rajamesandClaude Opus 5.5
26c588792e
For Captain Bob to edit into his own voice: the sponsorship pitch and tiers, the first devlog
('Building an OS that keeps its own receipts'), and a 5-7 minute video script with an OBS setup.
Claims limited to what is true today: QEMU on three ISAs, the stick in progress, hardware next.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2.5 KiB
Sponsor StarshipOS
Draft for Ko-fi, Patreon, Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors (2026-10-28). Captain Bob to edit into his own voice before posting.
An operating system that can prove what it is
I'm Bob James. I spent years in industry validating software: proving to auditors that a system does what it says. Most of that work was reconstructing evidence that should have existed from day one. So I'm building the system I always wanted to validate.
StarshipOS is a bare-metal operating system built on FORTH. It boots straight from UEFI firmware, without Linux or any OS under it, and runs StarForth v4, a small stack-machine engine inspired by Chuck Moore's F18 chip. Every piece of it is built to carry its own evidence:
- Every component has a fingerprint. Software ships in capsules, identified by the hash of their content. The running system prints those hashes at every boot, so "is this the system that was tested?" is a check, not a belief.
- Every boot tests itself. 538 self-tests run before the first prompt, on three CPU architectures (x86-64, ARM64, RISC-V), and all three must agree on the same dictionary hash.
- Nothing runs without its owner. No identity stick, no prompt. Access is controlled word by word.
- Proofs, not promises. The design is being specified in Isabelle/HOL, a machine-checked proof system, with every assumption named and every unproven part labelled as unproven.
Where it is today
- Boots in emulation (QEMU) on all three architectures, passing every self-test.
- A USB stick image that boots a PC is in progress now. The first real-hardware boot, on a small x86 PC, is next.
- After that: the engine on an FPGA (a Zynq-7020 board), with the long-term goal of proven F18-style cores in silicon.
- The adaptive runtime underneath, the Steady State Machine, is patent pending.
What your support does
This is a one-person project run on a retirement budget. Sponsorship pays for test hardware, cables and boards, patent filing fees, and the hours that go into it.
Tiers
- Crew, $5/month: my thanks, and the monthly devlog a few days early.
- Officer, $15/month: the above, plus your name in the project's credits file.
- Bridge, $50/month: the above, plus a monthly live Q&A call with me about the project.
(No physical rewards yet. When the bootable stick is ready, supporters will hear about it first.)
Follow along
- Devlog: [link]
- YouTube: [link]
- Source: [link to the public repository, if and when it is public]