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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

#101

Post by repelsteeltje »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #34
amiga386 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure it was ahead in its UX; it had a three button mouse, and daily operations needed all three mouse buttons. I had to use them for years at school and I feel you could never quite be sure what the third button would do. In some cases, it was like what shift-click does today, in other cases it selected menu items without closing the menu, in other cases it moved windows without bringing them to front an…

> you got different menus depending on whether you middle-clicked on the icon bar icon, or you right-clicked on the icon bar icon Are you sure you're talking about RISC OS? Because you're got the overview right but your details are weird. Right-clicking never pops a menu in RISC OS. Only the middle button does that. That's why the buttons in RISC OS have names. They're not "left, middle, and right" they are "select,…

> The "everything is an object" drag-and-drop was absurdly powerful. You're not limited to dragging into a directory, you can equally well "save" a file directly into another application, avoiding the middle step of dumping it onto the disk first.

So true!

For sure I was biased when I left RISC OS in favour of Windows 3.1 early 90s, but it took me years to get used to the clumsy COPY-CUT-PASTE metaphors still dominant today.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#102

Post by guenthert »

> RISC OS gives applications access to much of the memory map, and so if a program accidentally scribbles over the wrong parts of that address space, the whole computer can freeze up – which in testing our Pi 400 did several times.

Enough said.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#103

Post by repelsteeltje »

rbanffy wrote: post #100

RISC OS is an interesting beast, but I’d LOVE to see RISC/IX ported to the RPi and other small boards. Has anyone saved the sources anywhere? Would whoever now owns IXI IP help with the desktop part?

You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel?

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX

I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#104

Post by squarefoot »

VelesDude wrote: post #44
ajb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if the directX port ever saw the light of day. At that point the top brass were putting their hopes in the 'Network Computer' [1] and Set Top Boxes, so it may have shipped with one of those, or been intended to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer_Reference_Pro...

The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS. In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.

> The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was.

They were just like X dumb terminals that predated them by about a decade: far behind what the technology was offering with storage and computing power becoming cheaper every year. I'm glad they never caught up, and hope the same happens to Chromeboxes/books; I don't want prices of common hardware I use go up because of market shrinkage due to lots of people ditching real computers in favor of dumb terminals where even the simplest service is something that they must access and run remotely with no or reduced local storage/computing power. Sorry for having an unpopular opinion, but to me SaaS is like going back 40-50 years to the mainframes era, and essentially is a way to put everything behind a counter so that users can be charged tomorrow for what today is still free.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#105

Post by remedan »

mikepurvis wrote: post #50
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Modern multi-user paradigms also have very weird ideas of what’s shared. Like, installing or updating software is the same permission tier as accessing another user’s documents, wtf?

To me, a "modern multi-user paradigm" is Nix with Home Manager. Where most of my software is installed in my user's environment and not on the system level. Thus, if there were another user on the same machine, we could each manage our own software and updates without affecting the other.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#106

Post by lproven »

saagarjha wrote: post #89
pjmlp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS security always requires a concept of a user, unless you want to run all processes under the same identity.

This is a very Android centric viewpoint ;)

Unpacking that witty but cryptic comment:

Yes, you can have privilege-based security without user accounts, if you accept that you do not have control over your own hardware because only the OS vendor has administrative rights.

In other words: yes, you can have no-sign-in and no user accounts, but it's still there and you don't have admin access to your own computer.

Stepping back a level:

Smartphone OSes do not show accounts and permissions, but they are still there, just concealed. Same as they still have complex filesystems, but they are hidden.

Stepping back another level:

This is a bad way to design OSes: when you need to hide away major parts of the functionality, then you shouldn't have that functionality. It should not be in your design in the first place.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#107

Post by jl6 »

tech2 wrote: post #92
jl6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3rd party apps are written (controlled) by other people, and you are effectively granting that 3rd party permission to run their code on your device, so the user concept isn’t that far off the mark. Since ~nobody reads the source code of 3rd party apps, security vetting is usually a matter of deciding to trust the app’s author, same as how you would trust anyone else that you give a user account to.

You grant them capabilities, a handle which permits access to a particular directory, one which allows network access (or possibly even further limited than that) etc. No user, just a series of object handles which permit them to perform the task and nothing more.

Sure, but capabilities and handles are technical terms of art below the level at which regular users need to understand. The idea that an app is another person using your computer is not a terrible abstraction in terms of helping people make sense of what's happening.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#108

Post by repelsteeltje »

ajb wrote: post #39
fidotron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall seeing a Macromedia Director player but never heard of a DirectX port. In any case the lack of hardware floating point in most of their machines was looking like a big mistake by the mid 90s. Their compilers were also way off the pace and that was getting to be a problem. Tbh I think I am slightly bitter about having stuck with Acorn a bit too much, and should have jumped away sooner. It is clear Acorn knew…

I'm not sure if the directX port ever saw the light of day. At that point the top brass were putting their hopes in the 'Network Computer' [1] and Set Top Boxes, so it may have shipped with one of those, or been intended to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer_Reference_Pro...

Brian McCullough's book How the Internet Happened (https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone...) angles this in terms of the centralized digital superhighway versus the open distributed internet. (Where thin clients, set top boxes, etc. are in the first group and web browsers and WWW protocol are the second.)

Essentially, by 2005 the open internet had won, but the iPhone (or more precisely: the App store) became the dream of a thin client and became the platform NCs had initially targeted — turning the internet into a walled garden with a vengeance.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#109

Post by Symbiote »

dajtxx wrote: post #51
ajb wrote: post #7

It 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, ef…

Home computers didn't need multi-user capability or much in the way of security (other than anti-virus) back then. I'd argue they still don't. I don't think these two things were the problem. I can take or leave shared libraries. They seem to cause a lot of trouble, but so do statics, so I'm on the fence there. But in the context of when this was released it's a non-issue. I'll give you the CLI thing though. If the C…

I don't remember any limitation of the windowed CLI on RISC OS, except it was slower if there was a lot of output.

The OS generally had very little usage of the CLI though, since the GUI was present in ROM and booted to the desktop in about 3 seconds.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#110

Post by repelsteeltje »

jnaina wrote: post #48

Still remember viewing the Acorn Archimedes with the RISC OS for the first time in 1987, when it was launched. Someone wrote a 10 line demo that rolled down the current screen, using a curl motion using bitmap copy/transform, using Basic. Breathtaking performance/speed. Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace.

Best remember that compared to today, there hardly was a market place till late nineties. 70s and early 80s were dominated by hardware enthusiast, 80s game software and a nerdy minority, business PCs had little momentum till late 80s and 90s. All this time, the market was flooded with different types of mutually incompatible micro computers. After DOS compatible PC gained momentum, the only company still (barely) standing was Apple, and it ultimately adopted comorbidity PC hardware too.

So I think the reason Acorn (and Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, RadioShack as well as Sun, DEC and SGI) went belly up is primarily that while the market was growing, there simply wasn't enough space in the market to compete with wintel dominance.

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