The Daily WTF

The past is another planet, but a familiar one. Back in the far off year of 1989, Rick Poleshuck took a job with a company that made a computer product for nurses’s stations in hospitals. Now, this product was for notes, and it was an “all inclusive” product- software, proprietary hardware, networking, terminals, everything. And it was written in Forth.

Now, this is what we might call a “classic Forth” system, and in such a system, Forth ran on bare metal. No OS, no filesystem, and a simple scheduler. This was also the system they developed on: the source just lived in raw 1KB blocks on the hard disk, and they edited blocks directly. That’s not a WTF, that’s just how things were done in that environment.

While this software didn’t have any safety implications, it was used in the medical field, so “strict adherence to coding standards” was required.

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