drobe.co.uk editor Chris Williams has been out in the field to investigate the continuing role of RISC OS machines in education. Once upon a time, Acorn, with their BBCs and later RISC OS machines were very significant in British education. Today, that role is much reduced, but they hang on in certain niches. Read about Chris’ findings in his article.
RISC OS in schools today
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Whilst its bad enough that there are schools still hanging on to Windows 95/98 machines and 68K Macintoshs, using RISCOS, and even worse, using MODERN RISCOS machines cannot be a good idea.
With a *slow* Iyonix costing around E1,900, and a relatively decent (for education) Dell costing E680, it doesn’t look like a good choice from the off.
And on RISCOS, to get an office suite and browser that are even approaching usable, you have to pay. The Dell comes with IE and Works, and if you want security and features, Firefox and OpenOffice 2 are both free on Windows…
My high school had a choice of wheter to replace its extremely aging RISCOS machines or go Windows very recently. For the cost of getting the Iyonix’s alone they got a Windows network, a Windows NT based student database system with swipecard roll logins, Windows 2003 servers, etc. Had they used Linux, it would have been cheaper again.
I see that the deaf school uses Windows 2000 via rdesktop for something as simple as web browser. Doesn’t that indicate that they chose the wrong platform for the client machines?
Agreed… these RISCOS machines need to die out.
They are very overrpiced and the software is generally very poor for modern day tasks.
I actually cringed when I heard they were playing Zool, a game from 1992ish.
Why don’t they just get a decent set of Windows machines, nistall Firefox and openoffice and be done with it?
Before anyone tries the old “legacy software” trick, with the 1100 quid you’ll be saving per machine, either get new software to do the same job or buy a couple of copies of VRPC to run it in and try to phase it out if there are actually no replacements. But I doubt that there is any RISCOS software without a Windows or Linux equivalent.
Why does RISC need to “die out”? That doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s part of the whole “choice” thing so many people do not understand.
No arch/OS deserves to die out. Get real.
I ment Mr_Mojo there, sorry Kian.
There can be only ONE!!
usually linux. Apparently there cannot be any other OS for anyone to use ‘cept windows or linux. Most people that comment on a given OS have usually never used it much less tried it out for any reasonable length of time to get a feel for it. Theres really no point in responding to any of the posts that are like that. You won’t be able to tell them anything. you will always be wrong. *sigh*
Its MYOB from BeShare here. Oh, and thom, I’m who you probably think I am also…
I use BeOS. I can still use it because it has a browser, it has an office suite, and it runs on realistically available hardware. It’ll run on my E500 PCWorld special, and I can get the majority of everyday software free – Firefox, VLC, etc.
However, RISCOS, and the Amiga factions have a serious problem – beyond a lack of software. Their hardware is cripplingly expensive for what you get. Schools should not be using a platform that costs them more money than it should, which RISCOS does.
How do you know the educational pricing the lyonix uses currently? It might be completely different than that retail price you see on their website. For example the 70million education deal that Apple just won, those iBooks are being sold for $395. Thats not exactly close the price you see on their website, even for individual education customers.
I was just saying in general, specially around here, there cant be any other OS. but yeah, the iyonix stuff is over priced.. but risc os is still a kewl OS
I’m making an assumption here. Castle are British. Its not the ‘done thing’ to have massive educational discounts on hardware in the UK. Just look at the actual educational pricelist for Research Machines.
Also, Apple cuts prices massively to try to get mindshare – kids use Macs at school, parents get them macs at home so they’ve the same enviroment. RISCOS isn’t cut out for that market anyway – its completely unusable for the generic home user, and the machines are well out of the pricerange for a normal family PC. Just because the kind of person who reads OSNews doesn’t think twice about an E1000 desktop or an E1200 laptop doesn’t mean the average Joe spends that much – E400-600 is their pricerange for a *full* computer. With a printer, and an office suite of some kind.
“Its not the ‘done thing’ to have massive educational discounts on hardware in the UK.”
Interesting thats something I wasn’t aware of. I had assumed given a large enough prospective client, price was always negotiable no matter where you were.
I didn’t say price wasn’t negotiable. I meant that you aren’t going to get US educational-like 66% price reductions in the UK. You’ll get 10-20% off. But you’d get that from Dell also, which would still mean the x86 machine was significantly cheaper.
Apple keeps .edu prices insanely low in the US, and others follow. Thats illegal over here due to below cost dumping regulations – theres no way in hell an iBooks costs as little as $395 to make when you consider the ‘cost’ of the OS must be factored in.
