16 ms·

Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

272 points by m_c 2y ago

imoverclocked 2y ago
Wow, the article itself brings me down memory lane. The one thing that will not bring me into this platform: cooperative multitasking. (Shudder) I’m sure it feels fast though!
- lproven 2y ago
  You should try it. It is a good demo that some of the tech that Unix folks fetishize is actually an optional extra, and if you let it go, you can do more in 1% of the space.
robin_reala 2y ago
I’ve got fond memories of RISC OS from my school’s room full of Archimedes. I spent a a fair bit of time designing and failing to build a text adventure in Basic, while my teacher tried to get us to learn how to use TechWriter. Best feature was being able to drag a slider to create a RAM disk. Amazingly you can still buy a copy of TechWriter 9.1 for £85! http://www.mw-software.com/software/ewtw/ewtw.html http://www.mw-software.com/software/ewtw/ewtw.html
- xyzzy3000 2y ago
  The ability to assign memory to various aspects of the system dynamically by dragging bar charts is something I wish existed in modern operating systems. Sheer UX genius. I wonder who came up with it?
z500 2y ago
I kind of went down a rabbit hole last year after the Xerox Star emulator was posted here. It was really cool, but super slow, so I felt like emulating another old system. I ended up writing a GUI calculator for RISC OS in ARM assembly, neither of which I had exposure to before. It was a blast. Very interesting system, it's like visiting a country on the other side of the planet. There's a pretty good emulator, they've got a bundle fully loaded with all kinds of RISC OS tools. https://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/easystart.html https://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/easystart.html
wiktor-k 2y ago
It gives me strong Amiga-vibes and it seems it's open-source now... I like it and will definitely try it out!
b800h 2y ago
Excellent, I've been waiting for Wifi support, it's a game changer. Will be mucking around with this at the weekend.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
RISC OS has been limping on thanks to the efforts of some extremely hard-working volunteers, but a roadblock is coming. The Pi 5 drops support for 32-bit ARM code, in which RISC OS written, and since enormous chunks of it are written in assembly, there is no trivial way to port. Even so, it's heartwarming that people continue to put efforts into operating systems that aren't related to Unix or Windows. I'm happy to see people use this, and AmigaOS, and BeOS, and others. Computing shouldn't be a monoculture.
- fweimer 2y ago
  > The Pi 5 drops support for 32-bit ARM code Note that EL0 (userspace) support is still present, but RISC OS cannot currently run entirely in userspace.
- VelesDude 2y ago
  BeOS/Haiku are surprisingly modern considering their age. They made a lot of technology choices at the time that short term were limiting (multi threading everywhere) but long term were very nice. It was just that the short term issues was one of many anchors of them when they needed everything to go their way. Haiku is the closest of these to being daily runner ready but like a lot of systems, lack of driver support prevents it from that lofty goal. It is pretty much the only reason that Linux has been able to go so far.
ajb 2y ago
It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, effectively pausing it - the command line appeared at the bottom of the screen and the frozen gui scrolled up as you entered more commands; until you exit the system console. (It was also possible to get a command line in a window, which could do slightly less - I forget exactly what)
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  Sharing code? I like my apps bundling a whole browser to render a couple buttons
  - hedora 2y ago
    The march toward systemd-electron continues.
    - qwerty456127 2y ago
      This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.
      - dajtxx 2y ago
        Because I'm old and I'm sick to death of everything being a web app. Because I hate web app programming so it limits my employment options :-)
        qwerty456127 2y ago
        I feel the same.
fredley 2y ago
RISC OS was the first graphical OS I ever used - my father ran Sibelius (the very first version I think) on an Acorn computer for engraving music. The three-button mouse approach is totally unique, I'm glad they explain it in this article!
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40188348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40188348
ajb 2y ago
Acorn was a curious company. It managed to get incredible amounts of work done, by assigning big projects to individuals instead of teams. My memory is not to be relied on at this lapse of time, but I seem to recall that in the final years there was a browser maintained by one guy, a port of Java by two, and an implementation of directX by another. Obviously all those projects were much smaller back then (around 98) but still, those devs were doing the work of what another company had a team to do. And in fact this does work, as communication overhead is reduced, but in many cases the increase in productivity loses strategically to the slower time to market.
- beeboobaa3 2y ago
  From personal experience it's amazing how much more productive I am on solo projects vs working with other people. When you're solo you can just go, but in a team everything needs to be discussed or at least communicated.
  - DowagerDave 2y ago
    Scaling software development has been THE vexing problem since day one. There's no doubt that the most efficient system fits in the head of a single person; the challenge is then what?
    - silisili 2y ago
      I've pretty much found the most it scales linearly is 2, and only then in good conditions such as working well together, greenfielding, and something with clear enough boundaries. After that, well, it basically flatlines and even seems to decrease at times.
