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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 a

• 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.