I have a lot of experience of RISC OS, that is up till approx 1997-ish, – whatever the latest machines and OS was then.
They were extremely swift machines back then, PCs were extremely inferior, so comparing to the latest Apple we had at the time, the Archimedes hardware was firstly not only cheaper but the RISC OS on top was extremely quick, doing things almost instantly and it was very very stable OS indeed.
In 1997 I had experience of PCs (Win NT, Win95, DOS), Apples, Amiga Workstations, and a number of other minor machines.
Out of all of them for combined price and performance the Archimedes hardware and RISC OS outshone all others by far.
However, lets not reminisce.
Comparing the RISC OS machines (on Xscale) to the Amiga OS 4 (on PPC) and Apples (on PPC), then I think for price and performance, the RISC OS machines are in last place. Here I just compared the easy to use OSs still existing.
Windows and Linux machines are in a different league as they run on so variable hardware and are not particularly easy to use either of them when compared to RISC OS, Amiga’s OS4 or Apple’s OSX.
You can find A3000 and A5000 machines in Tasmania and Western Australia. Actually, in the mid-1990s, there were still venerable BBC Model Bs and Acorns floating around…
I used to love RISC OS, I used to work for one of the biggest dealers, I still have two SA-RiscPC’s at home (not turned them on in a while) but I don’t believe that schools should be wasting their money on them these days.
The hardware is totally out-of-date (they’ve just got USB2) and overpriced. There is barely even any new software being written (a few Linux ports) and all the old software has been converted to Windows (or can be used via emulation).
Jees if you’re going to pay that much, get a Mac, or preferably pay half the price and get a PC running Linux or even Windows – at least the children will actually learn how to use applications they have a chance of using in a job!
RISC OS people used to tout the stability, but that was back in Win98 days, I find Win2000 and Linux to be far more stable these days, plus if you crash an program in RISC OS, it usually takes down the whole machine, not like Win/Lin.
The biggest obstacle to using RISC OS in education however, is that it doesn’t have a decent web browser or Flash/Shockwave player, or even JVM for that matter….
Nothing compares to the old unisys icon computers for the Canadian schools — running the original qnx on a 80186 cpu in the early 80’s. It predates even the amiga, the MAC OS and RISC OS.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971
No chance of breaking them and it is just plain bad news to teach kids not how to think and understand interfaces but to use brand X.
Letting them use RiscOS when they’re also goign to be using Windows or OSX or Linux based OSes as well is a good thing.
One thing the guy in the article says which I thoroughly disagree with is the idea that school needs to train kids how to use Windows so they are ready for the workplace. Computing and computers are more than just whichever is biggest and that way lies the perpetuation of a lazy monopoly.
…these things are still in use in schools??
I remember sitting with my schoolfriends, complaining loudly about how our school had Acorns when every other school in the area used nice, shiny, fast PCs. That was back in 1997/8. I remember the fights to get onto the single RiscPC which was the only one that was reasonably useable (though still not very quick compared to the PCs we all had at home). I remember the Archimedes machine that, for some reason, took 20-30 seconds to register a keypress, thus rendering itself useless (I figure they kept it in the lab as a way of enticing kids to try not to be the last one in to class).
I realised that Iyonixes existed, but I assumed they were meant for businesses with legacy applications or stubborn sysadmins.
I agree that kids should be shown a variety of OSes, but I think this is going a bit far. RiscOS is old, Iyonixes are expensive and underpowered, schools shouldn’t waste their money on them IMHO. At the end of the day, if the school wants to teach RiscOS they can use an emulator on a (much cheaper and faster) PC.
The emulator is slower than an Iyonix.
It gives you none of the real advantages of RISC OS but lumbers you with all the happiness that is part and parcel of Windows.
As to (as you put it) “I remember sitting with my schoolfriends, complaining loudly about how our school had Acorns when every other school in the area used nice, shiny, fast PCs.”
Yes RISC OS machines can’t play some of your PC favourate games – but guess what – an education machine isn’t suppose to it’s purpose is to help you *learn*.
That is of course assuming that learning is the reason why computers are in schools ;-).
A few points then:
(1). Kian said “its bad enough that there are schools still hanging on to Windows 95/98 machines and 68K Macintoshs”
Why ?
Is the purpose of education to help people *learn* or to force schools to continually upgrade their computer hardware?
Most schooling lasts *longer* than the lifetime of (say) any given version of Windows – so teaching “Windows” as a thing to learn in its own right is *pointless* as any given version will have long gone the way of the Dodo by the time the students get to try it in the real world.