    - kaspm 2y ago
      Efficient but not necessarily better. When I'm solo developing I go back later and I made some questionable decisions a team member would have identified.
      - 2y ago
dheera 2y ago
That UI looks like something out of the late 80s / early 90s. I can smell the VCR head cleaner and scratch-n-sniff stickers and hear the dial-up internet bee-bee-bee-bee-gurglegugrle-dong-ding-dong-ding-whooooooooosh-wheeeeeeeesh-bling! bling whooooo. Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s?
- joosters 2y ago
  Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s? Of course YOU can, it's open source, feel free to hack away at it.
- owyn 2y ago
  I know this is a joke but this OS was first released in 1987... I forgot all about it, but it's pretty cool that you can still run it on hardware.
- sillywalk 2y ago
  There's been the Desktop Modernization Engine / Project https://paolozaino.wordpress.com/portfolio/risc-os-desktop-modernisation-project/ https://paolozaino.wordpress.com/portfolio/risc-os-desktop-m... discussion here: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/17696 https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/17696 Development seems to have stalled / slowed down.
- lproven 2y ago
  > Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s? Ew. Please no. I hate 2020 OS design. It's flat and ugly and confusing. And this is very much not just me. https://medium.com/@jared.cyr/is-flat-design-overrated-1b9d4738d2bf https://medium.com/@jared.cyr/is-flat-design-overrated-1b9d4... https://www.spinxdigital.com/blog/downsides-flat-design-trend/ https://www.spinxdigital.com/blog/downsides-flat-design-tren... https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ 1990s design was clearer, cleaner and better, dammit. https://twitter.com/RetroTechDreams/status/1786087261953532126 https://twitter.com/RetroTechDreams/status/17860872619535321...
lproven 2y ago
That's my article -- I posted it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40234430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40234430
- sillywalk 2y ago
  Link to HN discussion of another of your articles with more RiscOS history. Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS? 111 points by lproven on Oct 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735766
  - lproven 2y ago
    I have written about RISC OS quite a few times over the years. • RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/risc_os_35/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/risc_os_35/ • Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis – Paul Fellows describes how it beat the overambitious ARX to Acorn's Archimedes computer https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ • Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink – Steve Revill of RISC OS Open chats to us about taking the project into the future https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/retro_tech_week_rool/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/retro_tech_week_rool/
kaycebasques 2y ago
Skimmed the article, didn't see this important bit mentioned: I'm pretty sure the OS is available through rpi-imager, meaning it's trivial to set up on an RPi and presumably has some notion of official endorsement from RPi org.
- lproven 2y ago
  [Article author here] Yes it is. I didn't think that was an important bit. True story. ROOL went to show the RPi foundation their first version. It booted to the desktop, had an Apps folder with text editor, graphics, sound, command prompt, BASIC etc. Eben Upton asked how big it was. They told him it was 6MB. Eben asked "no, not the kernel, the whole OS?" They said "that is the whole OS. We haven't got SD card reading working yet. This is booted from the FAT partition kernel image." Upton commented that if he had known the Archimedes OS was still around and it was FOSS, and it ran Python, he'd have made it the Pi official firmware. Such a giant missed changes. Hundreds of millions of people would have had Pis that booted into RISC OS. Acorn's own original Unix hardware booted RISC OS from ROM, then you clicked a desktop icon to load RISC/ix, Acorn's BSD. The Pi was very nearly the same. A 10¢ flash ROM would have held the whole OS as it does on the Raspberry Pi Pico. That is the price Upton gave me personally in an interview. https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/17/raspberries_pi_direct_launch/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/17/raspberries_pi_direct... Pis would have booted direct into RISC OS without an SD card needed.
  - lttlrck 2y ago
    That would have been sweet.
ylluminate 2y ago
[dead]
486sx33 2y ago
“ significant chunks of it were hand-coded in Arm assembly code” as all modern OS should be at the kernel level
- jlarcombe 2y ago
  giving them grief now though, because the Pi 5's chipset drops support for 32 bit ARM..
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Thank goodness they are not.
_akhe 2y ago
Raspberry Pi is amazing. Everything from the size and simplicity of hardware to that of Raspbian. Super moddable, modular, surprisingly performant. As a lot of others do, I use one for most of my sites and apps as a home server. 15+ apps, sites, and APIs running on this thing 24/7/365 over WiFi. What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi?
- sillywalk 2y ago
  > What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi? It's small - apps are hundreds of KB to a few MBs and it's fast/responsive. The question is what do you want to use it for? There are apps for most things, but as it's not Unix or Windows it doesn't have a lot of ports of bigger open source apps.
  - _akhe 2y ago
    > The question is what do you want to use it for? Exactly, people replied as if those apps and use cases are actually used today. So it's just nostalgia right?
    - sillywalk 2y ago
