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

The new version of RISC OS, the original native Arm OS, runs on eight or nine Arm-based platforms, including the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and on that last two, this release supports wireless networking. RISC OS 5.30 comes with quite an assortment of applications, and plenty more are online. RISC OS 5.30 comes with …

  1. Antony Shepherd

    Oh dang, I have a rPi 3 sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do with it, might have to give this a try if only for the heck of it.

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Do it!

      You'll likely be pleasantly surprised.

      Some things will seem strange at first, but you'll soon realise the whole OS and applications are beautifully well integrated and consistent.

  2. Vestas

    OS on UV EPROMS

    I remember upgrading my mother-in-law's RiscPC back in the mid-90s to a new version of RiscOS.

    The reason it booted so fast became instantly apparent - the entire OS came on two UV EPROMs :)

    Much like OS/2, RiscOS lost to Windows because of Microsoft's illegal actions. Two proper OO desktops beaten by a complete pile of crap with "shortcuts" and a marketing campaign.

    Just goes to show what you can do when you bribe, blackmail and commit fraud on an epic scale....

    1. gfx

      Re: OS on UV EPROMS

      OS/2 wasn´t that fun, it was pretty stable we had an Building Control System running on it. But installing OS/2 from it's box with 31 floppies still haunts me.

      It did come with mahjong game.

    2. Sandtitz Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: OS on UV EPROMS

      "Much like OS/2, RiscOS lost to Windows because of Microsoft's illegal actions."

      OS/2 lost because of IBM. It didn't have the 3rd party developers, and consequently low amount of good software. Driver support was poor unless you happened to use an IBM PS/2.

      During OS/2 2.x Windows 3.x was already a clear market leader and OS/2 was having an uphill struggle for its whole short life. You could run Windows apps in OS/2 - so developers didn't bother with native apps. Technologically OS/2 was streets ahead of the (non-NT) Windows but technological supremacy just does not guarantee victory.

      NB - I personally used OS/2 from 2.0 to Merlin.

      "Two proper OO desktops beaten by a complete pile of crap with "shortcuts" and a marketing campaign."

      I have no experience of Risc OS, but Windows 95 had a better UI than what OS/2 ever came up with. (IMHO, of course)

      "Just goes to show what you can do when you bribe, blackmail and commit fraud on an epic scale...."

      Which bribe, blackmail and fraud cases are you speaking of?

      1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: OS on UV EPROMS

        One case springs straight to mind

        Microsoft : We need an internet browser NOW

        Spyglass software: hey heres our one

        Microsoft: Great we'll give you a % of each sale

        Spyglass : ok wonderful

        Microsoft gives internet explorer away for free with each copy of windows

        Spyglass: hey wheres our money?

        Microsoft: fuck you. its not being sold therefore we dont owe you any money.....

        1. Sandtitz Silver badge

          Re: OS on UV EPROMS

          I don't see any bribery, blackmail or fraud in there. Deception at most. Spyglass made a stupid deal, but they receiver royalties from Micros~1 - look it up.

          Also, Spyglass/IE had nothing to do with OS/2 losing the race, which is kinda the topic here.

      2. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: It didn't have the 3rd party developers

        This is not (entirely) true.

        Lotus took the bait and developed 123 for OS/2, to the detriment of the Windows port.

        Microsoft Excel then cleaned up.

        -A.

    3. RedGreen925

      Re: OS on UV EPROMS

      "Just goes to show what you can do when you bribe, blackmail and commit fraud on an epic scale...."

      I sense you are holding back, go ahead tell how you really feel about them slimy bastards at Microsoft.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: OS on UV EPROMS

      Hardware costs. And that is pretty much all. Moderate PC Vs Archie were not in the same league to put one on the desk. The old Beeb was pricey but not out of reach like Archimedes became.

      Archimedes was an amazing system, had many games ported to it from Amiga too. It lacked the 2D custom accelerator hardware wrangling of Miggyz but 3D performance was, befitting of tbe chipset, astoundingly good.

      Starfighter 3000 being the prime example.

    5. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: OS on UV EPROMS

      In what way was the desktop OO ?

      Did RiscOS provide a language that could program the desktop objects ?

      1. untrained_eye_of_newt

        Re: OS on UV EPROMS

        What you describe was a Symbolics. The memory was tagged with the object ID down to the hardware word level. Had the privilege of working with those machines in the late 80s, now I just Bash rocks together. It's a long way from the top but remember the worse-is-better principle.

        1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

          Re: OS on UV EPROMS

          Blocks of memoy have always been tagged, what you describe is nothing new and its certainly no OO.

          OO requires a language that can call objects and their members.

          1. JulieM Silver badge

            Re: OS on UV EPROMS

            It really doesn't.

            If you devote enough time to "propelling pencil and squared paper" design, you can implement objects with properties and methods using nothing more sophisticated than raw 6502 assembly language.

            1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

              Re: OS on UV EPROMS

              Exactly unless the objects can actively be manipulated then its not OO. WHen you can then it is.

