In a historic announcement, issued jointly this evening by RISCOS Ltd., Castle, Advantage 6, MicroDigital and VirtualAcorn, it would very much appear that the past on-going disputes surrounding RISC OS have been settled. Take a deep breath, then wait for this.
RISC OS united at long last
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have never used any RISC products, but nevertheless I find this great news. The more choice in the OS/hardware market, the better.
I’ve always thought that Risc OS was A pretty cool OS. Its to bad the machines are so expensive. $1550USD for the low end model! ouch. Is there anyway to buy a motherboard and build your own?
By coincidence, I bought an Acorn A7000+ on eBay yesterday, although quite a slow little machine (48MHz I think) it is my first step back into the RISC OS world (that I can afford, for now). I’m looking forward to what this new agreement may bring. I hope they keep together and work on getting the prices of hardware down (as much as small companies are able) and improving RISC OS further.
Although there has been problems in recent times getting modern features (web browsers) and such, there are a lot of unique applications on RISC OS which make it attractive (I just wish that I had more chance to check them all out back in school days…)
You and me, both.
A West Australian RISC OS users group managed to get the motherboard, CPUs and two PCI cards (video and USB) because the cost of transporting the computers from England to Australia and paying in Australian dollars is prohibitive. They had some sort of contract meaning that they couldn’t sell-on the motherboards without them being in one of the computers they had built. See http://www.drobe.co.uk/features/artifact1034.html
I reckon your chances are pretty slim.
a second hand RiscPC is much cheaper than an Iyonix. But upgrading to the latest version of RISCOS is still expensive.
What is exactly that makes RISC OS special? I don’t know a thing about but from reading different posts here at osnews in the past, people seem to give it a lot of praise. Is there some killer app availible or is it the os itself thats particularly good? Please note that I’m not trying to troll, I’m simply curious.
Announcement should read: “In an historic announcement”
instead of “In a historic announcement.”
The linked article has it correct.
“What is exactly that makes RISC OS special?”
It’s fast. Incredibly fast. Even on an old 30 MHz box, it boots in seconds, windows pop-up nearly instantly, and it’s so smooth to use. And that’s with anti-aliased fonts, marble-effect widgets and all the other goodies RISC OS had long, long before other OSes.
On a multi-hundred MHz box, RISC OS is so lightning fast it’s not even funny. In this day of bloated Windows releases, GNOME and KDE needing 128M+ to run smoothly and sluggish apps, RISC OS is a breath of fresh air. It’s astoundingly easy-to-use; the pervasive drag-and-drop design and uncluttered layout make it a very pleasant working environment.
It’s not interested in buzzwords, trivial ‘features’ and utter bloat. It’s meant to be fast, reliable and undistracting, and it does the job well (although better memory management would be good).
See if you can try it somewhere — you’ll see what I’m talking about.
That a/an depends entirely on your pronounciation of “historic”. In the UK, where RiscOS is from, its generally pronounced with a harder h, hence “a historic” is fine.
Shucky Ducky Quack Quack wrote:
“[/i]Announcement should read: “In an historic announcement”
instead of “In a historic announcement.”[/i]”
No it shouldn’t. According to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, one of the most respected books on the language:
““A” is used before all consonants except silent “h” (“a history” [but] “an hour”); “an” was formerly usual before an unaccented syllable beginning with “h” (“an historical work”), but now that the “h” in such words is pronounced the distinction has become pedantic, and “a historical” should be said and written; similarly “an humble” is now meaningless and undesirable.”
At most it’s a matter of opinion, but in no way is the story “incorrect” as you state.
There are some unique applications available and it’s a very responsive OS. But the main thing that makes RISC OS stand out is the well designed user interface. The clever Window management/focusing, well designed menu sytem, drag and drop between apps and loads of other features make it very elegant to use. IMO it’s far better than Windows, KDE & GNOME and still has an edge over Mac OS X. Not bad for a GUI that hasn’t changed all that much for over 10 years.