      It could also be that it meets its users needs and gets out of the way. Commercial software is still sold for Risc OS. The market is small, I imagine even smaller than the Amiga, but some people still buy it. Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it.
      - _akhe 2y ago
        > Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it. I see - yeah I get that, like classic cars, sailboats, SQL, etc.
- cess11 2y ago
  It's raw, like if you had a Forth system with a GUI that isn't aggressively obtuse. You can touch everything in it with a BASIC dialect, and at least in some variants drop into assembler and run the hardware somewhat directly. This allows e.g. interesting graphics programming, and there's very little that gets in the way of immediately testing ideas.
jnaina 2y ago
Still remember viewing the Acorn Archimedes with the RISC OS for the first time in 1987, when it was launched. Someone wrote a 10 line demo that rolled down the current screen, using a curl motion using bitmap copy/transform, using Basic. Breathtaking performance/speed. Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace.
- repelsteeltje 2y ago
  Best remember that compared to today, there hardly was a market place till late nineties. 70s and early 80s were dominated by hardware enthusiast, 80s game software and a nerdy minority, business PCs had little momentum till late 80s and 90s. All this time, the market was flooded with different types of mutually incompatible micro computers. After DOS compatible PC gained momentum, the only company still (barely) standing was Apple, and it ultimately adopted comorbidity PC hardware too. So I think the reason Acorn (and Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, RadioShack as well as Sun, DEC and SGI) went belly up is primarily that while the market was growing, there simply wasn't enough space in the market to compete with wintel dominance.
- lproven 2y ago
  > Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace. Bombed? RISC OS machines sold for some 15 years in the face of growing competition from Windows and Linux. Acorn chose to shut it down and span off ARM. Castle Technologies continued selling it and made a new 32-bit-clean version and new hardware for it. RISC OS Developments bought Castle and made RISC OS Apache-licensed FOSS. The OS is still alive and in development nearly 40 years after release. You can buy new hardware running it. You can buy new releases of the OS for original Acorn hardware and emaulators to run its apps on Windows and Mac OS X. The CPU family is the best-selling in the world and outsells all x86 chips put together by something like 100:1. Arm sold 8 Billion CPUs last year: https://newsroom.arm.com/news/arm-announces-q3-fy22-results https://newsroom.arm.com/news/arm-announces-q3-fy22-results Intel sold 50 Million: https://tweakreviews.com/processor---cpu/intel-sold-the-most-cpus-in-2023 https://tweakreviews.com/processor---cpu/intel-sold-the-most... Tell me again about how this platform "bombed"?
  - 2y ago
BizarreByte 2y ago
Using RISC OS on an RPI was as close to using a computer for the first time as I've ever gotten again. So many ways of doing things are not bad, but completely alien if you've never done it. It actually gave me an appreciate for how computers must be for those who aren't used to them.
btbuilder 2y ago
Press F12 and dust off your Dabs Press BASIC WIMP programming for the Acorn… A machine that you could code up a full GUI application with the BASIC interpreter in ROM, enabling children everywhere to which a C compiler was Unobtainium.
addamh 2y ago
RISC architecture is gonna change everything
- lproven 2y ago
  It did. Arm sold 160 times as many CPUs as Intel did last year. x86 is a rounding error. It's under half a percent of the CPU market.
mtillman 2y ago
Single user issues aside, this looks better than every version of Linux I’ve seen in the past decade.
- xyzzy3000 2y ago
  The (abandoned) ROLF project was an attempt to get a RISC OS look-and-feel for Linux: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211082559/http://stoppers.drobe.co.uk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070211082559/http://stoppers.d... There is also ROX Desktop, which has had some recent commits: https://github.com/rox-desktop/ https://github.com/rox-desktop/
appstorelottery 2y ago
The most impressive thing to me was the inbuilt BBC Basic, and the availability of every system function to basic with SWI calls. This contrasts with languages like GW Basic or even commercial QuickBasic (QBX) or Visual Basic: second class citizens when it came to accessing system calls under Windows (or dos). In fact, I wrote simple basic code to access the undocumented random number generator within the BCM2835 chip - it worked perfectly under RiscOS and even a dedicated BBC Basic emulutor for the Pico. This is what the code looks like for those that are interested: REM MAP MEMORY SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104000,32 TO ,,,RNG_CTRL% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104004,32 TO ,,,RNG_STATUS% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104008,32 TO ,,,RNG_DATA% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&2010400C,32 TO ,,,RNG_FF_THRES% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104010,32 TO ,,,RNG_INT_MASK% REM CHECK WHERE THE REGISTERS ARE MAPPED PRINT “RNG_CTRL MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_CTRL%) PRINT “RNG_STATUS MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_STATUS%) PRINT “RNG_DATA MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_DATA%) PRINT “RNG_FF_THRES MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_FF_THRES%) PRINT “RNG_INT_MASK MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_INT_MASK%) REM THESE INTS BECOME REGISTERS R0-R7 RESPECTIVELY A%=1 B%=RNG_DATA% C%=RNG_INT_MASK% D%=RNG_STATUS% E%=RNG_CTRL% F%=&1 G%=&4000000 REM GET A RANDOM NUMBER FROM THE RNG DIM RNG% 30 P% = RNG% [ OPT 1 SWI “OS_EnterOS” LDR R0,[R1] SWI “OS_LeaveOS” MOV PC,R14 ALIGN ] REM INIT THE RNG DIM INIT% 30 P% = INIT% [ OPT 1 SWI “OS_EnterOS” STR R5,[R4] STR R6,[R3] SWI “OS_LeaveOS” MOV PC,R14 ALIGN ] REM LETS INIT… CALL INIT% A%=0 X%=0 FIRST%=0 REM KEEP READING RANDOM NUMBERS UNTIL THEY ACTUALLY BECOME RANDOM REPEAT X%=A% A% = USR (RNG%) PRINT “WARMING UP &”;STR$~(A%) IF FIRST%<50 THEN X%=A%:FIRST%=FIRST%+1 UNTIL X%<>A% REM DISPLAY RANDOM NUMBERS (RETURNED FROM R0) REPEAT A%=USR (RNG%) PRINT “&”;STR$~(A%);" "; UNTIL 1=0
