Looks like it's got a whopping great 512kB internal SPI ROM device too, and indications are that it's reprogrammable.
You could totally run a unix on this; I've ported Alan Cox's Fuzix to the MSP430, which is substantially lower specced. Without an MMU you probably wouldn't get preemptive task-swapping, but Fuzix runs beautifully in cooperative multitasking mode. You even get the real Bourne shell (written by Bourne) and pipes.
Very tangentially related, but: if FRAM on the MSP430 saves its state on power loss, my mind went straight to Smalltalk. It's like hardware support for saving an image. Tho from an efficiency standpoint, smalltalk might be pushing it more than MicroPython is. That, and a smalltalk editor on a machine too small to fit a vi clone might be even more of a stretch. lol.
That's a very interesting idea. The smallest real Smalltalk I've seen ran on the 286 in protected mode. It's the only app I've ever seen that actually used segmentation usefully --- each object had its own segment descriptor, so it was limited to about 32768 objects. That's still way more than will fit in an MSP430.
[Aside: I wish they made MSP430s with more RAM. It's a lovely architecture, and I'm not just saying that because I'm sick and twisted and like devices with 20-bit registers. An MSP430 with a whole megabyte of RAM would be awesome.]
I do know of Timothy Budd's Little Smalltalk, which is an ultra-lightweight pedagogical Smalltalkish, which has a core image of ~90kB and 3500 objects; but that's still rather big...