            2. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: OS on UV EPROMS

              Of course you can implement them, but something isn't object oriented unless it has already implemented them for you and uses that paradigm to do things. I can easily make object-like things in C. C is not object oriented because other things don't use that model and the work to build it has to be redone. C++ took C and bolted on object orientation, so it is an OO language.

              For the same reason, I can't say that AMD64 is binary compatible with ARM because, using nothing other than AMD64 assembly language, I can write an emulator for ARM assembly language. Unless it's part of the native design, that's not how it works. From the sound of it, there is no object-oriented desktop in Risc OS, and such a term is kind of weird in the first place. It's especially weird because neither of the languages used to build Risc OS are object oriented. If I had to find an object-oriented desktop, something like NeXTStep might actually fit.

              1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

                Re: OS on UV EPROMS

                No my point is, if you cant easily script and do stuff with the os objects, then its useless.

                Im sure you could write a program, but then you arent saving any time are you ?

    6. JulieM Silver badge

      Re: OS on UV EPROMS

      Just goes to show what you can do when you bribe, blackmail and commit fraud on an epic scale....
      There's a lot of that going around at the moment.

  3. Belperite
    Happy

    School Archimedes

    Fond memories of spending many hours of customising the look and feel of RISC OS (most of the widgets / window chrome were sprites that you could easily replace at runtime). And playing Lemmings of course.

  4. heyrick Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    You forgot one of the best uses of the right click... Right click on a scrollbar to perform a two dimensional scroll.

    Thanks for the nice write-up.

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Whats a two dimensional scroll ?

      1. Martin an gof Silver badge

        Whats a two dimensional scroll ?

        Left-hold a scrollbar on a window in pretty much any GUI and you can either drag it up and down (vertical bar) or left and right (horizontal bar). In the days when this was the main way to move what was probably quite a small viewport around on a larger canvas, this could get quite tedious quite quickly. Under RiscOS, if you use the right button ("Adjust") instead of the left button ("Select") on a scrollbar, you can move both horizontally and vertically at the same time. This is the sort of thing that is today accomplished in some apps by middle button-dragging in the canvas, or by one of those fancy mice with a 2-way wheel or a ball or a touchpad on top.

        On the subject of scrollbars - and another one of those "why didn't anyone else do this?" questions - under RiscOS, if you left-dragged a scrollbar, your pointer was constrained to move in just one dimension (and only within the confines of the scrollable area). This means you never "fall off" the scrollbar as you can quite easily do in Windows or most Linux desktops. And while I'm moaning about "things should get better but they don't always", why is it convention that when you do fall off a scrollbar, the thing pops back to where it was when you started dragging it, rather than staying where it was when you unwittingly stopped dragging it? (and what's with disappearing scrollbars and window-resize targets a pixel wide and "maximise" behaviour that fills the entire screen even if the window content is nowhere near that big and... and... and...?)

        M.

      2. Catkin Silver badge

        Scrolling simultaneously in two axes.

  5. Chika
    Happy

    Wha... *yawn* what? NEW RISC OS?!?

    Oh joy! Must bust out my RPi! It'll make a change from fiddling with Linux and *shudder* Windows! Might even consider re-igniting my Phoebe project to put it in a Phoebe case that I put on the backburner years ago!

  6. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    Might actually give it a go

    After chucking my Pi 4 in a drawer with extreme prejudice after finding using it as a web browsing box was an exercise in pain, I could use it or the Pi 3 I have lying around somewhere

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Might actually give it a go

      [Author here]

      I dug my dusty Pi 3 out of a drawer and to my surprise found it had a card in it, with a copy of the unstable ROOL 5.27 on it. Whoops.

      Anyway, I pulled the card from my Pi 400 and put it in the Pi 3 and... it Just Worked™.

      One benefit of RISC OS Direct is that it includes an unfinished version of OBrowse, a derivative of the Otter Browser, which is a modern Webkit browser than can handle Web2 sites. I tried copying that onto my ROOL 5.30 card but it didn't work. (It's about the only app that didn't, though!)

      But yes, I think a Pi 4 or 400 with the new browser should be somewhat usable on the modern web.

    2. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: Might actually give it a go

      Even. Pi3 is a waste of hardware. RISCOS uses just one cpu core and very little RAM.

      A Zero runs it perfectly well, an early PiB for networking.

  7. TheFifth

    I loved working with RISC OS

    When I worked as a TV editor back in the late 90s, I used RISC OS everyday. For offline editing I worked on an Eidos (yes, from Tomb Raider fame) Optima Video Editing system. It was a RISC OS based editing system (think Premiere, Avid etc.) that was super simple and super fast to use. We had a RISC PC with a stack of external SCSI drives sat on top and a Jazz drive for backup. Picture quality was crap, but being an offline system, it could spit out an EDL file onto floppy that could be used in an online system. From that one file you could conform from the original tapes. I've used just about every editing system out there and I'm particularly fond of Avid, but Optima still holds a place in my heart. It was without a doubt the fastest system for editing I've ever used (in workflow terms). This is exactly what I used to use https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8337. Ah the good old days!

