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PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

stonetools.ghost.io

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

#21

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…

Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.

Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

#22
post #19

I 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…

> Why * * do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?

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

#23
I 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

#24
Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself.

It 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

#25
I had an Archimedes back in the day, they were incredible machines. I remember hearing about Pipedream but never got to try it, it sounded wild:

PipeDream 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

#26

I 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.

It looks like there's an fpga implementation as part of the mister project. It could scratch the itch if the real hardware is out of reach.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Archie_MiSTer

Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

#27

My browser had this down as a phising site? The actual content seems fine though.

Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.

Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!

Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

#28

Earlier 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.

Author here. Yes, I don't self-host exactly because I was hoping to avoid stuff like this by relying on a more robust back-end than I could provide.

Re: PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

#30
post #15

Why 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.

Author here. Technically the webmaster is Ghost blogging platform itself, because I just rent a subdomain on their servers. This is frustrating and I'm checking it out now.
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