It’s more important that kids are thought enough *savvy* to be able to figure out *whatever* OS they eventually wind up working with.
That can be done on *ANY* computer – even ones running RISC OS.
(2). Kian then said “With a *slow* Iyonix costing around E1,900, and a relatively decent (for education) Dell costing E680, it doesn’t look like a good choice from the off.”
Slow in what sense ? I take it you’ve used an Iyonix and are able to justify that comment. Or are you simply assuming the simplistic view that the Clock rate is what determines performance. Even Intel have given that one up ! (they use now a numerical measure of performance rather than the clock speed).
Unlike the Dell it won’t run your PC viruses, your Worms and scripts, it won’t fail to boot because the OS (or more likely Registery/hive) has become corrupt (the OS is in ROM on RISC OS machines). You won’t spend hours downloading, installing Windows Service Packs and critical updates (which of course leads to my next point….).
(3). PC *hardware* costs less, the software costs more. The continual upgrading of software, the added maintainence costs (all those AV packages, even free Windows Updates *costs* (someone has to install them and you may have coms charges to contend with)).
The cost of ownership may wind up much more than any perceived saving made by using a “cheap” PC rather than a “dearer” RISC OS box.
The PC hardware is a “loss leader” it looks cheap, gets people to buy – but overtime they wind up paying more.
If you’re not using Windows on the PC, there goes most to all of your argument.
Did I say schools should teach Windows? No. I said they shouldn’t use overpriced, underpowered hardware and an OS that has no software. They can use any OS on any hardware that makes economic sense. And RISCOS on Iyonix doesn’t make economic sense.
Fair enough. But you did mention (and I quoted) your references to OS’es and they all were Windows based, hence my misconception about what you were saying.
As for an OS with *no* software – I must be imagining I am using Techwriter and Artworks and GCC and !Draw et al. Yes it doesn’t have MicroSoft Office – but then neither does Linux …. (so ?)
The RISC OS hardware now is dearer than PC’s, but the Software is *much* cheaper and much of it quite capable. The machines *just run* you don’t need the same degree of support (and attendant cost) as a PC does. That too is part of the economics.
The cheapest most economic path for schools is to keep using the existing hardware (whatever that is) until it breaks (something you berated schools for in your first contribution).
RISC OS machines are generally quite realiable, don’t need as much tending to as PC’s, and over their operational life work out as less expensive. Are we allowed consider that or must we just assume that the initial cost of purchase is the only cost involved in using any given type of hardware…. in that instance yes the PC would win – but then that is not giving the whole picture is it ?
Yes RISC OS machines can’t play some of your PC favourate games – but guess what – an education machine isn’t suppose to it’s purpose is to help you *learn*.
We weren’t worried about games. We all had Megadrives and SNESes for that
The things were dog-slow at running a basic word-processor or Notate.
I tend to agree with Annraoi on this topic. Certainly, in the primary eduction sector, the OS is relatively irrelevant in terms of ensuring that the children will be up to date.
What children are learning at an early age are the basic motor control skills of mouse handling, of associating actions with icons, of cause and effect, etc.
Let’s think back. I am developer and data analyst. I’ve been doing my job for 12 years now, first AS/400, then OS/2 then Windows (with DOS, UNIX and others in there too somewhere). Lately I’ve been doing a lot of web work using php/mysql. Now oddly enough, most of that was not around when I was in junior school or early secondary. I cut my programming teeth on BBC Micro’s, ZX Spectrums and the Sinclair QL. It did me no harm. I am quite able to use Windows, Linux, OS/2, MacOSX, etc. And although I only learnt BASIC at school, I have coded in RPG, Rexx, SQL, Smalltalk, SQLWindows, Visual Basic, Pascal, PHP, etc, etc. Again, learning the fundamentals equipped me and others with the skills to move on to other things.
At school my four and a half year old daughter uses Windows. At home she uses Windows, eComStation and MacOSX. She has no problem with switching from one to the other, after the differences are pointed out to her.
PS. They need a decent up-to-date browser though.
For a schoool with a yearly IT support budget, the initial cost of the machine is the most important thing to deal with
And once again, on the software front, you jump back to assuming the PC’s are running Windows. A properly configured Linux system a: has infinitely cheaper software than RISCOS, which is of a much higher quality – last time I used RISCOS the shareware office suites, etc were a joke – and has as little need for OS maintainance than RISCOS.
