In common with a lot of people who used to use RISCOS, I don't use it now and that is the focus of this article: Why don't I use it any more and what would it take to make me use it again? Of course, an article of this sort still has worth as there is bound to be some degree of correlation between my feelings, experiences and hopes in relation to the platform and those other people.
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I have said before that RISC OS has found itself colliding with modern requirements, causing a lot of comparison with Windows and other operating systems. I believe that this kind of comparision is a detriment to the platform. RISC OS isn't Windows or Linux or OS X, it shouldn't try to be those things. Once you start trying to be Windows, you will fall short and feel that things are indaequate.
I don't think that RISC OS is inadequate. It's a very nice Operating System, good for emebedded spaces and very low power consumption / cooling. It runs on ARM chips, available in many PDAs. I feel that if RISC OS tries to be Windows, it will die or stay in a perpetual state of inadequancy (Amiga). RISC OS should instead be focusing on doing what it does best, Castle and ROS could be making mintage off of expensive embedded computer contracts in the industrial manufacturing industry.
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PS. Good article, the author is honest but humble in his opinion. Windows/Mac/Linux users could learn something here. The author should have linked to the specific RISC OS browsers though, instead of bypassing them for Firefox. For example, this article on Drobe, compares and contrasts the main browsers for RISC OS: http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1297.html
Edited 2006-12-07 12:48
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To me the biggest problem with RISC OS as a modern platform is its fragility. The lack of pre-emptive multi-tasking and decent memory protection are big problems. These problems IMHO limit its usefulness as an embedded or PDA OS.
Indeed IMHO RISC OS is probably a worse starting point for a PDA OS than Linux. The GUI is not at all suited to pen-based working, so it would need to be replaced. (PDA pens don't have buttons, so what do you do for menus?) What that leaves you with that is of use is the kernel, Filer, Font Manager, and Draw Module. Whilst the Font Manager used to kick arse, it's now looking quite dated, and the Draw Module was always lacking.
What's sad is that Acorn were developing another OS for the Archimedes. It was called ARX, and was being developed at the Acorn Palo Alto Research Centre. It was to be a modern OS, with memory protection and pre-emptive multi-tasking like Unix, with a GUI similar to Mac OS - the guys working on it were experts in OS design. Unfortunately the project was poorly managed (as most Acorn projects were). Management decided to kill the project because the predicted finish date was long after the launch date for the Archimedes - Arthur was thrown together in a hurry, and the rest is history.
For those that don't know, Arthur was essentially developed by a bunch of BBC Micro games developers who had little experience in OS design. I believe that none of the folks that had been working on ARX worked on Arthur. It was designed to be compatible (to an extent) with the earlier BBC Micro OS - much of the early software on Archimedes machines was ports of BBC Micro apps. It was never really designed to be a serious OS.
IMHO what Acorn should have done was get in some decent management for the ARX project. Had they done that they'd have ended up with a serious computer system and things may have turned out differently. They could potentially have competed in the spaces that Unix and Mac OS were dominating. Unfortunately Arthur meant they were only suited to the education and hobbyist market.
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Many technologies are destined to be a footnote. Even PC/GEOS released in 1989 had full pre emptive multi tasking and beat the pants off of Windows, yet still failed. If Acorn hadn't had such good education deals (in part thanks to Auntie and the previous BBC Micro), it might not have even got anywhere to begin with.
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I dislike the fact I'm automatically being rated at 2, it seems very haughty. I can troll with the best of them sometimes and feel that I should earn a high rank each and every time.
Edited 2006-12-07 13:26
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Linux is losing market share! Apple Users are homos! Windows XP crashes all the time! MSWord is a standard! Amiga users are in denial! OSnews is biased towards Apple/Ubunutu/Microsoft! Vista is just XP-SP3/a new skin! Ubuntu runs fine on 128MB! Firefox leaks memory! Novell are the new Microsoft! It's not open source, I'm not interested! EVERYTHING must be GPL!
Will that do? :3
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I dislike the fact I'm automatically being rated at 2, it seems very haughty. I can troll with the best of them sometimes and feel that I should earn a high rank each and every time.
I agree. A think a far better method of giving preference to some users would be to automatically hide the comments of users whose comment scores are below a certain threshold, say 0.90. Then those who want to be showered in drivel can do so without bothering the rest of us! ;-)
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Perhaps Acorn could have kept developing RISCOS at a pace equivalent to their initial efforts. I'm not expert enough to make any authoritive determination on the matter but I wonder if pre-emptive multi-tasking could be /added/ to a co-op system. Surely the existing apps would still be fed their expected message sequence?
I sometimes wonder if there is some clever business rule that I don't understand that states: Develop an absolutely massive lead and then stop improving your tech. Amiga, OS/2, 3DFX, Altavista spring to mind.
Mike
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Acorn were busy working on their Galileo OS when they folded. The plan for RISC OS was to replace the kernel with the new Galileo kernel, which would have supported pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protection.
