RISC OS runs on fastest hardware ever

Oranges and Apples

The mistake you are making is, as wonderfully demonstrated by your bicycle/car example is you are not comparing like for like. Sure, there are many more ARMs shipped than x86 silicon. But then, there are probably more self tapping screws shipped than x86 silicon. And how can you speak of value when the ARM is sold as licences and then resold as fairly inexpensive units? How many Beagle boards can you buy for the price of a lump of (expensive) x86?

Does my PVR run an N270? Does my Zen run x86? No, both run ARM. Because ARM is better targetted for small embedded devices than fully blown computer systems.

What is nice to see, irrespective of market size, is that it is shipping loads. It is a veritable success. Yay.

RISC OS not RiscOS

There are two completely different operating systems with similar names. RISC/os and RISC OS.

RISC OS could be thought of as a glorified version of the BBC micro operating system, in the same way windows could be thought of as a glorified version of CP/M.

Novel Netware obviously wasn't a serious operating system, by your criteria.

I would be curious to see a GUI on symbian (or even Windows mobile) that was as good as the versions of RISC OS from the early 90s, let alone its current UI.

I was going to say that serious opererating systems need good GUIs, but then I remember the state of GUIs on other systems.

Wash your mouth out!

"glorified C64-style OS"

If you had said glorified BBC Micro OS I might have let you get away with it! The C64 OS was primitive compared even to that.

But neither had the fluid, consistent, well designed GUI of RISC OS. Sadly, nor does anything else :-(

I keep waiting for someone to catch up with the RISC OS GUI, but after 20 years it doesn't look like happening. It's not going to be Windows with its history of appalling GUI design, Mac OS X did get closer, and while you can change the Linux desktop it doesn't change the apps which all behave like WIndows apps.

Touch sensitive devices or gesture recognition will probably completely change the way we interact with computers, so the WIMP desktop metaphor will be replaced by something "better".

This new ARM hardware will hopefully mean I can continue using RISC OS until that happens :-)

@jlocke. Such is the percieved wisdom.

But I believe that ARM has always had a protected mode. It was certainly enough to have BSD 4.3 ported onto it in the A440/R140 days. It was called RISC iX.

And I can't see that it would be impossible to add interrupt driven multi-tasking to RISC OS. It's a programmed interrupt timer that will effectively call the same context switch code in the OS as is used in the co-operative system. May have to move some of the context save function into the interrupt handler, but that should be trivial.

The main drawback was that although RISC OS was intended from the start to be multi-tasking, I don't believe that it was ever meant to be a multi-user OS. This means that some of the protections you may expect in a modern OS could be missing. As far as I can remember, RISC OS programs are relocatable, and run in a shared address space, but this should not be a barrier to making it fully protected. If the current implementations have the requisite hardware, it should be perfectly possible to set up a Virtual Address space that will allow existing applications to run, just protected from each other.

The people who designed ARM initially were clever bunnies, and would not have missed so obvious a trick.

It may be interesting to look at ROOL to see how difficult it would be to retrofit.

RISC OS

Co-operative though it was, it was at the time leap years ahead of Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 came along stealing the task bar concept (in fact the 'Icon Bar' pre-dated Windows task bar and Mac's dock. In general UI experience, RISC OS was speedy compared to clunky Win 95 and its pre-emptive multitasking (and whilst were on it, why is it that Windows even today can still take down the entire computer if a pre-emptive multitasking process locks up?).

C64 OS... not even remotely in the same ball park. Didn't even have a windowed interface. C64 was equivalent to the BBC Micro in terms of OS, with barely even any form of multitasking at all, and even then MS DOS was way more advanced, and RISC OS was way beyond that. RISC OS was near equivalent of Windows 95, just without the pre-emptive multitasking and the hideous registry system.

It's long in the tooth now, but for embedded systems it would be pretty good. Pre-emptive Multitasking just bloats Symbian, but otherwise the two have similar footprints. Cut out the desktop and you could build an embedded RISC OS that would be pretty rock solid.

Best thing about RISC OS was installation though.

Forget registries and installers. Just click on the app, drag to folder, job done.

Oh, and let's not forget the super speed of loading the OS thanks to putting it into ROM, and the inherent security this provides. Again, ideal for embedded systems, and if there's no registry/internal database concept (which Symbian does have), then if anything goes wrong, just power cycle and the device is back to factory default. Dodgy app? Just click, delete, gone.

Who says pictures don't lie?

Well, they don't - but they can be misinterpreted.