- pjmlp 2y ago
  This was fixed around Visual Basic 5, when it got AOT compilation with VC++ backend, OCX tooling in VB, it got a sweet spot in VB 6. Naturally this was kind of triggered by Delphi's competition, and then .NET came around.
guenthert 2y ago
> RISC OS gives applications access to much of the memory map, and so if a program accidentally scribbles over the wrong parts of that address space, the whole computer can freeze up – which in testing our Pi 400 did several times. Enough said.
- lproven 2y ago
  Yep. There are good aspects and bad aspects to old-school 1980s OS design. On the other hand, the entire PC industry was built on DOS and 16-bit Windows which were exactly like this. Apple made enough money to buy the dying NeXT from selling classic 68K and PowerPC Macintoshes which were exactly like this. Early Linux was exactly like this, too. I remember running Red Hat Linux 4.2 on my SPARCstation and having kernel panics right, left and centre. Several a day, every day. Everything we use today, all the hardware and all the software, was built both on software like this and from software like this.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Apple actually needed a little external help, as they were already on the red.
    - lproven 2y ago
      Selling its shares in Arm Ltd kept it afloat at one point, I believe. Who or what else?
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-apple/ https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...
        lproven 2y ago
        Oh not that tired old lie. :-( It's bullsh1t. It's not true. It wasn't an "investment". Microsoft stole Apple code and used it in Video for Windows. It got caught. Apple took MS to court and was going to win, so it settled. The marketing-lizards span this as "investing" but it's not true. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...
rbanffy 2y ago
RISC OS is an interesting beast, but I’d LOVE to see RISC/IX ported to the RPi and other small boards. Has anyone saved the sources anywhere? Would whoever now owns IXI IP help with the desktop part?
- repelsteeltje 2y ago
  You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.
  - xyzzy3000 2y ago
    Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 If only it had been given the RISC OS GUI with BSD underneath - that would have been way easier to port to modern Unix-like foundations and may have had a healthier-but-niche future as something 'modern' beyond Acorn's existence.
    - repelsteeltje 2y ago
      Ah yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected. Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        There was a free implementation called “lesstif” IIRC. Motif was proprietary until much later, as was CDE. IXI’s desktop runs on top of Motif.
dogtimeimmortal 2y ago
Anybody know a quick work around for the middle mouse button? Actually it appears I'm also having trouble with the keyboard too. My wireless keyboard+trackpad worked fine yesterday on raspberry pi os. It is refreshing though to see an OS that is lightweight and quick to install, and doesn't give you any surprise errors after you got it all updated about stuff like the web-browser is not supported on your model B+(even if i wasn't able to connect to internet and actually test functionality). Life is tough! I'm spending too much time trying to figure out all this random half-baked tech.
- dogtimeimmortal 2y ago
  I forgot this is an 8 day old thread. There is actually a lot about RISC OS that i think seems favorable over running raspi os, just based on the tiny amount of testing i did on both, and getting neither to work for my use-case: I like how small RISC OS is, and it seems to have a better method for adjusting scan to my TV - raspi os doesn't seem to have a way to adjust that. It does seem like there could be some improvements at making it more plug and play; or maybe it is my wireless keyboards fault. i'll have to report back after i get that figured out.
  - dogtimeimmortal 2y ago
    Ok, well final story is, i rummaged around and found some wired keyboards and mice. It was a little frustrating, but i finally found a pair that seemed to function. I'm still not sure what the point of 3 mouse buttons is; it seems like right and left click do the same thing(that is with the mouse i was able to actually get working - maybe RISC OS doesn't like any of my mice). Also the [FN]+Q,W,E,arrows trick didn't work on my keyboard that actually had a Function key. I guess i could have rummaged more(and maybe i will), but my hardware generally works fine with the linux distros I have used(mostly MX). It seems like some more work could be done here. Also, my wifi dongle seems to be recognized but incorrectly as a usb-ethernet interface, so i have an IP, but no internet, and i can't find a way to change that. riscosopen.org says sign-ups are disabled i need to email the webmaster; maybe i will; i am interested in trying out RISC OS, but it doesn't give me much confidence with my experience so far. ...it looks like MX still publishes a 32bit version, so i guess i can try and run that on my old Model 2 B+? ...but i bet it's going to have the same problem with no web-browser. So i guess all my 32bit stuff is bricks now? on a side note, i noticed some degradation in the desktop experience with the latest version of MX on my old laptop(it is a Thinkpad T510 with an intel i5). It is still functional, but i can feel the walls closing in.