I can see no reason why this wouldn't have worked and maintained application compatibility. The way that RISC OS apps work is by running in a loop continuously asking the windowing system what's happening, and it's at this point that the windowing system gives control to other applications before responding. A pre-emptive aware version of the RISC OS windowing system potentially wouldn't need to give control over to other applications.
Unfortunately a project like Galileo is a major undertaking - almost certainly beyond the abilities of Castle or RISC OS Ltd, even if they put their differences aside and worked on it together.
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I would welcome an article that DID provide an opinion on some ways in which RiscOS could be improved to "drag ex-users back", but is it just me, or is the part where the author claims to write about that, just about shared-sourcing (which could be otherwise described as "look-but-don't-touch") the OS?
Never mind the fact I don't think shared source is going to get anyone anywhere (the power of open-source comes from the fact that anyone competent to modify it can do so) - even if I thought shared sourcing were viable, not even open-sourcing is a magical formula. Torvalds, Cox et al can program till the cows come home, but if Linux had no momentum then people like HP wouldn't be moving to support Debian.
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No, it's not just you, there's very little in the article that seems to relate to its title.
Shared source for RISC OS seems to me to be too little, too late. It's also currently fiction, since there's no source published.
I'm not really convinced that anything can be done for RISC OS to bring back users. There's several reasons for this...
1) RISC OS is closely tied to a single processor ARM architecture, which inherently restricts its speed, since there are no 3GHz ARM chips. Performance will therefore never be competitive without major re-writes of most of the OS.
2) The hardware cost, as a minority platform, also makes things prohibitive. Hardware price will therefore never be even remotely competitive.
3) Porting to a different platform is impractical (at best) owing to a reliance on ARM code. You'd either need ARM emulation integrated into the kernel, or you'd loose compatibility.
4) Running under emulation also isn't practical as a means of survival - you'll inevitably gradually lose users to the host OS.
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1) Depends what you mean by 'speed'. The current machines are 'responsive' in ways that more modern machines are not. For example, as nothing ever gets swapped out to disk, there are typically no pauses when the user makes a menu selection. There is no disk thrashing under normal application use as everything always in RAM.
In terms of raw multi-media crunching bandwidth, I agree, the ARMs just aren't comparable with a top of the line desktop Intel chip. Having said that, for something like 'movie playback' hardware MPEG could perhaps do a better job anyway.
2) That neededn't be the case, if the OS were more open. As I said in the article, consumer grade ARM powered hardware is everywhere.
3) RISCOS itself is fast. Perhaps JIT emulated ARM code could be viewed as a sort of 'byte code' in which the OS is written. Speed critical parts always be written in native code. With the commercial JIT powered RO emulator (that I admit that I have never even seen running), I bet some UI operations are faster than the same operations on the underlying Windows PC.
4) Probably.
Mike
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Adding features to the OS will not "drag ex-users back".
The real underlining problem is in the groups of people trying to create/support the OS.
I dumped my Amiga because not only was it not improving, but they were going in the direction of expensive hardware that was not flexible in what it supported, plus the old 'add features till it breaks' approach that told me they were lost without a firm goal. Worse there was not even a working base of code, rather two different code bases being developed at the same time that were not compatible with each other.
Presently I am a BeOS fan looking forward to Haiku. Progress has been slow, but it has been steady too. It is important to note that all the other BeOS clone projects that planned to out-BeOS BeOS collapsed under the weight of their ambitions, while the ports to Linux stalled on the amount of interfacing code needed.
Haiku planned for a single, reachable goal and is still going strong.
Amiga, RiscOS and others main problems do not seem to be in the nature of the OSes but rather the in the nature of the people controlling the development.
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The last for sale Acorn operating system was 3.7.
It's funny with this PC in front of me I get programs getting into difficulty (crashing) and it means the PC is practically useless until I get into the task manager and kill them or reboot. My old RiscPC hardly every had a program that crashed (unless it was in development).
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Its called RPCEmu and you can get it from
http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator/
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It needs a huge injection of cash that's what.
Anyone got £200 Million going spare?
It needs a 3GHz ARM chip to overcome the use of ports like FireFox or Open Office which run far to slow to be useable just now.
If it had a fast ARM system with a modern 3D graphics chip and hardware FPU then it could just about survive.
Once it has the right hardware for the current level of demand that users would like, then the software from Linux could be ported and still run at a decent rate.
But as this it isn't going to happen, so why don't we just let this wonderfully old OAP OS live out the rest of its life in a Home and die gracefully?
I for one will miss it.
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Surely developing a 3Gig ARM chip would cost more than 200mil?
Obviously, the 3d chip is on the card. What do you need the hardware FPU for? Modern graphics chipset can do a lot of the transformation mathematics themselves now. In fact, I have even heard of some work being done to use the GPU for general multimedia work. Googling throws up a few links such as this one.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526-6932.html
Mike
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Because what it does it does nice and smooth.
If it does what you want and hopefully with newer hardware/ported software do more things then why should it die?
Even a humble A5000 feels smoother than this 3GHz Athlon (with fewer colours), but a RiscPC flies along and I'm sure the A9Home and Iyonix is even better.