In 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…
PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#22I 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 fa…
At least for me, when I tried RiscOS, it was annoying and more work to have to switch to the file manager and then open more window(s) just to save a file. That could also be with RiscOS not having(?) Alt-Tab. I do sometimes use the macOS "proxy-icon" (which I think was disabled by default a few versions ago) to save/move files into finder windows if I already have them open.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#23I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it.
I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#24It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#25PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.
I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#26I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was at the time. I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it. I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#27My browser had this down as a phising site? The actual content seems fine though.
Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#29I think fireworkz pro was the next evolution of the concept.
Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
#30Why 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.