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FOUND: MacFORTH early Mac professional dev system for Forth code

Crutch

Well-known member
Just uploaded to the garden and thought some here might find interesting -- I haven't tested it out yet (don't have any of my pre-SE/30 Macs set up in a usable state at the moment) but the disk image appears good so wanted to get it out there for archival right away:


This is version 2.1 of MacFORTH, the classic Forth development environment that included an inline macro assembler and was used to create several professional Mac applications of the day, including the famous ChipWits. Most people think of using Pascal and later C to write code for 68k Macs, but in the early days several other languages were well used and writing full-fledged Toolbox apps and even code resources was heavily covered in MacTutor's early years. Several professional-caliber Forth environments existed in the early Mac era, including MacFORTH and the later Mach2.

This is "Level Two" of MacFORTH, including several added features such as the inline assembler not included in Level One (for an additional fee). There was also a "Level Three" which I would love to find one day.

To my knowledge no version of MacFORTH was previously available online anywhere. I also have the disk for version 2.01, but the MacFORTH file itself appears to be correct. This may be a form a copy protection, I'm not sure yet. If anyone has a working copy of an earlier version, please upload it to the Garden for preservation purposes!
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
This is a good find! I was just playing with Forth again yesterday, so I'm going to take credit for mystically calling this forth in some way ;-)
 

Crutch

Well-known member
Nice! I am excited to play with this myself. Also, typo fix: I also have the disk for version 2.01, but the MacFORTH file itself appears to be corrupt. (I said “correct” above which means the opposite.) But version 2.1, linked above, looks good.
 

cmao

Member
I know what is going on with them. The person that made them choose a very unfortunate format. I can convert them to a Disk Copy 6.3.3 disk image if that would work for you. Do you want them as 800k or 1.44M?
Thank you ! I need them in 1.44 format.
 
Wow I must have also contributed to the summoning as I've just gotten into Forth and been running it on my DM41X (modern HP41CV clone) Does this run on 7.x.x? I.e. would it run on an SE/30 with 7.1.1? My emulator stopped working when I got a new Macbook so now I actually have no way to get software from online to put on my SE/30 (running SD to SCSI on it) and I can't play with it in the meantime.
 

frankc64

Member
A thank you to cmao. I got it to work from the DSK images at Macintosh Repository. My old PPC 7200 would not accept the disk images, but OS 7.6 on Basilisk would, so I transferred the contents to a .sit-file in Basilisk and transferred the sit-files to the PPC, and from there to my old SE FDHD.
 
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