272 points by m_c 2y ago

Wow, the article itself brings me down memory lane. The one thing that will not bring me into this platform: cooperative multitasking. (Shudder) I’m sure it feels fast though!

lproven 2y ago
You should try it. It is a good demo that some of the tech that Unix folks fetishize is actually an optional extra, and if you let it go, you can do more in 1% of the space.

robin_reala 2y ago

I’ve got fond memories of RISC OS from my school’s room full of Archimedes. I spent a a fair bit of time designing and failing to build a text adventure in Basic, while my teacher tried to get us to learn how to use TechWriter. Best feature was being able to drag a slider to create a RAM disk. Amazingly you can still buy a copy of TechWriter 9.1 for £85! http://www.mw-software.com/software/ewtw/ewtw.html http://www.mw-software.com/software/ewtw/ewtw.html

xyzzy3000 2y ago
The ability to assign memory to various aspects of the system dynamically by dragging bar charts is something I wish existed in modern operating systems. Sheer UX genius. I wonder who came up with it?

z500 2y ago

I kind of went down a rabbit hole last year after the Xerox Star emulator was posted here. It was really cool, but super slow, so I felt like emulating another old system. I ended up writing a GUI calculator for RISC OS in ARM assembly, neither of which I had exposure to before. It was a blast. Very interesting system, it's like visiting a country on the other side of the planet. There's a pretty good emulator, they've got a bundle fully loaded with all kinds of RISC OS tools. https://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/easystart.html https://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/easystart.html

wiktor-k 2y ago

It gives me strong Amiga-vibes and it seems it's open-source now... I like it and will definitely try it out!

b800h 2y ago

Excellent, I've been waiting for Wifi support, it's a game changer. Will be mucking around with this at the weekend.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

RISC OS has been limping on thanks to the efforts of some extremely hard-working volunteers, but a roadblock is coming. The Pi 5 drops support for 32-bit ARM code, in which RISC OS written, and since enormous chunks of it are written in assembly, there is no trivial way to port. Even so, it's heartwarming that people continue to put efforts into operating systems that aren't related to Unix or Windows. I'm happy to see people use this, and AmigaOS, and BeOS, and others. Computing shouldn't be a monoculture.

fweimer 2y ago
> The Pi 5 drops support for 32-bit ARM code Note that EL0 (userspace) support is still present, but RISC OS cannot currently run entirely in userspace.
VelesDude 2y ago
BeOS/Haiku are surprisingly modern considering their age. They made a lot of technology choices at the time that short term were limiting (multi threading everywhere) but long term were very nice. It was just that the short term issues was one of many anchors of them when they needed everything to go their way. Haiku is the closest of these to being daily runner ready but like a lot of systems, lack of driver support prevents it from that lofty goal. It is pretty much the only reason that Linux has been able to go so far.

ajb 2y ago

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, effectively pausing it - the command line appeared at the bottom of the screen and the frozen gui scrolled up as you entered more commands; until you exit the system console. (It was also possible to get a command line in a window, which could do slightly less - I forget exactly what)

dietr1ch 2y ago
Sharing code? I like my apps bundling a whole browser to render a couple buttons
- hedora 2y ago
  The march toward systemd-electron continues.
  - qwerty456127 2y ago
    This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.
    - dajtxx 2y ago
      Because I'm old and I'm sick to death of everything being a web app. Because I hate web app programming so it limits my employment options :-)
      - qwerty456127 2y ago
        I feel the same.

fredley 2y ago

RISC OS was the first graphical OS I ever used - my father ran Sibelius (the very first version I think) on an Acorn computer for engraving music. The three-button mouse approach is totally unique, I'm glad they explain it in this article!

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

More on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40188348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40188348

ajb 2y ago

Acorn was a curious company. It managed to get incredible amounts of work done, by assigning big projects to individuals instead of teams. My memory is not to be relied on at this lapse of time, but I seem to recall that in the final years there was a browser maintained by one guy, a port of Java by two, and an implementation of directX by another. Obviously all those projects were much smaller back then (around 98) but still, those devs were doing the work of what another company had a team to do. And in fact this does work, as communication overhead is reduced, but in many cases the increase in productivity loses strategically to the slower time to market.

beeboobaa3 2y ago
From personal experience it's amazing how much more productive I am on solo projects vs working with other people. When you're solo you can just go, but in a team everything needs to be discussed or at least communicated.
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  Scaling software development has been THE vexing problem since day one. There's no doubt that the most efficient system fits in the head of a single person; the challenge is then what?
  - silisili 2y ago
    I've pretty much found the most it scales linearly is 2, and only then in good conditions such as working well together, greenfielding, and something with clear enough boundaries. After that, well, it basically flatlines and even seems to decrease at times.
  - kaspm 2y ago
    Efficient but not necessarily better. When I'm solo developing I go back later and I made some questionable decisions a team member would have identified.
    - 2y ago

dheera 2y ago

That UI looks like something out of the late 80s / early 90s. I can smell the VCR head cleaner and scratch-n-sniff stickers and hear the dial-up internet bee-bee-bee-bee-gurglegugrle-dong-ding-dong-ding-whooooooooosh-wheeeeeeeesh-bling! bling whooooo. Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s?