    I did try RISC OS on RPi a few years ago and all my RISC OS knowledge came flooding back (even the weird drag to save stuff). I never went too far with it as I didn't have access to a network socket in my office, so without Wifi it was just a standalone oddity that was too much of a pain to do anything useful with. It's amazing how much we rely on networking to do anything these days. I think it's time to break out the Pi 400 again and load up the new release. Exciting!

    Side note: I've been looking online for info about the Optima NLE and apart from a few mentions here and there, the info seems to not exist. Not even a grainy image of the UI, let alone a video. I did see a RISC PC with an Optima card come up for sale on eBay a few years back, but it was a ridiculous amount of money. Way out of my price range for something with no real used beyond a nostalgia journey.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: I loved working with RISC OS

      [Author here]

      That sounds fascinating.

      I believe that, over the last couple of decades, there have been a couple of large corporate sponsors who have kept RISC OS 5 alive and in active development. I don't know who they are for sure, although I have heard a rumour concerning one of them, but I will be discreet.

      I think that there are more than one, and I think they are paying to keep the OS alive and maintained on hundreds to thousands of machines in production use. Along with support from the small but passionate user community, of course.

      I must admit, I do miss the stability of modern memory-managed fully-pre-emptive OSes, but it's amazing that it works so well.

    2. Martin an gof Silver badge

      Re: I loved working with RISC OS

      I've been looking online for info about the Optima NLE

      Absolutely nothing to do with RiscOS, but in a vaguely similar area to the Optima I used to work* with an audio editor called Soundscape. In the day when computerised audio editing ("SADIE" being the name which springs to mind) meant the latest '486 with as much memory as you could afford, an extremely expensive audio card (with associated awkward breakout cable and constant noise problems from being shut in a metal box with a bunch of digital electronics) and a stack of "multimedia-rated" SCSI drives, the Soundscape was a breath of fresh air. The computer in charge could be as lowly as a '286 with Windows 3 running in a couple of megabytes, so long as it had a free expansion slot for the interface card, and the audio hardware - a nice rack-mounted box - contained decent amplifiers kept well away from the noisy computer, a good collection of XLRs on the back panel and two removable IDE drives, again "multimedia-rated", but a darned sight cheaper than SCSI discs.

      Yet another case of a brilliant idea which ended up disappearing, almost with out a trace.

      *work in the sense that it wasn't my day job to use the machine, but I did have to know how it worked, how to give editors the basics to get started and how to fix it when it went wrong. Frankly, I'm struggling to think of times when it went wrong that couldn't be put down to operator error.

      1. cleminan
        IT Angle

        Re: I loved working with RISC OS

        We used to get an annual presentation from the Soundscape guys at uni in the mid-late 90s. I recall watching enviously as the crappy Windows machines ran rings around my A5000's little parallel port sampler & !SoundLab.

        It was a genuinely impressive HDR which applied endless effects to the audio live without modifying the source recording or stuttering, jaw dropping at the time.

        There's a largely forgotten article on the company on wikipedia under Soundscape Digital Technology.

    3. TheFifth

      Re: I loved working with RISC OS

      I think that there are more than one, and I think they are paying to keep the OS alive and maintained on hundreds to thousands of machines in production use.

      This doesn’t surprise me at all. I bet there are many machines still chugging away in important roles. I know the BBC used to use Optima for offline editing back in the day, but I’m pretty sure they went all in with Avid in the late 90s. It’s a shame there’s no-one keeping Optima alive out there, although it wouldn’t have clue what to do with widescreen, no matter HD footage.

      I must admit, I do miss the stability of modern memory-managed fully-pre-emptive OSes, but it's amazing that it works so well.

      One thing that always amazed me with Optima running on RISC OS was how stable it was. It hardly ever crashed and if it did, when you restarted it just picked up again where you left off.

      I remember when we moved over to Premiere and Avid on Windows 2000 (removing the need to online after initial editing). The number of days I lost to Premiere when it crashed and hosed yet another project I dread to think. Avid was better thankfully, but Windows and the drivers for the pro-level capture cards were an ever present issue. I remember the Pinnacle DC2000 being a particular problem (anything Pinnacle in fact!).

      In the day when computerised audio editing ("SADIE" being the name which springs to mind) meant the latest '486 with as much memory as you could afford

      I also used to use SADiE back in the 90s. I was always amazed at the price of it when there were free or very cheap alternatives out there that could do most of what it did (well, what we needed it to do anyway).

  8. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Coat

    There, I fixed it.

    ..."That's what RISC OS is: A time-traveler from the 1980s, alive and well, modernized and updated, but almost completely free of any tracking, advertising, and post-sale user monetization. You will find it very disorienting, especially if all you know is post-1990s Big-Tech OSes, but that's all part of the freedom....

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: There, I fixed it.

      :-D That too, of course...

  9. 43300 Silver badge

    I knew it well when I was a teenager (would have been version 3 / 3.1) - the user interface really was leagues ahead of the mainstream competition at the time.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      More so than ever now, in a lot of ways.

      There are things I'd like. More keyboard controls. The ability to drop files onto a folder icon, rather than an open folder window. But it's a thing of beauty as it is.

