smp wrote:
> ...
> Of course, I do not have the referenced Installation Manual. And, after some looking around
> on the Internet, I have come up with a couple of documents that purport to be an
> Installation Manual for FIG-Forth, but contain no additional code, Forth or otherwise, that
> would be a text editor.

The line editor screens begin on page 69
http://forthworks.com/mirrors/tayget...cs/FIGINST.ZIP

> ...
> I can do something like 0 LIST, or 0 BLOCK EMIT. When I do this, I can see that Forth is
> accessing blocks off of my disk drive, starting at Track 0, Sector 0. This is scary,
> because if I were to attempt to save anything, I would be in danger of over-writing portions
> of my diskette which should not be over-written.
>
> What I think I need is a pointer to some code for a simple text editor (or that original
> Installation Manual) so that I can get this added into my system. But I certainly need to
> be able to ensure that any screen that I create with the editor does not over-write any
> sensitive portions of my diskette.

The original Fig-Forth (and early forths in general) assume it owns the
entire disk. Typically this meant booting forth from rom or CP/M disk and
inserting a formatted but otherwise empty disk to do your forthing.

BTW "block 0" doesn't *have* to start at track 0 sector 0. By modifying
the disk r/w code you could, for example, have "block 0" begin at track 3.

Despite the faster I/O offered by direct disk access, most forthers and
vendors switched to OS based files. One Fig-Forth modified to use
regular CP/M files was
http://forthworks.com/mirrors/tayget...m/forth-nl.lbr