coordinating efforts..

[Tom Novelli]

It's becoming painfully clear just how reduntant our prototyping efforts are
becoming.. maybe, as project coordinator, you could help us remedy the
situation. Find out what people are working on, and how seriously. What
looks promising? What's special about each one? What do they have in common?
Also look at previous (abortive) prototype, and summarize them. Put
everything on a web page as you go along. Here, I'll start it off:

I wrote a Forth interpreter/OS last summer. It kinda sucked, but there might
be something worthwhile in it. Then I rewrote it in 2 days (albeit using
BIOS for all I/O) and made it better (and much better organized!) Last month
I wrote some routines for interfacing "TUNES O'TOP" to Unix. My current
project is a modular, 32-bit OS, with the core written entirely in NASM. Its
contribution to Tunes: a v86 monitor, Forth interpreter, and (maybe) a
minimalist LISP variant. The whole thing is very minimal :)

There's also Clementine.. it's written in C and NASM.. it has memory
paging.. woohoo! The XCOM format looks good for object migration, and for
importing "foreign" drivers.

There's KUT, "Kernel Usable for Tunes", which I still haven't look at in
depth. Basile said he didn't have much time for it.. it might not continue.

Oh yeah, don't forget TML. All I know is, it's a metatranslator. What's
that? A translator-translator? :)

Then there's Brix :)  It's not really Tunes, but it's related. It's written
only with NASM, so far.  At least it's getting somewhere, afaik. It should
offer Tunes people a lesson in pragmatism..

BTW, for the web page, you should just put up a new main page to start with.
Don't worry about the sub-pages... there's plenty of information there for
people to wade through.. more than any other OS project. That's a good
thing. Just take what bineng drew up, put in a nice blurb about what TUNES
is (about half a page.. hmm, I could write it), with navigation links, and
news on the bottom. Just do it :)

Tom Novelli <tcn@tunes.org>