“There are some unique applications available and it’s a very responsive OS. But the main thing that makes RISC OS stand out is the well designed user interface. The clever Window management/focusing, well designed menu sytem, drag and drop between apps and loads of other features make it very elegant to use. IMO it’s far better than Windows, KDE & GNOME and still has an edge over Mac OS X. Not bad for a GUI that hasn’t changed all that much for over 10 years.”
So with all the copying going on, why is nobody “copying” them?
So with all the copying going on, why is nobody “copying” them?
http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/
Few people have ever used RISC OS, Acorn computers were always quite rare outside the UK and a few other countries. Obviously more people are going to copy Windows and Mac OS as that’s what they’re familiar with.
Someone else has already mentioned ROX, but I remember a story that there were several Acorn computers at Microsoft and it’s UI features influenced Windows 95. That may be a load of rubbish but the RISC OS iconbar is rather like the Windows taskbar.
Tom Nook wrote:
No it shouldn’t. According to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, one of the most respected books on the language
Gregg’s Reference Manual – pretty much the de Facto standard for American business/professional correspondence – negates Fowler’s claims:
In writing, the form more commonly used is ‘an’ historic occasion. In speaking, you can use both forms, depending on whether the ‘h’ is pronounced or silent.
The Chicago Manual of Style (again, American), goes on to state that the history behind the pronunciation comes from the British-English pronunciation of “historic” as something closer to “iztoric” (silent h), whereas American-English pronounces it more as “hisstoric” (hard h).
So in speaking, it seems that it’s pretty much optional whereas in writitng more people tend to lean toward “an historic.” Of course I need to point out that my sources are American, which essentially fortifies the notion that it’s either/or and up to the whim of the speaker.
In any case, Tom Nook, no the title is not incorrect, and maybe I was too quick to label it as such. However, the original article to which the headline links indeed utilizes “an historic,” so in the spirit of quoting the source I feel it should say “an historic.”
But really it’s no big deal, more fun to debate rather, and someone may pick up better grammar in the process.
^^ Whoops. The above post was me
Hopefully this news SHOULD bring new products to market, and allow the market to continue to expand. I’d expect more news from the RISC OS camp in the forthcoming year.
“So with all the copying going on, why is nobody “copying” them?”
Look at Windows, Mac OS and Linux to see the influence of it. This predates Windows 95 and Linux and certainly Acorn boxes were acknowledged to be at Microsoft during the development of Windows 95.
RiscOS came out first in 87 (I was at the launch of the Archimedes with Arthur… ahhh thank God RiscOS wasn’t far away
) and had drag and drop between apps even then. I think it got antialiasing with RiscOS3 which I think was introduced around 90 and the (beautiful imo) marbled widgets.
How about background file copy/move tasks? Microsoft didn’t figure that one out till Windows 98 I think.
Changing desktop resolution on the fly was in RiscOS from the beginning. Windows couldn’t do it initially, Linux is only recently working that one out.
Another wonderful functional thing from the very start was the ability to create a ramdisk just by dragging the ram disk memory allocation bar along. Sounds weird maybe but having that just there as part of the base OS was superb. Still no one has that that I know of?
Anyway, the point is answered that many features and design ideas were copied from RiscOS by other vendors. The reason you don’t see it is because it’s already been done. I look forward to when they copy the 2-3s boot time too.
Firstly – being English, we would *not* use ‘an historic’ because “history” begins with H which is pronounced. Maybe the Queen says ‘an istoric’, but most of her subjects say ‘a historic’, I can fully assure you all 😉
As for influence – Amiga and ST were both around at the same time and MacOS was 3 or 4 years old by the time RiscOS was about. When I was a kid, we had an A3000 (Archimedes) and I also owned an A500 (Amiga) and, to be honest, the A3000 ripped off the Amiga design – not the reverse.
As for the OS, moot. The RiscOS taskbar is fairly similar, but also pretty different. The Windows people could just as easily borrowed the idea from NeXT or similar Window managers. Having said all that, I did get the feeling (not knowing other OS at that the time) that Win95 did seem to “borrow” from RiscOS.
