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