4 ms·

I encountered RiscOS a couple of times in the mid-nineties, first on an Archimedes a teacher had brought in (my middle school was populated my Apple Macintosh L

by qubex 6y ago

I encountered RiscOS a couple of times in the mid-nineties, first on an Archimedes a teacher had brought in (my middle school was populated my Apple Macintosh LCII machines running System 7) and later the RiscPC was an exotic object of desire I lusted over (before eventually choosing a dual-PowerPC BeBox). I remember being extremely disappointed by the OS: firstly, storing the system on ROM made obvious sense to me but it also nagged me because this wasn’t an embedded system and the ideology of downloading frequent updates from the internet to patch the deluge of security vulnerabilities and other assorted bugs being discovered on a regular basis was already developing. Secondly, as the article points out, it actually struck me as a rather rudimentary OS with a fairly ugly (and foreign) GUI. It lacked preemptive multitasking, memory protection, and the notion of multiuser. It felt technically on the level of Windows 3.11 but loaded from ROM, on an (admittedly very fascinating) exotic architecture.

radiac 6y ago
Having an OS which boots from hardware is always a feature to me - no matter how badly you screw up your system, you just do a hard reset (boot holding R) and get a working OS and GUI. You can still patch it by defining a boot app, but the core system is always there, safe from mishap and malware. And yes, the OS was starting to show its age (both graphically and with its cooperative multitasking) by the time Acorn was broken up, but at its peak it was miles ahead of the competition, and was definitely an under-appreciated pearl.
- Lio 6y ago
  I remember hand tuning the boot sequence on my A5000. I could make it appear to boot and be ready in a few seconds. In reality it was still loading all its OS patches from disc. That along with clever use of 16 colours (8 greyscale) and antialiased fonts really gave the impression of a much more advanced machine for the time. Really loved that machine. :D
lproven 6y ago
[OP/article author here] Well, that was sort of my point. If you follow the link to the ROUGOL talk on its history, it explains some of the reasons why. It's important to consider that the history of RISC OS has an important commonality with the history of AmigaOS: in both cases, the companies were planning something far more sophisticated and clever -- CAOS for Commodore, ARX for Acorn -- but the projects over-ran and under-delivered. So, they fell back on almost-skunkworks projects that used existing tech to get something good enough out the door when the hardware was ready to ship. In Commodore's case, they used the existing TRIPOS OS, written in BCPL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS ... and the existing Rexx language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx The result was AmigaDOS (as it was originally called, before it was renamed to AmigaOS). In Acorn's case, there had already been a 16-bit port of the BBC Micro MOS and BASIC, for the ill-fated Acorn Communicator, based on the same 65C816 CPU as the Apple ][GS: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Communicator.html http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Communi... So Acorn ported its existing OS and language to ARM, and wrote a fairly basic desktop GUI in BASIC. The result was Arthur: https://everything2.com/title/Arthur+OS https://everything2.com/title/Arthur+OS Once it had shipped, it was finished and renamed RISC OS. Allegedly the name change is because of the Dudley Moore film which had just taken the name "Arthur 2": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_2:_On_the_Rocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_2:_On_the_Rocks So, yes, it was a hasty, last-minute exercise, based on an outdated core, an early-1980s, single-user, single-tasking command-line OS for a low-end machine -- just like Windows 3 and DOS. On the other hand, it worked and worked very well -- arguably far better than Windows 3, I'd say.

by qubex 6y ago

radiac 6y ago

Having an OS which boots from hardware is always a feature to me - no matter how badly you screw up your system, you just do a hard reset (boot holding R) and get a working OS and GUI. You can still patch it by defining a boot app, but the core system is always there, safe from mishap and malware. And yes, the OS was starting to show its age (both graphically and with its cooperative multitasking) by the time Acorn was broken up, but at its peak it was miles ahead of the competition, and was definitely an under-appreciated pearl.

Lio 6y ago
I remember hand tuning the boot sequence on my A5000. I could make it appear to boot and be ready in a few seconds. In reality it was still loading all its OS patches from disc. That along with clever use of 16 colours (8 greyscale) and antialiased fonts really gave the impression of a much more advanced machine for the time. Really loved that machine. :D

lproven 6y ago

[OP/article author here] Well, that was sort of my point. If you follow the link to the ROUGOL talk on its history, it explains some of the reasons why. It's important to consider that the history of RISC OS has an important commonality with the history of AmigaOS: in both cases, the companies were planning something far more sophisticated and clever -- CAOS for Commodore, ARX for Acorn -- but the projects over-ran and under-delivered. So, they fell back on almost-skunkworks projects that used existing tech to get something good enough out the door when the hardware was ready to ship. In Commodore's case, they used the existing TRIPOS OS, written in BCPL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS ... and the existing Rexx language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx The result was AmigaDOS (as it was originally called, before it was renamed to AmigaOS). In Acorn's case, there had already been a 16-bit port of the BBC Micro MOS and BASIC, for the ill-fated Acorn Communicator, based on the same 65C816 CPU as the Apple ][GS: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Communicator.html http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Communi... So Acorn ported its existing OS and language to ARM, and wrote a fairly basic desktop GUI in BASIC. The result was Arthur: https://everything2.com/title/Arthur+OS https://everything2.com/title/Arthur+OS Once it had shipped, it was finished and renamed RISC OS. Allegedly the name change is because of the Dudley Moore film which had just taken the name "Arthur 2": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_2:_On_the_Rocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_2:_On_the_Rocks So, yes, it was a hasty, last-minute exercise, based on an outdated core, an early-1980s, single-user, single-tasking command-line OS for a low-end machine -- just like Windows 3 and DOS. On the other hand, it worked and worked very well -- arguably far better than Windows 3, I'd say.