For one thing, you're looking at pictures which are mostly taken of individual stands, rather than the room(s) in general. Since that seems to have been the goal of the photographer, it seems reasonable to take pictures of the stands when there are fewer people obscuring them.

For another thing, some of the individual presentations, such as the one from RISC OS Open Ltd, were very popular and had a very noticable emptying effect on the room as the crowd all tried to cram into the room used for those. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if those pictures were taken while one such presentation was going on.

FWIW, my stand was next to the RISC OS Open Ltd one, and on more than one occasion during the day it was drowning in a crowd of visitors to their stand.

RE: timewraped in from then too

Not all of them!

"I am 9 years old and am VERY good at computing."

http://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2010/06/17/risc-os-open-at-acorn-world#comment-77

nextstep

Would this be the operating system? "Nextstep 1.0 was released on September 18, 1989"

RISC OS 2 was released in April 1988

Arthur (the previous version) was released in 1987

Windows in 1983?

Wiki's article says November '85. God, that predates OS/2! But the first worthwhile version of Windows (3.0) turned up in 1990.

RISC OS is from 1988, but before that came Arthur in June 1987. It is a bit bogus to throw in a comparison with *Unix*, so at least be honest and say X came about in 1984, while the current X11 was released in September 1987 (nerrr! after Arthur :-) ).

I wonder - if Win3 was co-operative multitasking, and Win32 (95, etc) was pre-emptive, I wonder how much was 'kludged' so a PMT OS could handle CMT applications? Let's not forget that Win32 was [supposed to be...] 32 bit, while many of the older applications were 16 bit. I can still run Win3.1 apps on XP. Useful, but also a bit disturbing. My main gripe with W95 was how often the damn thing used to bluescreen. Long gone days, it takes a *lot* to get XP to bluescreen. I think I've had my eeePC for nearly a year now, hasn't BSOD'd on me once. [this, of course, is tempting fate, isn't it?]

But, then, having said all of this, there are good reasons to want to keep RISC OS alive. It is a simple OS, simple to understand, simple to use. It is highly modular, I mean, hell, the entirety of the OS beyond the core kernel is a bunch of "modules". It is powerful and feature-laden for its size. RISC OS fits on a 4Mb ROM (later versions use a bigger flash because I think it is circa 5Mb). How big was Windows 3.11? How big was Windows 95? My Neuros OSD PVR came with a version of Debian installed in a 16Mb flash. If you update to the latest firmware, it resides (permenantly) on a CF card because it outgrew the flash space. Of course, it makes it easier to run a live filesystem than all the read-only flash stuff, but still... If I ever succeed in porting any version of RISC OS to the unit, I fully anticipate being able to softload it into the OSD's memory (32Mb, I think) and running with it there in-situ. Pare it down a little bit (as Neuros did to the Debian), I don't see why it wouldn't fit in a teeny-tiny 4Mb.

And finally (yes, I am known for long rambling posts, so there's light at the end of the tunnel now!), substantial parts of the core OS were written in assembler by the very people involved in the design of the processor it is running on. Howzat for speed freak satisfaction? RISC OS demands little but gives a lot. It may be lacking in modern codec support, but I think that is only due to it never really being used in a CPU/DSP system. There doesn't seem to be any technical reason why you couldn't design some sort of media player running on RISC OS - you'd only ever see the media player interface anyway. Perhaps why Linux is used more is because Linux is truly open in the OPEN sense of the word. RISC OS is only partially open and... is it ALL available yet, or are there still bits missing? They've only just published FPE's sources...

Re: Register-level GUI calls

"So there was no obvious language for which to make a standard GUI library. Hence, making the GUI API OS-level was a reasonable choice, as you could build on top of this in any language, which many people did."

I think C was in pretty widespread use on the Microsoft platform by the time Windows 3.1 was introduced, and as you note, C is the traditional systems programming language of choice on Unix-related platforms. Acorn had a bunch of people doing work in C, at least at the turn of the 1990s, not least because they were brushing up against Unix and getting people in to do the RISC iX port of Unix, so I don't think there should ever have been any doubt about what sort of language support should have been provided.

Microsoft was able to get a lot of developers quickly by getting the tools out there and providing APIs that, although they might have sucked in comparison to platforms like NeXTSTEP, were just absent on RISC OS. Many people may have written wrappers around the low-level APIs, but apart from the proprietary ones, they didn't seem well developed. It must have been a bizarre experience working at Acorn, having access to and experience with Unix-based toolkits like Tk which, although looking archaic now, were in a different league to anything widely available for RISC OS, and yet not providing such toolkits for RISC OS.