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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

#181

Post by xyzzy3000 »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’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

The ability to assign memory to various aspects of the system dynamically by dragging bar charts is something I wish existed in modern operating systems. Sheer UX genius. I wonder who came up with it?

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

#182

Post by xyzzy3000 »

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?

SCO owned IXI at one point and sold the desktop to various vendors until CDE emerged.

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

#183

Post by xyzzy3000 »

lproven wrote: post #154
jnaina wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the Archimedes/RISC OS system itself bombed and got outsold by the PC, Mac, Atari ST and the Amiga. But the ARM processor/ISA itself that came out of the original ARM2 on Archimedes is now world dominating. Both are true.

In the long run, _everything_ got outsold by the PC, including the Mac. But in the long run we're all dead (as J M Keynes put it). Step back too far and everything gets lost in the noise. Archimedes was the reason RISC OS was created... and Acorn was the reason Arm was. But originally Acorn's ARM machines were to run ARX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARX_(operating_system) Arthur outdid ARX, so ARX was cancelled and…

The Acorn-designed ARMs were released in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. The best-selling designs are the recent ones which do share heritage but are far removed from the excellent work that Furber, Wilson and team did while at Acorn.

RISC OS is a plaything for enthusiasts, a relic if an age where computing was a hobby rather than the corporate monstrosity that it has become.

As a hobbyist and RISC OS user I am fine with that. But Acorn itself got out of the game in 1988 after Phoebe took only 1,400 preorders. Had they continued, Galileo may well have succeeded RISC OS with a more modern foundation.

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

#184

Post by mixmastamyk »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #49
hedora wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The march toward systemd-electron continues.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

One attempt, XULRunner didn't work out.

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

#185

Post by dusted »

RetroTechie wrote: post #167
dusted wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular take but here I go (bye bye karma): Code sharing between applications, beyond what is basic, common and stable enough that it could live in the kernel, is not a good idea in the long run. It served a purpose back when memory was scarce and libraries (and their versions) few. Containerization for all it's isolation magic has primarily been successful as a way to package "more or less the entire OS dependency…

Code sharing should not be done, because it is a hard problem? Stuffing whole OSes + apps + their dependencies in containers, and running a # of those, is not the solution. That works for single-purpose uses like servers. Not for user-facing OSes that run a # of apps side-by-side. Solving that "how to share code reliably" problem is the solution. Being a hard problem means it's worthwhile to find a good solution for…

Sharing code runtime is not a hard problem, it's the wrong problem. Code _sharing_ shouldn't be done. Code _reuse_ sure, absolutely, and it's done right by including that exact, specific code at compile time.

And yes, stuffing whole OSes + apps + deps into containers is indeed not the solution, it's the symptom.

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

#186

Post by quintushoratius »

josephg wrote: post #118
rbanffy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One such case is company-issued phones. They require the company-provided apps to be isolated from any user-specific configuration, creating an effective multi-user system where user apps (such as Apple Music) run with different privileges (and network access) than, say, Teams or Outlook.

I think this is a good idea anyway. I love how if I install some dodgy app on my phone, it can't access the private, stored data of other apps. It can't steal my google or facebook credentials. And it can't cryptolocker my filesystem. My desktop computers are designed with this old "user security" model that I don't use at all - since I'm the only user anyway. User security protects ... uh, the operating system I sup…

You might be interested in Qubes OS, which runs every application in a virtual machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS

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

#187

Post by flomo »

xyzzy3000 wrote: post #180
flomo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trivia at this point. But the Oracle Network Computer was a low-end x86 box running FreeBSD and a full-screen Netscape Navigator. Very much a product of its time. (WebTV, later purchased by Microsoft, was the more successful product in this space.)

Acorn did the reference profile NC for Oracle, and it was an ARM7-based machine with NCOS, a stripped down version of RISC OS. The Acorn-built NCs were then sold under a variety of brandings, including Acorn's own and Xemplar (the Acorn/Apple education collaboration in the UK). Was the Oracle Network Computer a later variant?

Possibly, this was after it was spun-off as a separate company.

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

#188

Post by saagarjha »

pjmlp wrote: post #113
saagarjha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which are particularly sexy, unfortunately.

Given the hoards of candidates for game development and IoT jobs, putting up with the pay and hours, at least two of those are quite sexy.

Game development, maybe. The IoT people just want something to pay their bills.

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

#190

Post by ekianjo »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
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…

> 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…

multi user support has other purposes. it means you can turn the OS into a server OS which can be shared across numerous accounts. lacking that capability means you dissociate a desktop OS from a server OS for no good reason.
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