joosters 2y ago
Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s? Of course YOU can, it's open source, feel free to hack away at it.
owyn 2y ago
I know this is a joke but this OS was first released in 1987... I forgot all about it, but it's pretty cool that you can still run it on hardware.
sillywalk 2y ago
There's been the Desktop Modernization Engine / Project https://paolozaino.wordpress.com/portfolio/risc-os-desktop-modernisation-project/ https://paolozaino.wordpress.com/portfolio/risc-os-desktop-m... discussion here: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/17696 https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/17696 Development seems to have stalled / slowed down.
lproven 2y ago
> Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s? Ew. Please no. I hate 2020 OS design. It's flat and ugly and confusing. And this is very much not just me. https://medium.com/@jared.cyr/is-flat-design-overrated-1b9d4738d2bf https://medium.com/@jared.cyr/is-flat-design-overrated-1b9d4... https://www.spinxdigital.com/blog/downsides-flat-design-trend/ https://www.spinxdigital.com/blog/downsides-flat-design-tren... https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ 1990s design was clearer, cleaner and better, dammit. https://twitter.com/RetroTechDreams/status/1786087261953532126 https://twitter.com/RetroTechDreams/status/17860872619535321...

lproven 2y ago

That's my article -- I posted it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40234430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40234430

sillywalk 2y ago
Link to HN discussion of another of your articles with more RiscOS history. Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS? 111 points by lproven on Oct 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735766
- lproven 2y ago
  I have written about RISC OS quite a few times over the years. • RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/risc_os_35/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/risc_os_35/ • Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis – Paul Fellows describes how it beat the overambitious ARX to Acorn's Archimedes computer https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ • Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink – Steve Revill of RISC OS Open chats to us about taking the project into the future https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/retro_tech_week_rool/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/retro_tech_week_rool/

kaycebasques 2y ago

Skimmed the article, didn't see this important bit mentioned: I'm pretty sure the OS is available through rpi-imager, meaning it's trivial to set up on an RPi and presumably has some notion of official endorsement from RPi org.

lproven 2y ago
[Article author here] Yes it is. I didn't think that was an important bit. True story. ROOL went to show the RPi foundation their first version. It booted to the desktop, had an Apps folder with text editor, graphics, sound, command prompt, BASIC etc. Eben Upton asked how big it was. They told him it was 6MB. Eben asked "no, not the kernel, the whole OS?" They said "that is the whole OS. We haven't got SD card reading working yet. This is booted from the FAT partition kernel image." Upton commented that if he had known the Archimedes OS was still around and it was FOSS, and it ran Python, he'd have made it the Pi official firmware. Such a giant missed changes. Hundreds of millions of people would have had Pis that booted into RISC OS. Acorn's own original Unix hardware booted RISC OS from ROM, then you clicked a desktop icon to load RISC/ix, Acorn's BSD. The Pi was very nearly the same. A 10¢ flash ROM would have held the whole OS as it does on the Raspberry Pi Pico. That is the price Upton gave me personally in an interview. https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/17/raspberries_pi_direct_launch/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/17/raspberries_pi_direct... Pis would have booted direct into RISC OS without an SD card needed.
- lttlrck 2y ago
  That would have been sweet.

ylluminate 2y ago

[dead]

486sx33 2y ago

“ significant chunks of it were hand-coded in Arm assembly code” as all modern OS should be at the kernel level

jlarcombe 2y ago
giving them grief now though, because the Pi 5's chipset drops support for 32 bit ARM..
saagarjha 2y ago
Thank goodness they are not.

_akhe 2y ago

Raspberry Pi is amazing. Everything from the size and simplicity of hardware to that of Raspbian. Super moddable, modular, surprisingly performant. As a lot of others do, I use one for most of my sites and apps as a home server. 15+ apps, sites, and APIs running on this thing 24/7/365 over WiFi. What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi?

sillywalk 2y ago
> What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows XP on a Pi? It's small - apps are hundreds of KB to a few MBs and it's fast/responsive. The question is what do you want to use it for? There are apps for most things, but as it's not Unix or Windows it doesn't have a lot of ports of bigger open source apps.
- _akhe 2y ago
  > The question is what do you want to use it for? Exactly, people replied as if those apps and use cases are actually used today. So it's just nostalgia right?
  - sillywalk 2y ago
    It could also be that it meets its users needs and gets out of the way. Commercial software is still sold for Risc OS. The market is small, I imagine even smaller than the Amiga, but some people still buy it. Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it.
    - _akhe 2y ago
      > Is it nostalgia, or just if it aint broke don't fix it. I see - yeah I get that, like classic cars, sailboats, SQL, etc.
cess11 2y ago
It's raw, like if you had a Forth system with a GUI that isn't aggressively obtuse. You can touch everything in it with a BASIC dialect, and at least in some variants drop into assembler and run the hardware somewhat directly. This allows e.g. interesting graphics programming, and there's very little that gets in the way of immediately testing ideas.

