The original ARM operating system
Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#12[deleted]
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#13The real value of a niche platform like RISC OS isn't measured by market share, but by how much of its design DNA survives elsewhere.
I've always been curious whether choices in Mac OS X might have been (unintentionally) influenced by RISC OS. I believe there were a disproportionate number of Brits on the HI team at Apple.
The stand-outs to me are the use of blue folder icons and the Dock.
https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/3rdParty/Retro...
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#14[dead]
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#15If you want to know what it's like to program for RISC OS:
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#16The real value of a niche platform like RISC OS isn't measured by market share, but by how much of its design DNA survives elsewhere.
I've always been curious whether choices in Mac OS X might have been (unintentionally) influenced by RISC OS. I believe there were a disproportionate number of Brits on the HI team at Apple. The stand-outs to me are the use of blue folder icons and the Dock. https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/3rdParty/Retro...
There was persistent noise even back in the 90s that the icon bar was inspiration for the Windows task bar in Win95. Quite the basis for it, or if it was nonsense, no idea. (HN has previously surfaced some serious Acorn related historical surprises, so someone here may actually know).
What has been quite surprising over the years is how violently many people raised with Open/Save dialogs hate the Risc OS filer and approach to saving and loading files.
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#17The real value of a niche platform like RISC OS isn't measured by market share, but by how much of its design DNA survives elsewhere.
Well, a reminder of the origin story of RiscOS: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Acorn/fellows.php
Paul Fellows later went on to be the CTO of AlertMe, which became the basis of British Gas' Hive service, and then Lowes' Iris product line.
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always been curious whether choices in Mac OS X might have been (unintentionally) influenced by RISC OS. I believe there were a disproportionate number of Brits on the HI team at Apple. The stand-outs to me are the use of blue folder icons and the Dock. https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/3rdParty/Retro...
There was persistent noise even back in the 90s that the icon bar was inspiration for the Windows task bar in Win95. Quite the basis for it, or if it was nonsense, no idea. (HN has previously surfaced some serious Acorn related historical surprises, so someone here may actually know). What has been quite surprising over the years is how violently many people raised with Open/Save dialogs hate the Risc OS filer and ap…
Paul Fellows absolutely claims that. From https://astrospeakers.org/provider/paul-fellows :
> He worked on the first generation of home computers and lead the design of the RiscOS operating system for the ARM processor, including inventing the apps and icon bar user interface that has since spread to phones and computers across the world
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#19I think maybe the famous surviving Risc OS application might be Sibelius music notation program. It’s owned by Avid now but it started as the work of two brothers on an Acorn Archimedes under Risc OS. https://www.avid.com/sibelius
Obligatory posting of Tantacrul's hilariously vicious kicking of Sibelius[0]
"This really is one of the great examples of breaking all UI design principles and every UX design principle too. It's like a design bull in a musical china shop."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
[0] They may have fixed things in the intervening 8 years, I'm not a composer, I don't know.
Re: Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
#20I used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer. I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It could be expanded with BASIC plugins to do just about anything! It was distributed by the Arcade BBS to start with then Acorn User magazine put it on the floppy disk that came with t…
I went down a rabbit hole a few summers ago and I ended up writing a calculator from scratch in assembly for RISC OS. Interesting experience having GUI routines at the syscall level