Anti-aliased fonts were there on the A3000, and the A3000 ran RiscOS 2.0 iirc. The A5000 was the first machine I saw with RiscOS 3.
The boot time is also a moot point. The OS is on ROM. Of course it’ll boot quickly!! RiscOS 2 actually booted faster than RiscOS 3 too, so Acorn obviously bloated it up somewhat with that release 😉
Guardian Style Guide
A or an before h?
Use an only if the h is silent: an hour, an heir, an honourable man, an honest woman; but a hero, a hotel, a historian (but don’t change a direct quote if the speaker says, eg, “an historic”)
“An historic” does not scan correctly, and is common only to cockneys and Antrim and North Down in Ireland (also, hard vs. soft h is broken along religio-cultural lines in Nothern Ireland).
Can we stop with this now?
So is that “a” before “historic” pronounced ay or ah?
Look, all I meant was that the ORIGINAL article says “an historic,” and that it should be quoted as such.
I understand MS Word 6’s context menus came from RISC OS (RISC OS doesn’t have menu bars, only context menus, which means that the UI designer has to be much more careful).
According to Andrew D., RiscOS was released 17 years ago. Isn’t that a long time for an operating system to get widely used, let alone known ? My guess is the software vendor didn’t put much emphasis on advertising. Unfortunately, this is a habit for all those guys who make superior products but aren’t interested in getting rich. The result is always the same : lamers (aka B. Gates) end up filthy rich while true innovators spend their life in a dusty lab. What a waste !
No, no, no – you misunderstand… The Archimedes (original brand name for the Acorn RISC machines) were designed for a specific purpose. In the ’80’s the UK government decided computers were important enough that they should push schools into getting them and subsidise the effort. They also awarded Arcorn a contract to supply an officially approved machine. This was the Acorn BBC 8-bit Micro. Acorn went through a lot of different models (model A, B, D, Master, plus more I’ll forget as well as a lw cost “Electron” for the “home” market – though only really nerdy kids had an Electron 😉
The Archimedes was aimed at continuing this lineage. It was sold almost completely to the educational market (indeed my Mother, a teacher, used one till about 4 years ago for school reports etc.) Indeed the had a BBC emulator included as part of the standard package. The ROM basic was a dialect of the same Basic (to allow teachers to continue on with the same course material I guess) and the command line OS used the same odd language (*dir = cd in DOS and *. = dir.. very confusing when you move to any other OS..) Some people brought them for home use, but this was pretty rare. Later Acorn failed dismally to break the home market with an A3010 and A3020 model (both, for the first time, had a TV modulator – up till then the Archimedes had used a weird RGB Monitor with a SCART like connector.)
It’s not that Acorn marketed badly – it’s that the target market dried up witht he advent of the cheap IBM clone and the dominance of Micrsoft. By ’95, Archies were pretty old hat. I believe Acorn even desperately made a “RiscPC” machine that was Windows and RiscOS capable.
RiscOS is just like BeOS. Nice OS, but it targeted a small market and never achieved much outside of that box. When they attempted to gain a wider audience, they realised the audience had moved on, so to speak.
“The Archimedes was aimed at continuing this lineage. It was sold almost completely to the educational market”
That’s pretty much true, but it wasn’t Acorn’s aim when they created the Archimedes. They wanted the Archimedes to be a mainstream personal computer for home and business, not just for education.
I remember Acorn adverts from the time (including one with ex-Blue Peter presenter John Leslie). Acorn tried to capitalise on their computer’s popularity in education, but they also pushed the Archie for desktop publishing, business software and games.
I think being used in schools was what made the Archie less popular for home and business. Like the BBC/Electron, kids considered them more ‘nerdy’ than other computers like the Amiga. A lot of businesses didn’t see them as real business computers, just computers for school kids. It’s hard to see what Acorn could have done to change the perception of their computers.