jnaina 2y ago

Still remember viewing the Acorn Archimedes with the RISC OS for the first time in 1987, when it was launched. Someone wrote a 10 line demo that rolled down the current screen, using a curl motion using bitmap copy/transform, using Basic. Breathtaking performance/speed. Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace.

repelsteeltje 2y ago
Best remember that compared to today, there hardly was a market place till late nineties. 70s and early 80s were dominated by hardware enthusiast, 80s game software and a nerdy minority, business PCs had little momentum till late 80s and 90s. All this time, the market was flooded with different types of mutually incompatible micro computers. After DOS compatible PC gained momentum, the only company still (barely) standing was Apple, and it ultimately adopted comorbidity PC hardware too. So I think the reason Acorn (and Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, RadioShack as well as Sun, DEC and SGI) went belly up is primarily that while the market was growing, there simply wasn't enough space in the market to compete with wintel dominance.
lproven 2y ago
> Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace. Bombed? RISC OS machines sold for some 15 years in the face of growing competition from Windows and Linux. Acorn chose to shut it down and span off ARM. Castle Technologies continued selling it and made a new 32-bit-clean version and new hardware for it. RISC OS Developments bought Castle and made RISC OS Apache-licensed FOSS. The OS is still alive and in development nearly 40 years after release. You can buy new hardware running it. You can buy new releases of the OS for original Acorn hardware and emaulators to run its apps on Windows and Mac OS X. The CPU family is the best-selling in the world and outsells all x86 chips put together by something like 100:1. Arm sold 8 Billion CPUs last year: https://newsroom.arm.com/news/arm-announces-q3-fy22-results https://newsroom.arm.com/news/arm-announces-q3-fy22-results Intel sold 50 Million: https://tweakreviews.com/processor---cpu/intel-sold-the-most-cpus-in-2023 https://tweakreviews.com/processor---cpu/intel-sold-the-most... Tell me again about how this platform "bombed"?
- 2y ago

BizarreByte 2y ago

Using RISC OS on an RPI was as close to using a computer for the first time as I've ever gotten again. So many ways of doing things are not bad, but completely alien if you've never done it. It actually gave me an appreciate for how computers must be for those who aren't used to them.

btbuilder 2y ago

Press F12 and dust off your Dabs Press BASIC WIMP programming for the Acorn… A machine that you could code up a full GUI application with the BASIC interpreter in ROM, enabling children everywhere to which a C compiler was Unobtainium.

addamh 2y ago

RISC architecture is gonna change everything

lproven 2y ago
It did. Arm sold 160 times as many CPUs as Intel did last year. x86 is a rounding error. It's under half a percent of the CPU market.

mtillman 2y ago

Single user issues aside, this looks better than every version of Linux I’ve seen in the past decade.

xyzzy3000 2y ago
The (abandoned) ROLF project was an attempt to get a RISC OS look-and-feel for Linux: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211082559/http://stoppers.drobe.co.uk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070211082559/http://stoppers.d... There is also ROX Desktop, which has had some recent commits: https://github.com/rox-desktop/ https://github.com/rox-desktop/

appstorelottery 2y ago

The most impressive thing to me was the inbuilt BBC Basic, and the availability of every system function to basic with SWI calls. This contrasts with languages like GW Basic or even commercial QuickBasic (QBX) or Visual Basic: second class citizens when it came to accessing system calls under Windows (or dos). In fact, I wrote simple basic code to access the undocumented random number generator within the BCM2835 chip - it worked perfectly under RiscOS and even a dedicated BBC Basic emulutor for the Pico. This is what the code looks like for those that are interested: REM MAP MEMORY SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104000,32 TO ,,,RNG_CTRL% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104004,32 TO ,,,RNG_STATUS% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104008,32 TO ,,,RNG_DATA% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&2010400C,32 TO ,,,RNG_FF_THRES% SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104010,32 TO ,,,RNG_INT_MASK% REM CHECK WHERE THE REGISTERS ARE MAPPED PRINT “RNG_CTRL MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_CTRL%) PRINT “RNG_STATUS MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_STATUS%) PRINT “RNG_DATA MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_DATA%) PRINT “RNG_FF_THRES MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_FF_THRES%) PRINT “RNG_INT_MASK MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_INT_MASK%) REM THESE INTS BECOME REGISTERS R0-R7 RESPECTIVELY A%=1 B%=RNG_DATA% C%=RNG_INT_MASK% D%=RNG_STATUS% E%=RNG_CTRL% F%=&1 G%=&4000000 REM GET A RANDOM NUMBER FROM THE RNG DIM RNG% 30 P% = RNG% [ OPT 1 SWI “OS_EnterOS” LDR R0,[R1] SWI “OS_LeaveOS” MOV PC,R14 ALIGN ] REM INIT THE RNG DIM INIT% 30 P% = INIT% [ OPT 1 SWI “OS_EnterOS” STR R5,[R4] STR R6,[R3] SWI “OS_LeaveOS” MOV PC,R14 ALIGN ] REM LETS INIT… CALL INIT% A%=0 X%=0 FIRST%=0 REM KEEP READING RANDOM NUMBERS UNTIL THEY ACTUALLY BECOME RANDOM REPEAT X%=A% A% = USR (RNG%) PRINT “WARMING UP &”;STR$~(A%) IF FIRST%<50 THEN X%=A%:FIRST%=FIRST%+1 UNTIL X%<>A% REM DISPLAY RANDOM NUMBERS (RETURNED FROM R0) REPEAT A%=USR (RNG%) PRINT “&”;STR$~(A%);" "; UNTIL 1=0

