Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
136 points - today at 12:36 PM
SourceI used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer.
I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It could be expanded with BASIC plugins to do just about anything! It was distributed by the Arcade BBS to start with then Acorn User magazine put it on the floppy disk that came with the magazine.
Amazingly Director was written entirely in ARM assembler (with the help of lots of macros). I used to really enjoy writing ARM assembler and used to grit my teeth whenever I had to read the assembly output of the C compiler! I remember writing quicksort in ARM assembler as part of this (to sort menu entries) which was a lot of fun.
I still have a RiscPC under my desk, but I don't think I've turned it on for nearly 15 years :-(
proactivesvcs
today at 2:54 PM
I have a feeling I used that, either on my A3010 or my Risc PC. Thank you!
I went down a rabbit hole a few summers ago and I ended up writing a calculator from scratch in assembly for RISC OS. Interesting experience having GUI routines at the syscall level
lowbloodsugar
today at 6:49 PM
32bit ARM remains my absolute favorite instruction set. And yeah, C compiler output was criminal! I wrote products entirely in the BASIC assembler. What a time to grow up!
I think maybe the famous surviving Risc OS application might be Sibelius music notation program.
It’s owned by Avid now but it started as the work of two brothers on an Acorn Archimedes under Risc OS.
https://www.avid.com/sibelius
zimpenfish
today at 5:38 PM
Obligatory posting of Tantacrul's hilariously vicious kicking of Sibelius[0]
"This really is one of the great examples of breaking all UI design principles and every UX design principle too. It's like a design bull in a musical china shop."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
[0] They may have fixed things in the intervening 8 years, I'm not a composer, I don't know.
Sibelious crashed sibelious crashed SIBELIOUS CRASHED
As someone that grew up using Acorn Archimedes it's hard to express to those that were never involved just how difficult what has been going on here is or how surprising it is they have stuck at it. The overwhelming majority of us had left long before 2000 (even before 1995 really), and it's not as if there were ever that many compared to the Amiga or ST universes.
WillAdams
today at 1:53 PM
There was at least one program for the Acorn which is unique --- Cerilica's Truism --- it was a DTP application which actually simulated mixing inks and what inks would look like on various paper substrates (no need for the "C" variants of PANTONE spot colours).
It's impressive how fast it boots up on a Pi. I've tried all the OSs for the Pi and RISCOS is way faster than all the alternatives.
bishengke
today at 2:01 PM
The real value of a niche platform like RISC OS isn't measured by market share, but by how much of its design DNA survives elsewhere.
iamcalledrob
today at 3:42 PM
I've always been curious whether choices in Mac OS X might have been (unintentionally) influenced by RISC OS. I believe there were a disproportionate number of Brits on the HI team at Apple.
The stand-outs to me are the use of blue folder icons and the Dock.
https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/3rdParty/Retro...
There was persistent noise even back in the 90s that the icon bar was inspiration for the Windows task bar in Win95. Quite the basis for it, or if it was nonsense, no idea. (HN has previously surfaced some serious Acorn related historical surprises, so someone here may actually know).
What has been quite surprising over the years is how violently many people raised with Open/Save dialogs hate the Risc OS filer and approach to saving and loading files.
Open and save dialogs are insane. Let's make a whole other finder that's completely different to the main one we use to navigate files.
The RISC OS approach is like a million times better. The only thing I would add is a context menu to create a new file of whatever kind at this location, like The "New" menu in windows.
Paul Fellows absolutely claims that. From https://astrospeakers.org/provider/paul-fellows :
> He worked on the first generation of home computers and lead the design of the RiscOS operating system for the ARM processor, including inventing the apps and icon bar user interface that has since spread to phones and computers across the world
codeulike
today at 3:07 PM
The original ARM operating system
numeric83
today at 9:02 PM
I guess technically that'd be Arthur rather than RISC OS.
My high school had a particularly well connected compsci teacher who managed to get his hands on one of the first Archimedes to be sold (using his own money it must be said ...). At that stage it shipped with Arthur because, or so we were told, the "actual" OS was still in development. As it turned out, that OS was eventually cancelled and instead Arthur was upgraded (in practice ... replaced by) RISC OS.
I still have fond memories of playing the demo that would become Zarch (aka "Virus" on the Amiga/ST/Spectrum/etc.).
codeulike
today at 9:17 PM
Yep, I think of Arthur as a sortof Beta for RiscOS
I had an Archimedes A305 which launched with Arthur, when I upgraded to Risc OS (which arrived on ROMs, if I remember correctly, you ordered the ROMs and then your local dealer would fit them onto the motherboard) it wasn't really _that_ different, everything I'd written continued to work, etc. Like it was a major upgrade but fundamentally the same "thing".
MomsAVoxell
today at 2:20 PM
I think we're getting pretty close to the point where hardware manufacturers can find a niche use case for these OS's - I put ReactOS and Haiku in this set - and build custom hardware just for these OS's.
I mean, I'm pretty sure there is a market for OS's that have not, yet, been encumbered with AI/Ads/spyware/etc.
CurbStomper
today at 3:55 PM
[dead]
Twenty years, but apparently no screenshots. How can they be serious about making a graphical operating system with no screenshots anywhere on their web site?