31–40 of 55 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually parts of the content aren't loading, probably also due to it being listed? Strange though! I wonder what happened?
Looks like the source is on PhishTank: https://www.phishtank.net/phish_detail.php?phish_id=9419370
Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself. It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8. I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison. From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is.…
The "Icon Tray" here is actually the "Icon Bar" and discussed so widely it's the name of the main Risc OS forum to this day. Pipedream always was spectacularly odd, even at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac". The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop. Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did fo…
Quote from the article we are commenting on... "Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file."" OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with cla…
What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I forget it's name) where you could drag sliders to change how much various things were allowed to allocate.
The downside, of course, was that if some app crashed, it would take out every file you had open with it. But then, it didn't really have very good isolation, so often a crashing app would take down the whole OS.
"We must now Single-click "Select" on that icon to actually bring the application to the forefront and activate it. I don't know what that's all about, but that's how it works." What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I fo…
I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was at the time. I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it. I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
It looks like there's an fpga implementation as part of the mister project. It could scratch the itch if the real hardware is out of reach. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Archie_MiSTer
As to why ARM succeeded so greatly and is still among us as (originally) a RISC CPU, unlike SPARC, MIPS (the list goes on), it was because of its extremely low power requirements - something which wasn't even in the minds of the two designers at the time. However, when they first wired up the first chip and tested it, they noticed after a while that even though it worked, power had not been applied to the power pin.. it ran purely off parasitic power from the data lines.
So, it started to be used in portable, battery-powered devices, like first the Newton, and later all kinds of PDAs and then phones. After a while the yearly number of ARM CPUs sold numbered in the billions, more than any other particular CPU.
"Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt."
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2012/05/03/arm-creators-...
"We must now Single-click "Select" on that icon to actually bring the application to the forefront and activate it. I don't know what that's all about, but that's how it works." What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I fo…
Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?
The only reason I can think of is to not disrupt the user's flow by opening a window on top of the Filer windows. Maybe they intend to open multiple applications to use together.
There was a carefully written programmer's guide for UX. That might have an explanation.
I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was at the time. I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it. I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
They come up fairly regularly.
Be cautious of any that aren't shown to be working, especially if they don't include photographs of the area around the CMOS battery. These could leak after 15+ years and damage the board.