pjmlp 2y ago
This was fixed around Visual Basic 5, when it got AOT compilation with VC++ backend, OCX tooling in VB, it got a sweet spot in VB 6. Naturally this was kind of triggered by Delphi's competition, and then .NET came around.

guenthert 2y ago

> RISC OS gives applications access to much of the memory map, and so if a program accidentally scribbles over the wrong parts of that address space, the whole computer can freeze up – which in testing our Pi 400 did several times. Enough said.

lproven 2y ago
Yep. There are good aspects and bad aspects to old-school 1980s OS design. On the other hand, the entire PC industry was built on DOS and 16-bit Windows which were exactly like this. Apple made enough money to buy the dying NeXT from selling classic 68K and PowerPC Macintoshes which were exactly like this. Early Linux was exactly like this, too. I remember running Red Hat Linux 4.2 on my SPARCstation and having kernel panics right, left and centre. Several a day, every day. Everything we use today, all the hardware and all the software, was built both on software like this and from software like this.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Apple actually needed a little external help, as they were already on the red.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Selling its shares in Arm Ltd kept it afloat at one point, I believe. Who or what else?
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-apple/ https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...
      - lproven 2y ago
        Oh not that tired old lie. :-( It's bullsh1t. It's not true. It wasn't an "investment". Microsoft stole Apple code and used it in Video for Windows. It got caught. Apple took MS to court and was going to win, so it settled. The marketing-lizards span this as "investing" but it's not true. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...

rbanffy 2y ago

RISC OS is an interesting beast, but I’d LOVE to see RISC/IX ported to the RPi and other small boards. Has anyone saved the sources anywhere? Would whoever now owns IXI IP help with the desktop part?

repelsteeltje 2y ago
You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.
- xyzzy3000 2y ago
  Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 If only it had been given the RISC OS GUI with BSD underneath - that would have been way easier to port to modern Unix-like foundations and may have had a healthier-but-niche future as something 'modern' beyond Acorn's existence.
  - repelsteeltje 2y ago
    Ah yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected. Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      There was a free implementation called “lesstif” IIRC. Motif was proprietary until much later, as was CDE. IXI’s desktop runs on top of Motif.

dogtimeimmortal 2y ago

Anybody know a quick work around for the middle mouse button? Actually it appears I'm also having trouble with the keyboard too. My wireless keyboard+trackpad worked fine yesterday on raspberry pi os. It is refreshing though to see an OS that is lightweight and quick to install, and doesn't give you any surprise errors after you got it all updated about stuff like the web-browser is not supported on your model B+(even if i wasn't able to connect to internet and actually test functionality). Life is tough! I'm spending too much time trying to figure out all this random half-baked tech.

dogtimeimmortal 2y ago
I forgot this is an 8 day old thread. There is actually a lot about RISC OS that i think seems favorable over running raspi os, just based on the tiny amount of testing i did on both, and getting neither to work for my use-case: I like how small RISC OS is, and it seems to have a better method for adjusting scan to my TV - raspi os doesn't seem to have a way to adjust that. It does seem like there could be some improvements at making it more plug and play; or maybe it is my wireless keyboards fault. i'll have to report back after i get that figured out.
- dogtimeimmortal 2y ago
  Ok, well final story is, i rummaged around and found some wired keyboards and mice. It was a little frustrating, but i finally found a pair that seemed to function. I'm still not sure what the point of 3 mouse buttons is; it seems like right and left click do the same thing(that is with the mouse i was able to actually get working - maybe RISC OS doesn't like any of my mice). Also the [FN]+Q,W,E,arrows trick didn't work on my keyboard that actually had a Function key. I guess i could have rummaged more(and maybe i will), but my hardware generally works fine with the linux distros I have used(mostly MX). It seems like some more work could be done here. Also, my wifi dongle seems to be recognized but incorrectly as a usb-ethernet interface, so i have an IP, but no internet, and i can't find a way to change that. riscosopen.org says sign-ups are disabled i need to email the webmaster; maybe i will; i am interested in trying out RISC OS, but it doesn't give me much confidence with my experience so far. ...it looks like MX still publishes a 32bit version, so i guess i can try and run that on my old Model 2 B+? ...but i bet it's going to have the same problem with no web-browser. So i guess all my 32bit stuff is bricks now? on a side note, i noticed some degradation in the desktop experience with the latest version of MX on my old laptop(it is a Thinkpad T510 with an intel i5). It is still functional, but i can feel the walls closing in.