The PFE was started on request of Tektronix Berlin in order to allow older Forth-based simulations to run on the newly developed measurement systems of the company. The new system was supposed to be compatible with the newest Forth-Stands and it should be very portable to allow for usage in any new developments. I had a lot of experiences in this field as I was creating my own forth environment for the home computers of the 1980ies. So I took over the PFE project that was published by Dirk-Uwe Zoller in 1998 thereafter expanding it considerably.

The original PFE (abbr. "Portable Forth Environment") had been under the free GNU Lesser General Public License, and Tektronix did allow me to publish the extensions under the same license - but not including any of the special modules for our measurement hardware. Later Dirk-Uwe Zoller did transfer his rights on PFE after he had seen me supporting PFE a long time at http://PFE.sf.net added up with newly developed opensource modules.

As a result I can offer developments on the basis of the "PFE" project. At the same time I have a deep knowledge about stack-oriented virtual machines - which includes also the contemporary .NET and Java engines but also their opensource cousins like Mono, Harmony, Superwaba that I have been looking into.

So if you do require an embedded environment or a specialization of a virtual machine then I can provide you with well-founded counseling on the available possibilities in the market. In most cases it is not needed to derive your own VM but to provide an add up to the existing capabilities of standard implementations.