Hey guys 😉 I used to write software for the Acorn RiscOS-based machines. I was part of the team which created a range of soundcards and accompanying software applications. We had 16bit sound coming out of Acorn boxes, with Ensoniq and Yamaha chipsets whilst Soundblasters were still 12bit if memory serves. I got to work closely with the guys at Acorn, they were a fine bunch of sandal-wearing Cambridge geeks (before it was even cool to be geeky) their Extra Savour-Faire I’m certain was the inspiration for the They Might Be Giants song of the same name. 🙂
Seriously now, there was a level of enthusiam and cranial-creativity back in those days which only seems to exist in small organisations of less than 300 people. Be is another damned fine example of such an organisation (or was).
These guys and developers (like me) managed to squeeze every ounce of juice out of our sexy little Arm chips by writing 80% of our software in Arm machine code. No VB, no C++, I’m talking machine code guys, it was then the only way to ensure maximum from such a minimum.
I remember obsessing over a MIDI engine I wrote totally in Arm code, it could load the entire Tubular Bells MIDI file in 9 seconds on a 8MHz Arm processor, and play it back under interrupts in the background whilst moving levels and sliders and allowing real-time adjustments from the user in the GUI. It took me months to write it all, way before Steinberg created Cubase, I don’t think they copied they just had the same ideas, which to me are still as obvious as they were on the day I decided “these sliders really should automate” (on an 8MHz machine! ..gulp).
Good thing patents weren’t around in those days of wanton wastage of “resource” and brownian motion, the computer industry simply wouldn’t exist as it is now. Patents worry me, a lot.
As for the features of RiscOS. As much as I loved it, I feel it’s had it’s day, and I sympathise with the Be engineers who aren’t so interested in talking about their past.
So I’ve watched PCs develop with great interest, they’re still clunky, mostly ugly, the CPUs are stupifyingly inefficient – wasteful of power and memory resources, and the OS’s are quirky, awkward and hideously memory intensive.
I’m typing this on Linux, using the latest Firebird/KDE on a reasonable spec machine. It’s ok but the font kerning looks freaky and aliasing looks uneven, the graphics card may as well be a “built in” because my Radeon is completely under used, it’s using millions of colours and SVG icons are cool but they take an age to redraw.
Our friend earlier mentioned a RAM disk. Sadly, a RAM disk can really only work in a system designed not to swallow up all RAM immediately, and where RAM is in abundance. Thus the concept has been lost.
Apps exist in the domain of many MegaBytes not KBytes, since the demise of BeOS “kits” have been lost again – the concept of applications hooking into system resources though “filters” or “translators” is once again a pipe dream….paradoxically, the nightmare that is Linux dependencies continues, despite the ancient promise of shared libraries being “a good thing”.
What else?
Drag and drop is a beautifully simple concept which is hard to implement and keep consistant, it must be written into the OS, it must be supported by the apps. Unfortunately few modern developers have ever seen it, let alone coded it.
When I used to use ArcFS I could write to and from an archive within my filerwindows without the need for another filerUI like Winzip/Winrar/Ark etc. – ArcFS worked as a file-sytem plug-in (or translator).
Hmm….UI wise, the single most irritating thing both Windows and LinuxGUI’s do which drives me nuts is they assume the cursor focus means “on top”, re-ordering my windows when sometimes I want to type in the lower window goddamnit!
So what’s going on? Well “progress” is going on.
😉
I always hated “an historic”. I was taught that the way you decided whether to use “a” or “an” depended on whether or not the next word started with a consonant. If not, “an” supplied it’s own. Also don’t let someone from back east try to tell you a patch of cactus is called “cacti”, or the chinese food place try to tell you the plural of ‘shrimp’ is ‘shrimps’, also the plural of computer mouse is ‘mouses’ not ‘mice’, and men are not ‘hung’ they’re ‘hanged’. Okay some men are hung, but not so hung that they need a third button on their mouses.
“It’s not that Acorn marketed badly – it’s that the target market dried up witht he advent of the cheap IBM clone and the dominance of Micrsoft. By ’95, Archies were pretty old hat. I believe Acorn even desperately made a “RiscPC” machine that was Windows and RiscOS capable.”