      1. steelpillow Silver badge
        Happy

        There are things I'd like.

        Legacy of being sat on by greedy but cash-strapped IP owners for too many decades, then struggling to get any effort resourced as a fringe free OS. I am truly happy and amazed that someone still finds it useful enough to inject life back into it.

        Can't help thinking it would (does?) make a great IoT OS when burned into ROM in the traditional manner.

        Even, a browser without javascript does sound a rather nice standard to shoot for. It's my default on Firefox.

      2. heyrick Silver badge

        "More keyboard controls."

        Yes, the ability to keyboard around menus would be rather nice, especially as I get older and my dyspraxic self gets less able to hit the target. I mean, it was perfectly fine in MODE 12 (640x256), but a 1080P screen that's barely bigger? Yikes!

        "The ability to drop files onto a folder icon, rather than an open folder window."

        Have you tried asking on the forum? That ought to be doable. If I remember correctly, you can drag a file onto the drive iconbar icon to get it dropped in $ (that's the root directory), so there's already some support for dropping files into non-folder things. And, yes, I think that would be a good enhancement.

      3. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        The ability to drop files onto a folder icon, rather than an open folder window.

        No no no, no no, with a double helping of no. One of the many things about the RISC OS Filer that makes it ***HUGELY*** easier to use than other systems is the *ABSENCE* of the "oops, where's my file gone, shit, it must have gone into some subdirectory, instead of the bloody directory I told it to drop the ****er in."

        Another thing I really really miss on other platforms is being able to Shift-doubleclick to load a file into a editor instead of running it.

        1. skswales

          Did I just move that, or copy it?

        2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          > No no no, no no, with a double helping of no.

          Are you sure?

          I mean, yes, I jest, but also, how would you feel about a confirmation dialog that asked [Y/N]?

          Or an optional setting in the Configuration program somewhere?

          For me, I would want files dropped on a drive _copied_ into the root directory, and files dropped on a folder to be saved (or if on the same drive, moved) into that folder. I want this as badly as you apparently don't.

          And an exclusion for !Folders -- if it's an app, run the app and pass it the file. Don't copy it into the appfolder.

          1. steelpillow Silver badge

            Definitely not enough confirmation dialogs in places where they are sorely needed (though certain other OS, especially when cloudy, love to pop them up where they amount to no more than nag buttons: all things in moderation).

            Even better in my book would be a History action log [journal?], which I could pop open and read for myself what I just accidentally did - maybe even undo the action. Bit like that Restore option in my MATE trash filer view wedded to the Force Quit toy in my desktop toolbar.

  10. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

    Perfect timing

    With Raspberry PI OSs getting increasingly bloated and less suitable for older Pi I revisited RISC OS a couple of days ago but "no Wi-Fi" made that a short visit.

    I will have to take another look. I have never used RISC OS so it may be a culture shock, will have its learning curve, but may be just what I need for some of the things I am doing where an older Pi is good enough. Otherwise it might be DietPi or Tiny Core Linux.

    1. skwdenyer

      Re: Perfect timing

      There are very cheap wifi dongles that will plug into the RJ45 on a Pi. No wifi isn’t any sort of dealbreaker these days.

      1. herman Silver badge

        Re: Perfect timing

        RJ45 or USB?

        I have used cheap USB Wifi widgets, that even had a little penguin printed on the packaging, which worked like a charm.

  11. aerogems Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Always nice to see projects like this are alive and kicking. The lack of memory protection seems like an odd oversight though. Can't say as I miss seeing GPF errors on Windows 3.1 pop up when you're not even doing anything.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      IIRC memory model was one of the beauties of RISC-OS, you could shrink the font cache and screen resolution after an app had started, to give it more memory

      1. Nik 2

        And create a RAM drive on the fly. Magic technology in the world before HDD

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      your blaming the os for something on ly the cpu can do.

    3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > The lack of memory protection seems like an odd oversight though.

      It wasn't an oversight at all. That kind of thing is really hard to do.

      The story is this:

      [1] Acorn designs snazzy new chip

      [2] Owners Olivetti set up team in Palo Alto to write snazzy new OS (called ARX) for new chip.

      (Aside: it sounded good. Written in Modula-2, microkernel, preemptive multitasking, etc.)

      [3] But ARX overran schedule and budget and was too big and too slow. Acorn management ask Acornsoft if they can do something smaller, quicker and simpler: _A Risc by THURsday. ARThur.

      [4] Acornsoft team ports BBC Micro MOS and BBC BASIC to ARM, and do a demo desktop in BBC BASIC. It is much smaller and faster and would be usable on a 512kB machine with no HDD, which Acorn needs to compete in the home computer market. ARX is workstation class and needs 4MB RAM and a hard disk, meaning a £3000-£5000 computer.

      [5] ARX shut down, Arthur chosen and released.

      [6] Arthur 2 is renamed RISC OS and the desktop is rewritten and built in. Some genius notices 2 things.

      [a] that as it's event-driven, like all windowing GUIs including even Visual BASIC, you can do other things in that main event loop.

