Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess technically that'd be Arthur rather than RISC OS. My high school had a particularly well connected compsci teacher who managed to get his hands on one of the first Archimedes to be sold (using his own money it must be said ...). At that stage it shipped with Arthur because, or so we were told, the "actual" OS was still in development. As it turned out, that OS was eventually cancelled and instead Arthur was u…
> At that stage it shipped with Arthur because, or so we were told, the "actual" OS was still in development. I think this was ARX[0], which was overambitious. Arthur apparently stands for A Risc by THURsday[1] EDIT: a detailed article[2], linked from lproven's article[3], about the history of ARX / Arthur / RiscOS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARX_(operating_system) [1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2022…
I could come back to the "modernising RISC OS" piece and update, as things are now actually happening. Although I was pessimistic for its prospects, it's becoming reality.
I know of 2 main efforts...
* Merlin, an all-new OS in Rust, aiming for a very simplified modern design and backwards compatibility.
* The RISC OS Open team is rewriting it in C.
I also know of an effort involving running an Arm64 hypervisor and then running the current 32-bit RISC OS kernel in a whole-machine VM. I lack any tech details about it so far, though.