[indrora]

Kinda-Sorta.

If you read Proudfoot's docs [ https://www.mralligator.com/rcx/ ] you'll find that what Lego did was half VM half native half "well, it depends".

There's a BIOS/stdlib, which in turn boots a userspace OS held in RAM ("firmware") that then executes the assembled mini-VM. However, there was nothing keeping people from rewriting the in-ram OS with something else, which led to BrickOS, jeJOS, pbForth, ROBOLAB, etc.

I spent many, MANY hours of my youth hacking on the RCX and am damn sad that there isn't currently a good replacement for it.

[kurtoid]

That's on RCX. I don't know for certain about the NXT 1 or 2, but the EV3's VM is called LMS2012