      [b] A quirk of the Arm architecture makes remapping memory addresses cheap and quick.

      Put them together and every time an app calls the OS to get input, the OS can move that app elsewhere in RAM, move another app in, and give it control until the next OS interrupt.

      Accidental round robin CPU allocation. Multitasking more or less for free.

      Comparison: when Apple implemented Aliases in System 7, its version of Unix symbolic links (and later Windows 9x "shortcuts"), as well as the path to the target file they include the disk name and the machine name, because that's how Classic MacOS worked. Result: if the machines are on the same AppleTalk LAN, aliases _automatically_ work over the network. Create a file. Make an alias to it. Put the alias on a floppy. Take the floppy to another machine and insert it. Open the alias on the new machine _and it works_.

      RISC OS multitasking is an inspired and very clever hack, and it delivered useful multitasking in an OS that fit into 2MB of ROM or something and worked in half a meg of RAM with no permanent fast storage.

      It's amazing and it's cool but it's not very stable.

      There _was_ a pre-emptive multitasking WIMP2:

      https://www.nedprod.com/programs/RISC-OS/Wimp2/

      But while it made multitasking more smooth and a bit more reliable it was also slower and less responsive, and that's part of the appeal of RISC OS. It's a motorbike OS when most OSes are armoured cars with automatic gearboxes and power steering, that way 10 tons. They are safe but they are not at all responsive. There's no feel.

      It is caught in the same bind as AmigaOS: the shared memory is how the OS works, and that makes it unsafe. Remove the shared memory and you can make it safer, but it won't be compatible and it also won't be as small and fast any more.

  12. frotz

    I dabble a bit with ROOS and RISC OS Direct on my Pi 4. Being from the US (and a solid middle-class early 1980's childhood), it is quite unlike anything I'd used then or now. The integrated BASIC interpreter takes me right back to my childhood and my old 6502-based Atari (I believe Macs at the time cost about as much as my parents would spend on a car so they weren't even a dream), and demonstrated that my memories of fun weren't as rose-tinted as I thought. I enjoyed the experience enough to wish I had a "proper" desktop RISC system with storage beyond just USB or the flash cards on the Pi.

    What a great platform.

  13. Arthur the cat Silver badge
    Unhappy

    what was then called "Arthur"

    And did I get any acknowledgement?

    More seriously, I wonder if this had anything to do with Arthur Norman?

    1. JohnDallman

      Re: what was then called "Arthur"

      Yes, it was after Arthur Norman. He did a lot of assorted work for Cambridge computer companies in the 1980s. The Norcroft C compiler was partly his work.

    2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: what was then called "Arthur"

      The Acornsoft team claimed Arthur was short for something like A RISC operating system by Thursday, as they didn't have long to whack it together before the hardware shipped, and ARX was not close to completion.

      Arthur and RISC OS can trace their heritage back to the BBC Micro MOS, as that was pretty much used to jumpstart Arthur development, from which RISC OS 2 grew.

      C.

      1. -maniax-

        Re: what was then called "Arthur"

        I've always heard the (ba)acronym was Acorn Ready by THURsday

  14. Tron Silver badge

    Modest proposal.

    Given the price and capability, they might want to avoid the Linux path and partner with a mainstream vendor to produce a [boxed] retail mini-PC Pi that works out of the box for civilians. Yes, you can probably snag one on ebay offered with aftermarket setting up by an enthusiast, but mainstream retail requires better than that - something the Linux lot never really understood. Hence we still have Windows v Mac.

    I'm not 100% on the dates, but Mac OS 6 worked fine on my beloved Mac Classic (a bit better than 7 did if I recall), which was about 1½ kiloquid new. It probably worked fine on a second hand Mac Plus.

    Despite being a Sinclair buff (BBC Micros were owned by rich, middle class kids to promote their upward mobility), I think they should do more with this than just flog it to enthusiasts. I love it that they produce a printed manual.

    Don't be afraid to adopt stuff from modern OSs if it works. Evolution is good for you.

    Still don't understand why the BBC didn't run with the Pi.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Modest proposal.

      Unfortunately, any kind of boxed, retail computer/OS would have to come with big, prominent disclaimers telling the potential buyer "THIS IS NOT WINDOWS" and "THIS IS NOT APPLE" otherwise there'll likely be a lot of returns. Remember the Windows Surface "is ir Arm or x86" debacle.

    2. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

      Re: Modest proposal.

      Still don't understand why the BBC didn't run with the Pi.

      Because that would have been commercial favouritism and the BBC would have been hauled over the coals for it - Especially by those whose agenda is to shut down the BBC, who will use any pretext to achieve that.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Modest proposal.

      Easy enough. Find a suitable Pi case, put Pi 4Bs in them, provide a power supply and pre-imaged and pre-inserted card, and you have your box. It could be better, but it will be functional enough. You probably don't have to worry about improving it because every non-enthusiast who buys one is going to be disappointed with the software so you don't need to worry about losing repeat customers due to hardware issues.

