Twenty Years of RISC OS Open

I 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 :-(

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.

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

RISC OS is a really interesting and significant OS, one whose importance is largely missed by American readers.

GUI computers conquered the mass market in the mid-to-late 1980s; by the 1990s, Microsoft caught up, and the x86 PC nearly wiped out everyone else. Only Apple survived.

But in the late 1980s, the pre-Cambrian explosion, there were 4 main players:

• Apple, first with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, running related in-house OSes

• Commodore, with the Amiga, running an in-house OS built using some parts from academia

• Atari, with the ST, running an OS from former CP/M giants Digital Research

• Acorn, who stuck with 6502 longer than anyone, then did the mother of all 2nd acts with the most successful RISC CPU of all time, which outsells x86 100:1 and powers the Mac I'm typing this on.

They did it by taking their original 8-bit OS, modernising it for a 32-bit CPU, and putting an astounding GUI on it which influenced NeXT, Microsoft, Apple, Android, Linux and everything since.

People often wonder what if the original MacOS was open source, or if Microsoft open-sourced 16-bit Windows, or IBM open-sourced OS/2. Amiga and ST fans wanted FOSS versions so badly, they rewrote the entire things from scratch.

Well, here is the worked example.

Acorn's OS is still around, still maintained, still runs on modern hardware made and sold cheaply today. It can talk IPv6, has modern web browsers and email and chat and media and all that stuff that people said Linux and BSD needed for decades, and it always had them.

And it's FOSS.

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.

If you want to know what it's like to program for RISC OS:

https://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/

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.

The original ARM operating system

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.

[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?