Submitted by Drobe.co.uk, the premier RISC OS news website, today announced that it has entered archive mode and will no longer function as a news reporting source. The site was founded by Peter Price in 1999 and editorship was taken over by journalist Chris Williams in 2001.
Chris first broke the sad news on Monday morning via usenet:
“Drobe’s RISC OS news service, which launched in October 1999, will sadly cease from Monday. Running the site has been so much fun over the years and the experience has been very rewarding – from the investigative pieces and tabloid tomfoolery to the libel writ threats and meeting up with users after shows. However, all good things must come to an end – if you’ll forgive the cliche – and it’s time to formally move on.”
Darn. Drobe was an excellent site and it’s painful to see it go. Credit must be given for keeping the content archived and not just deleting everything. Though not personally a RISC OS user (but would love to be), Drobe provided a really accessible face to RISC OS. There are still a number of RISC OS related news sites, particularly notable iconbar.com (named after the task-bar concept RISC OS had long before Windows ever did).
The loss of any major portal is a blow to any niche operating system; it’s hard to imagine a world without BeBits and AmigaWorld. It is important to OSnews to cover niche / aged / alternative operating systems and I hope we can be of assistance to the RISC OS community going forward.
Thank you Peter and Chris for 10 years of dedicated work and I hope the RISC OS platform continues to grow ever stronger.
Truely the end of an era. Drobe was THE source for RiscOS news. A sad day indeed, you will be missed.
Maybe it’s a huge sign that nothing happens in the RiscOS scene in a long long while…
It’s dead Jim….
it might be dead now, but just wait for…(drumb roll)
OpenRisc!!!
of course due to licencing issues it will have to change it’s name, but thats ok… hmm let’s see what would be fitting… oh!
Sonnet! (can you tell where I am going with this yet?)
Might not be the best name in the world, but its way better than my first idea…
Iambic Pentameter!!!
(if you haven’t figured it out this is a parody of another older OS that went away, only to come back again. Ah BeOS we can’t wait ot have you back).
Sad to think that RiscOS is fading away (even though their are a few developments in the works). What next? eComStation (http://www.os2world.com/)? OpenVMS (http://openvms.org/)…(for hobbyist’s that is)? etc…
The days of the older alternative OS’s come to a close some day I supose, still though, there are a lot of good memories and a lot of “oh yeah? well i remember when…” that will never go away. To the dead OS’s of old, we look forward to seeing you again in years to come as OSS clones
Edited 2009-09-21 22:35 UTC
I believe we are already there. Most alternative OS are barely alive or just good memories. We live in a world where the desktop PC runs Windows, Mac OS X or some flavor of Linux.
BeOS is gone, Haiku still have some works to be done before we get a real release, but even then, it’s not going to become a major player.
AmigaOS is well, almost dead, since people can use it on limited hardware (costly) or older upgraded to PPC Amiga. Same with MorphOS.
And the list could go on. But if some are alive, it’s as niche player or nostalgic users still holding on to the good life.
It’s sad really. I miss that time where Windows was not yet the winning standard. The fun I had using OS/2… And TOS on my Atari 1040ST…
If these would be all we got, it would be sad indeed.
Luckily, many “alternative” OSes are doing quite fine.
Except the open fork of the OS actually is a fork, and not a clone, and I’m pretty sure the trademarks are all sorted out. (The copyrights, OTOH… but at least it’s not Zeta levels of messed up…)
I’m confused. Wasn’t there only just another release of RISC OS 5? With RISC OS 6 on the horizon? Didn’t Castle open source the code? Sounds to me like there’s a lot going on.
I don’t know too much about RISC OS beyond what I learnt buying the 4.x ROM image that was released recently.
That was in April 2009 – http://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2009/04/28/new-iyonix-rom-r…
That appears to have been released in December 2008 – http://select.riscos.com/RISCOS6/
RISC OS 5 and 6 are separate forks of the OS.
Some while ago – http://www.riscosopen.org/
I’m not sure a “lot” but certainly there is still stuff going on.
RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) and RISCOS Ltd (ROL) continue to make available updated OS versions (see above).
Companies like CJE http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/ APDL http://www.apdl.co.uk/ and RComp http://www.arsvcs.demon.co.uk/ develop and sell hardware and software.
Martin Wuerthner http://www.mw-software.com/ supports and develops well-respected software. eg; along with John Tytgat, they are due to release a major updated PostScript printer in October.
Jeffrey Lee has been working on porting RISC OS 5 to the Beagleboard hardware – http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=2512
Peter Naulls continues to improve his port of Firefox – http://www.riscos.info/index.php/Firefox
STD launched the VPOD graphics card in April – http://www.stdevel.com/products/vpod.html
John Kortink surprised us with a Dual-head DVI graphics cards for ancient Risc PCs this August – http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=2528
There’s been more, but that was what sprang to mind at the moment as some of the bigger stuff.
So, perhaps not a blazing pace of development going on, but it’s still happening.
Edited 2009-09-22 09:37 UTC
Thanks for the update. Very interesting. April 2009 since last update seems quite recent to me.
It would appear that reports of RISC OS’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
…All things must pass away
The Icon Bar is still okay.
http://www.iconbar.com/
At last ARM has decided to try and compete in the low end of the laptop and desktop markets.
So after years and years of running RISCOS on processors that are suitable for music players and disk controllers – it would be really nice to finally see RISCOS run on something resembling a modern desktop class processor.
It’s sad that Drobe has now become static yet still too early for the eulogy.
– Wasn’t OSNews born from the ashes of BeOSNews?
A decade is quite long for any group of enthusiasts to remain together and having fun in a venture.
Hopefully, some of the regular contributors to Drobe have by now developed a satisfaction in writing about events/tecnology surrounding RiscOS and will become regular contributors to OSNews. This would bring some interesting discussions/posts in the future.
Those more inclined to use chips, glue, solder, and other items to put together projects (I still remember the Lego ARM based laptop), will have some challenges in finding an existing forum to express themselves. However, these could become the seed for a gathering of “open-source hardware projects” similar to the extinct NS32532 based PC532. Having open-source hardware is probably the best way in which near-extinct OSes could come back to populate the rest of the world.