      I haven't run the operating system. I cannot; I am blind and it doesn't appear to have any accessibility options. I have read the article, though, and the gaps between this and any other computer that the average person buys are obvious. If it can only access a subset of sites, people won't want it. If it doesn't support modern formats, people won't want it. If the CMT means it crashes frequently, as Liam says his does, it will only frustrate people and end up being the first thing they say to each other about the product. You already have many other stumbling blocks like the UI being different which will make it hard to sell them.

      It's well and good if people like the UI and can configure it to do what they want. If we don't want to use JS on the internet, then its lack of support for it doesn't affect us. That won't transfer to the general public. If you want to sell this to them, you either have to improve it so it can do most of what their other options can or you need to find a specific niche use and create a box that's limited to that use case. If you sell it as a general purpose computer, users will compare it to other general purpose computers, and they won't care about things like this one running on a less powerful chip, not running Google or Microsoft code, or coming with a Basic interpreter they won't use. All they will see is the list of things they can accomplish from a really cheap Windows or Android device that this one can't manage.

    4. Bebu
      Windows

      Evolution is good for you

      "Evolution is good for you"

      The odd denisovian or neanderthal might beg to differ. :)

      Perhaps more correctly might be good for your species, or a least your descendants.:)

      Natural selection being "natural" is neither good nor evil, and hardly "kind."

      1. Dagg Silver badge

        Re: Evolution is good for you

        Actually denisovian and neanderthal genes were absorbed by modern humans. Across all the various Europeans they contain basically all of the neanderthal genome and the Australian aborigines contain a large set of denisovian genes and so do the Tibetans.

        So they just interbred.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Evolution is good for you

          > Actually denisovian and neanderthal genes were absorbed by modern humans.

          A few. That would be zero consolation to the actual people who were exterminated.

          > So they just interbred.

          We are the descendants of Cro-Magnons. Our ancestors were more slender and less cold-resistant, probably weaker but taller and more athletic, than Neanderthals... but with smaller brains.

          We are the dumber but more aggressive and violent species.

          The sad probability, based on our own history of enslaving other races, is that our ancestors killed -- and quite likely ate -- the Neanderthals, but kept a few of the women, maybe as slaves... and raped them and kept the offspring. :-(

          Arguably you can't given consent if you don't have a shared language, or indeed language at all.

          1. David Hicklin Silver badge

            Re: Evolution is good for you

            > We are the descendants of Cro-Magnons

            I can't believe you got that so wrong, we are all descendents from the Golgafrinchan's who arrived on the Ark Fleet Ship B

  15. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Is this an OS?

    Single-user and co-operative multitasking. Those are (or were) reasonable design choices for the platform, but doesn't that mean we should regard this as GUI shell rather than an OS?

    That's not to denigrate it, of course, since some "modern" GUI shells could use some improvement.

    1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Is this an OS?

      There is a fair difference of opinion on this, but to my mind a key definition is whether the OS runs by itself on bare metal. That's why Windows 3.1 and 9x are not 'proper' operating systems[1]

      RiscOS doesn't sit on top of anything, so it's an OS.

      OS/2 was single user (there is a multi user addon, and the Citrix spinoff, I'm not sure I'd count them though), and pre-emptively multitasked, but with a synchronous gui input queue that caused issues. No-one argued it wasn't an OS.

      [1] Yes, I'm aware 9x supposedly almost never calls down to DOS, but 'almost never' is not 'never' dependent on configuration i.e. weird INT13 driven hard disks, and it definitely needs DOS to boot.

      1. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: Is this an OS?

        and it definitely needs DOS to boot.

        Yes, linux isn't really an a 'proper' operating system [1]

        [1] It's only a command shell for GRUB

        1. RedGreen925

          Re: Is this an OS?

          "It's only a command shell for GRUB"

          Soon to be replaced by Systemd once that Microsoft planted weasel Pottering is done.

        2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Is this an OS?

          > It's only a command shell for GRUB

          Ho ho.

          ;-)

          There is a difference between a bootloader and an OS layer.

          For instance: in Win95 and Win98, although it's hidden in the OS, you could actually exit back to DOS. You can't remove DOS.

          You can't exit from Linux back to GRUB.

          Compare with Novell Netware.

          Netware 2.x, the 80286 version, could be loaded from DOS by running NETWARE.EXE or it was able to cold-boot itself from a hard disk into RAM.

          Netware 3.x and 4.x could only be loaded from DOS. So you put a little DOS partition on your server, that booted, then it loaded SERVER.EXE (IIRC) and Netware booted up. Note, extended memory managers were forbidded because that is the RAM that Netware ran in.

          And you _could_ exit back to DOS again! _But_ -- big exception -- you could also type `REMOVE DOS` into the Netware console and it unloaded DOS and reclaimed the 640kB of RAM it occupied. But you lost access to the floppy drives, and to your CD drive *if* it was controlled by DOS device drivers and did not have Netware ones. If you had a CD that Netware supported, such as a SCSI one, it was unaffected.

          Once you did REMOVE DOS you could no longer exit.

          So there is a clear line here... but it's surprisingly blurred.

          [1] Bootloader than you can't get back to.