That’s partly true, the shift in education towards PCs was infact driven by pressure from parents and businesses for schools to teach with/using “industry standard” equipment. The irony here is that a far inferior American designed PC computer systems (running Windows 3.1) had become the “standard”. Some schools bought time by waiting for Windows 95, those who didn’t were stung with the old “minimum requirements” ruse and had to buy equipment twice!
Acorn’s marketing was never great, they used to preach mostly to the converted and hardly ever to the great unwashed shoe-wearing masses.
As for the RiscPC, it was designed to house 2 CPU cards so 1*Arm and 1*x86, and with software veneers much like the lunix-wine project Windows95 could be installed alongside your RiscOS and you could run PC apps in your Windows95 “window”.
The purists hated it, the schools tried to use it as a reason not to switch to full-on PC hardware, but the CPU cards were too expensive….sigh
Hmm….UI wise, the single most irritating thing both Windows and LinuxGUI’s do which drives me nuts is they assume the cursor focus means “on top”, re-ordering my windows when sometimes I want to type in the lower window goddamnit!
Actually the default behaviour in Unix/Linux is NOT to bring the focused window on top. When you install KDE it asks you what style you want to use. You want Unix style. You can find it in the desktop settings wizard.
Maybe speaking out of turn but I think Cagey is saying he’d like to be able to type in the background window.
Just a short while ago my parents were going through the attic (loft) and found my Atom, BBC B and my (upgraded internal HDD) A3010. Ah green buttons baybee.
It used to pain me terribly to see just how joyously wonderful they were technically yet so horrendously bad Acorn at marketing. Seeing them whittling themselves away (splitting off ARM, then letting it buy their share out, then set top boxes, then E14, then *poof*!) and vanishing was very hard for a few years.
But I’m over it now *sob*.
Thanks Andrew D for clearing that up 😉
Though, maybe I really can re-configure KDE to allow me to do stuff (cut/paste/type/work) in these windows which are behind other windows and I missed it? I appologise if I have, sigh….I think I may be growing feature-blind 🙂
Ironic that RiscOS had hardly any “features” at all in comparison to KDE/Gnome, and yet for some reason “in comparison” (of resources) it worked far far better.
Prove me wrong, show me KDE/Gnome running on an Arm710/8MB of RAM/310MB HDD (the standard rig for RiscOS3) 😉
I wonder what new opportunities there are for riscOS now that ARM is not some obscure cpu anymore but rather “the” standard in all pdas and smartphones today
“Another wonderful functional thing from the very start was the ability to create a ramdisk just by dragging the ram disk memory allocation bar along. Sounds weird maybe but having that just there as part of the base OS was superb. Still no one has that that I know of?”
AmigaOS has always had RAM disks, and you don’t have to manually set the amount, it just automatically resizes as you add or delete things in it.
All OSes have this ability. Windows has it, as does DOS. Linux, of course has it as well. Most people never use them what with the improved caching capabilities of today’s systems.
The only place where SRAM (or in a few cases flash RAM) disks are used is in embedded applications where having a hard drive is not feasible. In the PDA market, flash disks have been used since the mid-1980s and are still being used today by Windows CE.
RAM Discs (Notice the english spelling of disCs, under RISC OS are dynamic providing the S/W which provides it is running.
The RiscPCs are used in many things, BBC & smaller TV companies use them. (Who want’s to be a millionaire studio lighting / cameras / questions & DOGS (Digital On-screen Graphics) were controlled using one SA 233MHz RPC with a millipede TV card in afair. How many PC’s are trusted with that for live TV?
BBC used (if i remember correctly) Rack Mounted RPCs to run BBC1 & 2
I have a Dell D800 Latitude laptop with XP Professional, and I am saving up to purchse an iyonix. With these new ideas there is no point in Windows.
I may be converting my company to use RISC OS instead, as we are having so much trouble with NT & 2000. – Stability thats what the world needs, and Windows can’t hack it any more (just waiting for XP to blue screen again!)