A "few" questions about Tunes

[Ales Hvezda]

Hello,

	I've been meaning to send you e-mail for a while now (couple of 
years), but I always got distracted until recently when suddenly I have
lots of time on my hands.  This e-mail is sort of a mixture of questions.

	Anyways, I've known of Tunes for a while now, and am quite 
interested in what you propose.  Several things that caught my attention
in regards to Tunes are the ideas of:  1) fine-grained "objects/words" 
and 2) a clean and *simple* reflexive system.  Being a newly born (about 3
years now) Forth programmer I find these ideas quite compulsive.
I've been reading through your web pages over these of couple of year
and am slowly beginning to comprehend what you have in mind.  I still
don't quite understand all the details (need to download your pages 
and read them locally again; handy if I can't get to your site).  
I have my own ideas on how I would do things, but I'm more curious
as to yours.

	I've been thinking about doing something similar to O'TOP, but I'm 
curious as to what and how this manifest itself.   How does the user or
programmer interact with Tunes?  Most of my OS experience comes from using 
UNIX for a while now, and when I think of UNIX I think of it's API, user
model, IPC, filesystem etc...  These characteristics define UNIX.  What I'm
struggling to comprehend is how this is all laid out in Tunes (what/how the 
analogous concepts are implemented in Tunes).  I also look at things
the Forth way with "objects/words" (fine grain objects) as the building 
blocks for everything.

	I guess I can't really ask any intelligent questions, because I 
don't know enough of the details, but the underlying ideas of Tunes seem
reasonable.

	Generally, I don't put up web pages or mailing lists for projects
I'm about to undertake, (I much prefer to code something up and see if
what I'm proposing is feasible and work some more and when I have something
releasable, then I do some advertising).  But I must say the Tunes project
with it's Glossary and Review subprojects is quite valuable and useful.  

	LispOS is interesting particularly since it started out so strong and 
it seems to be fizzling out now. (I'm not a fan of lisp, but I guess it's 
because like the Forth philosophy).  Might have been an interesting
project if 1) there was some consensus and 2) if the Flux toolkit was 
released on time.  Flux is a nice idea, but it's been stalled for way 
too long.  

	I would have started a personal OS project a long time ago but every
time I look at the available and practical hardware targets, I can only see
x86.  I hate x86.  I was raised (taught) on the 68k family and so I'm 
just slightly (completely) bias against intel.  Everything from getting
into protected mode to handing i/o is so bloated in complexity that I 
just can't seem to get myself to learn it.   My college education is
in hardware design, so at least I might be able to do something about it.
But for now, are there any reasonable/widely available alternatives to x86?
(I recall you saying once that you would like computing to move into
the "distributed MISC" type computing...  I have always been interested
in this and have pursued this idea but haven't come up with anything that 
is reasonable "yet")

	Okay I think I'm done for now, hope I made some sense.  Thanks
for any info/insight.

							-Ales