          [2] Stage 1 OS that loads a Stage 2 OS.

          That's subdivided into:

          [2a] Stage 2 is dependent on Stage 1 and maybe can exit back to it.

          [2b] Stage 2 can call and use Stage 1 but is independent and you can remove Stage 1, after which no exit is possible.

          [2c] During its initialisation, Stage 2 re-allocates the RAM used by Stage 1 and it's gone. (E.g. Linux booted from `LOADLIN.EXE`)

          Linux and GRUB is type 2c.

          Systemd and Linux are none of the above.

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Is this an OS?

      > we should regard this as GUI shell rather than an OS?

      No. It is a single integrated whole: the bootloader, the underlying text-mode OS, and the WIMP on top.

      It is inseparable: you can't run the WIMP on anything else.

      AFAIK the OS doesn't have its own name as such but it's essentially a much improved and upgraded port of Acorn MOS from the 6502 BBC Micro to the ARM.

  16. TheMaskedMan Silver badge

    "BBC Micros were owned by rich, middle class kids to promote their upward mobility"

    This made me laugh, all the more so because the only 2 Beeb owners I knew fit exactly into that category - or, at least, their parents did.

    But plenty of rich folks had speccies, too - 48k, natch. Pretty much everyone else had C64s, myself included.

    I've never used ROSC OS, but this sounds like a perfect project for my Todo list! No idea what I'd do with it, but something is bound to occur to me.

    1. damiandixon

      I had a DAI personal computer. My uncle had a software house back in the late 70s and 80s. He had been buying lots of different computers to play with and decide which one to standardise on for development.

      It's in the loft. Sadly it has a power supply issue.

      I lived in a council house at the time and my mum was a war widow... so money was very tight.

      When I could finally afford a replacement I got an atari 130xe.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I had an Acorn Electron, and my better off friends all had commodore 64s or speccies... The only place I ever saw a bbc micro was in school, and I never got the chance to use it. As far as I know, the kids who were allowed to use it went off to become roofers... but then roofers are pretty well paid compared to some "middle class" occupations...

      1. druck Silver badge

        My parents could only afford to buy me an Electron, and I was disappointed it was slower than a BBC Micro in the high resolution modes, so while my BBC owning friends wrote programs in BASIC, I had to learn 6502 assembler to get sufficient speed. This really helped in my first job during university where I happened to see the boss of another department struggling to get get his BASIC code on a BBC Master (the successor to the BBC B) fast enough to sample an eddy current probe detecting cracks in an axle stub mounted on an old record desk turntable, it couldn't keep up with a whole revolution at 33 rpm, and he was due to demo it to Ford the next day. I had a Master 128 myself by then, so I volunteered to take it home overnight and rewrite it in assembler. First thing the next morning I tried it out, and it kept up at 33rpm, and 45rpm, it even managed 78rpm (I said the desk was old). The demo to Ford when well, the boss was elated, and I was promptly moved from the messing around with dirty bits of power station department, to the writing software for the non-destructive test instrument department. After the job I dropped the Physics course, switched to UCL to do computer science (projects all written on an Archimedes) and software engineering has been my career ever since.

    3. werdsmith Silver badge

      BBC Micro was more than a months income for ordinary families. It was for the wealthy or this not afraid of a bit of never never.

    4. heyrick Silver badge
      Happy

      "BBC Micros were owned by rich, middle class kids to promote their upward mobility"

      <glances over to the Beeb on the bookshelf with its dual floppy drive and 40/80 switch>

      I may never use it again [*] as emulation is simpler, but it is there if I should need it...

      * - Probably ought to recap the power supply before trying it, just in case.

  17. mark l 2 Silver badge

    When i was in high school in the late 80s to early 90s we had a IT classroom full of Acorns running RISC OS and not a single IBM compatible PC,

    So when i left my school to go to college in 1992 and had my first experience of Windows 3.1, I immediately thought it was crap compared to Risc OS and Amiga OS i had on my home computer. Thankfully the computer lab also had a couple of Acorn machines and I was able to use those for typing up assignments when the tutor would let me.

    But by the time i started my second year those Acorns had been replaced with more beige boxes running Windows.

    I didn't see another Acorn in the wild until the early 2000s when I got a job working for a local education IT dept and I found out several nursery schools still were using them for some basic educational games for the children.

  18. JohnDallman

    We may never see RISC OS for the Pi 5

    The Pi 5 has ARM Cortex-A76 processor cores. They (and all later Cortex-A cores) don't support running privileged code in 32-bit mode. RISC OS seems to need to run privileged code, and re-writing it as 64-bit would be a rather hefty piece of work.

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: We may never see RISC OS for the Pi 5

      That is a very good point, thanks. Yes, we've written about 64-bit-only SVC modes in modern Cortex cores.

      That is a shame.

      C.

      1. Martin an gof Silver badge

        Re: We may never see RISC OS for the Pi 5

        Never say never. There were plenty who said that with the handcrafted 26-bit ARM code at the heart of RiscOS it could never be made to run on modern ARM chips without 26-bit support and yet (some many years later) here we are... I know nothing of the intricacies but I have a gut feeling that 32 to 64 isn't as much of a paradigm shift as 26 to 32 was.

