[rescue] USB / Firewire

[Jonathan C Patschke]

On Saturday, Oct 19, 2002, at 10:26 US/Central, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

>> The other cards that I've tried this with did not work.  I suspect 
>> that
>> if you know Forth and have fairly deep knowledge of both the Macintosh
>> and Sun dictionaries, it'd be fairly straightforward to write a piece
>> of Forth code to save in nvram to act as a compatibility layer.
>
> That would be a darn cool project for someone to undertake.  I also
> think a forthos for either system, written at the ofw level would rock.

I'd love to do this, but I lack time and knowledge (which could be 
obtained with me time) of the two dictionaries.  Honestly, I don't 
expect it would be -that- -hard[0]- of a project, so long as the docs 
are fairly complete.  With Sun, I doubt this would be a problem, but 
Apple might guard their secrets a little more closely.

Forth is a -really- cool language.  It's almost possible to write 
spaghetti code in it if you can manage to shift your brain into RPN 
mode, and it encourages encapsulation and code reuse.  Not bad for 
something nearly 40 years old and with no syntax. :)

The only thing that might be a real stopping point is when the nvram 
code gets loaded.  If it gets loaded late enough in the boot process, 
patches wouldn't affect hardware detection.  But, this is definitely 
something worth exploring on a boring rainy weekend (which would be 
this one, were I not to meet Bill, Amy, and Steve for 'Q in an hour).

[0] Yes, you need to understand some amount of hardware voodoo, but 
Forth is self-documenting (to an extent), so you could learn a lot just 
by poking around and seeing how the existing code works.

--
Jonathan C. Patschke
Celestrion Information Systems
Thorndale, TX