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Your comment about obfuscated BASIC is very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Might you be able to mention any particularly important or memorable programs dist

• pmyteh 8y ago
  Not so much important or memorable: most of the really important stuff on RISC OS was small-scale commercial. There was also a tendency to use BASIC minifiers to make the program fractionally faster and somewhat smaller, so the boundaries with obfuscation weren't that clear. As for the contemporaneous writing, I'd start with the comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroup archive on Google Groups, because it's searchable (and I definitely remember this stuff being discussed in the late 90s, mainly as a reaction against the rise of Free Software. Incidentally, the decline of the RISC OS market really brought home to me the value of having sources available (and being allowed to use them). We had two significant breaking architectural changes (StrongARM architecture in 96 and the move from ARM's 26-bit to 32-bit addressing mode in the 00s) which cost us a lot of good software because the authors had moved on and nobody could fix the code.
  • kemitchell 8y ago
    > There was also a tendency to use BASIC minifiers to make the program fractionally faster and somewhat smaller, so the boundaries with obfuscation weren't that clear. Interesting! > comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroup archive Thanks! > Incidentally, the decline of the RISC OS market really brought home to me the value of having sources available (and being allowed to use them). I have a few of these stories, but now I have one more.