        There are lots of things I miss about RiscOS that I can't understand why they never found their way into modern GUIs (drag to save is a biggie, as is all-menus-are-context-menus) and I still maintain a working StrongARM RiscPC, but it's getting less use these days.

        M.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: We may never see RISC OS for the Pi 5

          Back in the early 2000s there was a running debate at the company I worked at about porting the main product to 64bit.

          The argument from senior management was it was not worth it and that 64bit was decades away from mainstream.

          In the end it took less than a week to do.

          I buried the time in one of the release cycles.

          Management at that company we're very short sighted and missed more than one opportunity.

    2. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: We may never see RISC OS for the Pi 5

      And RISCOS only uses one of those cores. No SMP.

  19. stu_e

    Arthur...

    You mentioned the original OS being Arthur. That was originally written in BASIC, and when I was at school I had the bright idea of printing out a listing. It took at least a day on the school's 9 pin dot matrix...

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Arthur...

      > That was originally written in BASIC

      No, it wasn't.

      Arthur *the OS* was hand coded in Arm assembly language, including the BBC BASIC V interpreter.

      The GUI, later called the WIMP, and in Arthur called DESKTOP, was written in BASIC.

      1. heyrick Silver badge

        Re: Arthur...

        Sort of. The underlying WindowManager was also part of the assembler wodge that was in the OS, the desktop looking UI was thrown together in BASIC as an example that mysteriously found its way into the ROM.

        It is rather forward thinking that the Wimp API didn't change that much between the single task Arthur and the multitasking RISC OS. In fact, the API hasn't changed much since then, just had various bits bolted on for additional functionality (like idle polling and the nested windows stuff).

  20. Bebu
    Windows

    Don't tell me...

    The UK nuclear weapons capability is run off a collection of "Arthurs" (being the UK of the "Daley" variety?)

    Would explain the unlikely survival of Risc0S from the 1980s. :)

    Not an unusual situation. An australian bank used OS/2 for their teller systems until not very long ago. An australian telco's engineering branch used hundreds of SunOS 3 systems possibly into the noughties I believe. NeWS (display postscript) and SunView - does it get any better? :)

    1. Wellyboot Silver badge

      Re: Don't tell me...

      Occams razor! - The development of a reliable UK owned OS & Chip family with very low power requirements does tie in quite well with the Vanguard submarine design & build timeline, missiles aside* there are an awful lot of computerised systems on those boats that need to be kept running from battery if the reactor goes offline for whatever reason. There is also a very wide array of other UK military systems designed from the '80s that required similar low power processing capabilities.

      * Odds are that as the missiles are from a shared pool they'll all need to use the same Lockheed control systems to light the touchpaper.

  21. Mint Sauce
    Thumb Up

    I well remember heading off to polytechnic in 1991, and recoling in horror at having to use Windows 3, after cutting my teeth on various Archimedes machines running RISC OS.

    Context menus everywhere just made much more sense to me at the time. Win 3 didn't even have antialiased fonts as I recall.

    Going to have to find an old PI and try this out... question is, can it run Crysis, er, I mean Zarch? :-D

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > I mean Zarch? :-D

      I don't think so, no. Lander and Zarch barely used the OS and hit the metal. The metal now is vastly different.

      I don't know of a port but I'm not much of a gamer. In fact Lander is about the last 3D video game I really liked much.

      In the PlingStore you can download Aemulor which lets you run old 26-bit RISC OS 2/3 code on ROOL. But they need to be well-behaved WIMP apps to work, I believe.

      1. ThomH Silver badge

        Lander and Zarch also don't bother with a frame-rate limiter in game. So even if they did run, you'd almost immediately crash your vehicle. Even more almost immediately than usual.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does it come with that Lander (Zarch) 3D game and that really good paint package? I remember that from the school Archimedes.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > that really good paint package?

      Yes, that is still there. :-)

  23. Alien Doctor 1.1

    One of the...

    best articles for a long time and so many fantastic stories and experiences from the commentards. This has been the best read for ages.

    Just about the time thatcher tried to take back the Falklands I was doing an NCC COBOL course at a tech college in Bristol. After course ended, and I survived the police assault on Stonehenge revellers I switched into the college metalwork department. Whilst there I managed to link, program and use a bbc micro to a face Miller cnc machine. Students could draw what they wanted on the beeb, then the face miller would create the designs for them in various materials.

    I am 60 now and suffering with an early onset problem. I wish I could remember the exact details (and the COBOL, I could do with the money*) but I do fondly recall those days**.

    * in the COBOL course I wrote an airline reservation system

    ** when the noggin works properly

  24. Conundrum1885

    Pi

    Interesting note here, the best option for RISC OS is probably the 3. Cheaper, the drop in performance isn't that significant and also

    they can be obtained from folks who upgraded to the 4 and 5.

    For added geek cred, buy a not working one and repair it.

    Simple additional fan may boost performance a bit with such a low overhead system.

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