I first came across Forth in the 1978, as I was building my first (Z80) computer just before going to Cambridge University to study "Computer Science". My final year project was implementing Forth on the 68000. Along the way I joined FIG-UK and became the librarian. I was doing consulting work that included building a lighting controller for the BBC which was in Forth on a 68000 talking to 6502's (which also ran Forth).

Fun parts of that project included a full multi-tasking extension allowing fine-grain parallelism, terminal emulator in forth, block fetch and retrieve over serial.

Along the way I came across - in 1984 - one of the first BBS's - CommuniTree which was written in Forth, and switched over to comms, starting one of the first ISP's and being an active author on early internet standards. (HTTP, URL, URN, VRML etc).

I haven't touched Forth since then, but in recent years I worked on small (8 and 16 bit PIC) micro's to build low cost payment handling for solar energy, mostly in Africa. This included writing a FM mesh networking stack in about 2kB, it was written in C and I missed the elegance of writing tight code in Forth.

The last few years I was the tech lead for distributed systems and offline access at the Internet Archive which involved putting their code on Rapsberry Pi and other small micros.

Now … with some time on my hands, I'm interested in seeing whether something interesting can still be done with Forth. I'm playing with a web-based Forth to run in both the browser and probably a server. The first version will be on top of Javascript because I know it really well, but WebAssembly would probably be a better alternative since its inherently stack based. I'm interested in exploring Forth's that have both high level features (multi-tasking etc) but can also run cross-platform on small micros (ESP, PICs). I'm particularly interested in incorporating good web awareness into it (e.g. a set of extensions that speak DOM).

I'm intending everything to be Open Source, my git repo is https://github.com/mitra42 or reach out by email at mitra@mitra.biz.

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