Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
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Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#2I’ve got fond memories of RISC OS from my school’s room full of Archimedes. I spent a a fair bit of time designing and failing to build a text adventure in Basic, while my teacher tried to get us to learn how to use TechWriter. Best feature was being able to drag a slider to create a RAM disk.
Amazingly you can still buy a copy of TechWriter 9.1 for £85! http://www.mw-software.com/software/ewtw/ewtw.html
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#3I kind of went down a rabbit hole last year after the Xerox Star emulator was posted here. It was really cool, but super slow, so I felt like emulating another old system. I ended up writing a GUI calculator for RISC OS in ARM assembly, neither of which I had exposure to before. It was a blast. Very interesting system, it's like visiting a country on the other side of the planet.
There's a pretty good emulator, they've got a bundle fully loaded with all kinds of RISC OS tools.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#4It gives me strong Amiga-vibes and it seems it's open-source now... I like it and will definitely try it out!
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#5Excellent, I've been waiting for Wifi support, it's a game changer. Will be mucking around with this at the weekend.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#6RISC OS has been limping on thanks to the efforts of some extremely hard-working volunteers, but a roadblock is coming. The Pi 5 drops support for 32-bit ARM code, in which RISC OS written, and since enormous chunks of it are written in assembly, there is no trivial way to port.
Even so, it's heartwarming that people continue to put efforts into operating systems that aren't related to Unix or Windows. I'm happy to see people use this, and AmigaOS, and BeOS, and others. Computing shouldn't be a monoculture.
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#7It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way.
Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, effectively pausing it - the command line appeared at the bottom of the screen and the frozen gui scrolled up as you entered more commands; until you exit the system console. (It was also possible to get a command line in a window, which could do slightly less - I forget exactly what)
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#8RISC OS was the first graphical OS I ever used - my father ran Sibelius (the very first version I think) on an Acorn computer for engraving music. The three-button mouse approach is totally unique, I'm glad they explain it in this article!
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#9Wow, the article itself brings me down memory lane. The one thing that will not bring me into this platform: cooperative multitasking. (Shudder) I’m sure it feels fast though!
Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
#10More on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40188348