The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though
PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
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Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually parts of the content aren't loading, probably also due to it being listed? Strange though! I wonder what happened?
Looks like the source is on PhishTank: https://www.phishtank.net/phish_detail.php?phish_id=9419370
Interesting, the source is (a subdomain on) the Ghost blogging platform.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#13I used PipeDream on the Cambridge Z88, and only briefly tried it on other platforms under the PipeDream (Archimedes, MS-DOS) and Fireworkz (Windows) names. I think it was a great moonshot of an idea, ahead of its time when you consider Affinity has done the same thing with Illustration/Layout/Photos.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#14I think fireworkz pro was the next evolution of the concept.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#15Why is U-Block telling me stonetools.ghost.io is in the fishing/badware list... If the webmaster is here, you might want to take a look.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#16In some ways Archimedes' RiscOS was ahead of its time, in some ways it was a disappointment. It never matured due to lack of momentum, market share. I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#17In some ways Archimedes' RiscOS was ahead of its time, in some ways it was a disappointment. It never matured due to lack of momentum, market share. I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac". The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop. Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did fo…
Quote from the article we are commenting on...
"Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file.""
OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.
Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac". The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop. Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did fo…
Quote from the article we are commenting on... "Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file."" OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with cla…
Most of the hardware had rom with its drivers in it. Meant just about everything was a plug and play experience.
And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#19I find current UIs weird and stupid and extremely dull - which is why I think the CLI is still used so much by at least developers like me.
Drag and drop is one thing we just don't really use more than, say, once every 1/2 hour.
There's no composability really. We have the stupid metaphor of an "App" and it's a little world in itself. You can't really plug things into each other - e.g. use the gimp brush tool in a facebook post.
It's a dead end.
Why ** ** do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
I used to use the ROX window manager and ROX Desktop - they were a great export of RiscOS features to Linux. I liked the way I could customise a menu option with a hotkey so easily. It's no longer maintained and I wasn't smart enough to be able to do it myself then. Perhaps now... :/
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#20PipeDream was a wild piece of software. Even as a young teenager in the early 90s I could tell it was a weird paradigm.