Fig-FORTH

A public domain version of Forth that was distributed by the "Forth Interest Group" in the late 70s and early 80s, not as software but rather as printed listing of assembly code that you could type in to your computer to get a working Forth environment. This was needed since at the time personal computers did not have standardised peripherals. Implementations were available for anything from the low power 8-bit RCA COSMAC (1802) to large minicomputer systems from DEC and Data General. A DOS version was made available in the early 80s that got quite a lot of development over time.

In addition to the original fig-FORTH, most of which appear to ape polyFORTH from the Forth Inc. company to a large degree, a number of European charters of FIG ported and extended the system to locally made or popular computer systems and unlike the original organisation made their versions available on tapes and disks.

In 1994 a gent called Jim Brooks announced on USENET that he had created a 386 version of FIG-Forth, had already made a protected mode version of it for DOS and was currently porting it to OS/2 and would be releasing it under the name Virtual FORTH/32. His homepage has screenshots of his OS/2 implementation but it appears that he never released it in any version but simply used it as an in house tool.

Note that despite being distributed in assembly language format, FIG-Forth was not developed in assembly but rather a Forth cross-compiler was developed first, with the output from it being what was distributed.

Version

 * The official DOS version is currently at v13.1
 * Note that there are a number of unofficial DOS versions out there with sundry extensions, some of which have become more ISO Forth like.

License

 * Open source - In the public domain

Authors

 * FORTH Interest Group - Original publisher
 * William F. "Bill" Ragsdale (Main programmer)
 * Kim Harris
 * John James
 * David Allan "Dave" Boulton (1957 - 2009)
 * Dave Bengel
 * Tom Olsen
 * Dave Wyland

Links

 * Jim Brooks homepage - Includes screenshots of his OS/2 version
 * A list of FIG-Forth implementations - From FIG, note these are only the USA port releases, all European ports are missing from the list.
 * The Last FIG-Forth - A non-official DOS version.