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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

#131

Post by xyzzy3000 »

amiga386 wrote: post #28
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…

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…

If you press F3 (the standard save shortcut in RISC OS), you get a Save As dialogue box which will persist even if you mouse-out.

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

#132

Post by xyzzy3000 »

mtillman wrote: post #87

Single user issues aside, this looks better than every version of Linux I’ve seen in the past decade.

The (abandoned) ROLF project was an attempt to get a RISC OS look-and-feel for Linux: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211082559/http://stoppers.d...

There is also ROX Desktop, which has had some recent commits: https://github.com/rox-desktop/

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

#133

Post by lproven »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #103
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.

[Article author here]

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

No. (Although that sounds fun, I never heard of such a thing.)

RISC/ix was Acorn's ARM UNIX. It had nothing of the Acorn GUI -- it was fairly standard X11, I think with Motif or something Motif-like.

Acorn did add some Acornish tweaks to it, including its text editing and its memory allocation, but it looked and ran much like any other late-1980s UNIX, as far as I now. I have never got to try it myself, sadly.

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

#134

Post by lproven »

sillywalk wrote: post #56
lproven wrote: post #23

That's my article -- I posted it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40234430

Link to HN discussion of another of your articles with more RiscOS history. Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS? 111 points by lproven on Oct 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735766

I have written about RISC OS quite a few times over the years.

• RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/risc_os_35/

• Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis – Paul Fellows describes how it beat the overambitious ARX to Acorn's Archimedes computer

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/

• Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink – Steve Revill of RISC OS Open chats to us about taking the project into the future

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/retro_tech_week_rool/

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

#135

Post by lproven »

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.

> Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace.

Bombed?

RISC OS machines sold for some 15 years in the face of growing competition from Windows and Linux.

Acorn chose to shut it down and span off ARM.

Castle Technologies continued selling it and made a new 32-bit-clean version and new hardware for it.

RISC OS Developments bought Castle and made RISC OS Apache-licensed FOSS.

The OS is still alive and in development nearly 40 years after release. You can buy new hardware running it.

You can buy new releases of the OS for original Acorn hardware and emaulators to run its apps on Windows and Mac OS X.

The CPU family is the best-selling in the world and outsells all x86 chips put together by something like 100:1.

Arm sold 8 Billion CPUs last year: https://newsroom.arm.com/news/arm-announces-q3-fy22-results

Intel sold 50 Million: https://tweakreviews.com/processor---cpu/intel-sold-the-most...

Tell me again about how this platform "bombed"?

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

#136

Post by lproven »

_akhe wrote: post #42

Raspberry Pi is amazing. Everything from the size and simplicity of hardware to that of Raspbian. Super moddable, modular, surprisingly performant. As a lot of others do, I use one for most of my sites and apps as a home server. 15+ apps, sites, and APIs running on this thing 24/7/365 over WiFi. What would be the benefit of using RISC OS over Raspbian, or even Ubuntu Server? Is it pure nostalgia like running Windows…

> simplicity of ... Raspbian

You think Raspbian is simple?

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/

« Raspberry Pi OS with desktop and recommended software

    Release date: March 15th 2024
    System: 32-bit
    Kernel version: 6.6
    Debian version: 12 (bookworm)
    Size: 2,678MB
»

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

« Complete SD card images

RISC OS Pi

2024-04-28 06:15:00

For Pi Zero & ZeroW & Zero2W, Pi 1 models A(+) & B(+), Pi 2 model B, Pi 3 models A+ & B(+), Pi 4 model B, Pi 400, Compute Module 1 & 3(+) & 4.

Version 5.30 Size 155.1 MB »

2.6GB of code, vs 155MB.

It's nearly twenty times bigger.

17.25x as big. And yes, I chose the image with "recommended software" because that 155MB RISC OS image is packed with dozens of apps as well.

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

#138

Post by lproven »

kaycebasques wrote: post #24

Skimmed the article, didn't see this important bit mentioned: I'm pretty sure the OS is available through rpi-imager, meaning it's trivial to set up on an RPi and presumably has some notion of official endorsement from RPi org.

[Article author here]

Yes it is. I didn't think that was an important bit.

True story. ROOL went to show the RPi foundation their first version. It booted to the desktop, had an Apps folder with text editor, graphics, sound, command prompt, BASIC etc.

Eben Upton asked how big it was.

They told him it was 6MB.

Eben asked "no, not the kernel, the whole OS?"

They said "that is the whole OS. We haven't got SD card reading working yet. This is booted from the FAT partition kernel image."

Upton commented that if he had known the Archimedes OS was still around and it was FOSS, and it ran Python, he'd have made it the Pi official firmware.

Such a giant missed changes. Hundreds of millions of people would have had Pis that booted into RISC OS.

Acorn's own original Unix hardware booted RISC OS from ROM, then you clicked a desktop icon to load RISC/ix, Acorn's BSD.

The Pi was very nearly the same. A 10¢ flash ROM would have held the whole OS as it does on the Raspberry Pi Pico. That is the price Upton gave me personally in an interview.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/17/raspberries_pi_direct...

Pis would have booted direct into RISC OS without an SD card needed.

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

#139

Post by lproven »

imoverclocked wrote: post #9

Wow, 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!

You should try it.

It is a good demo that some of the tech that Unix folks fetishize is actually an optional extra, and if you let it go, you can do more in 1% of the space.

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

#140

Post by lproven »

dheera wrote: post #14

That UI looks like something out of the late 80s / early 90s. I can smell the VCR head cleaner and scratch-n-sniff stickers and hear the dial-up internet bee-bee-bee-bee-gurglegugrle-dong-ding-dong-ding-whooooooooosh-wheeeeeeeesh-bling! bling whooooo. Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s?

> Can we at least upgrade the fonts, colors, and negative space to make it look more 2020s?

Ew. Please no.

I hate 2020 OS design. It's flat and ugly and confusing.

And this is very much not just me.

https://medium.com/@jared.cyr/is-flat-design-overrated-1b9d4...

https://www.spinxdigital.com/blog/downsides-flat-design-tren...

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

1990s design was clearer, cleaner and better, dammit.

https://twitter.com/RetroTechDreams/status/17860872619535321...

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