Back to the software, theres no way in hell ArtWorks and !Draw are up to the level of Photoshop, or even the GIMP or one of the commercial image editors for BeOS. Techwriter is unlikely to be at the level Abiword is at, and OO.o is well above that. Both of those are completely free.
There is No Way RISCOS machines can be justified in schools considering the insane initial outlay, the fact that software even needs to be paid for, etc.
Considering you’re also in Ireland, I presume you may have used RISCOS or 68K Macintoshes in school, if your school had computers (some of them didn’t get a single machine till 1998 or so). I’m writing most of my arguments from a UK perspective, where schools have IT money to spend. Over here, a school is lucky to be able to upgrade the OS on their computers after they’ve got them… and this is apparently the EU’s IT Hub… me arse it is.
I’ve never quite seen why it has to be one OS v another.
I use a Windows machine for email and web browsing and RISC OS for pretty much everything else. Hoping between the two systems is no big deal. e.g. Techwriter exports Word files.
The best thing about RISC OS, I think, is that everything is open and accessible – you can understand what’s going on. Windows tries to hide what is really going on and you have to fight much more to understand – I get the impression that most people don’t bother, which, from an educational point of view, I find sad.
The things were dog-slow at running a basic word-processor or Notate.
Were these computers running apps stored on a server over a very slow network? That’s the only explanation I can think of for them being so slow. Even my old A305 (the first Archimedes) could easily keep up with 100WPM typing and was generally responsive. IMO back when Acorn were in business they made computers faster than PCs in the same price range.
As far as the irrelevance of the OS goes, I learned to program in BASIC and assembler on BBC and RISC OS machines as a kid.
However, I would not be doing the job I am doing today if it were not for moving to Linux (and to some degree, Windows).
When I did that, I learned Perl, PHP, Python, SQL, Javascript, some Java and some C++/C/C#, basically becuase the environment supported it, it was free and available. Whilst I could have learned half of those on RISC OS, the developer tools are very out-of-date and expensive.
RISC OS is a nice environment for learning the basics of computing – as far as the WIMP model goes, but it really isn’t worth the extra money above a Linux PC (or Mac or Windoze).
“Back to the software, theres no way in hell ArtWorks and !Draw are up to the level of Photoshop, or even the GIMP or one of the commercial image editors for BeOS. Techwriter is unlikely to be at the level Abiword is at, and OO.o is well above that. Both of those are completely free.”
Hmm, I think you’re out of your depth. You are confused about the difference between vector and bitmap graphics – you can’t compare Draw and Artworks with PhotoShop any more than you can compare apples with pears. The proper comparison would be with PhotoDesk, which I think you would find to be a highly capable package.
As for WP… I have used TechWriter extensively (e.g. for my recent dissertation) and find that it easily outclasses Word. To include AbiWord even in the same category as those two is plain ludicrous.
Since I’m here, I’ll make a more general comment…
I use RISC OS regularly at home because I find it nicer to work with than Windows. It is true that it has weaknesses (with the browser issue probably being the most important) but I see no reason why that means it should be abandoned!
As for it being “out of date” for use in schools – I can’t believe people are saying that it shouldn’t be used “because it’s not Windows”. I imagine a lot of the people reading this believe Linux will be a powerful force on the desktop in the future. How, exactly, has following the mindset of “we must teach our children what we use now” helped prepare people for using Linux? Oh, wait, it hasn’t.
Adam
PHP, free, Perl, free, Python, free, C, free, C++, free.
“last time I used RISCOS the shareware office suites, etc were a joke ” – pity there were no shareware office suites.
“theres no way in hell ArtWorks and !Draw are up to the level of Photoshop, or even the GIMP or one of the commercial image editors for BeOS” – Yes, with your expert knowledge on these programs you’re obviously the right person to make that statement. Except for that they’re vector graphics programs, oh well.
“Techwriter is unlikely to be at the level Abiword is at, and OO.o is well above that.” – Techwriter is a structured document processor, with excellent mathematical input, so it’s obviously better than generic wordprocessors/MS Word clones. Ovation Pro and Impression Publisher are better wordprocessors than MS Word, and they’re DTP programs.
So do you have any actual experiance to back up your ranting?
As for apps being slow, that’s hilarious. Sibelius 7 on a 4MHz ARM2 is faster than Sibelius for Windows on a 4GHz x86.
“The hardware is totally out-of-date (they’ve just got USB2)” – Ah yes, my PC has USB3 now, and USB4 is out next month.
Without a standard integrated decent vector graphics format an OS isn’t really worth using.
When my school had RISC OS computers the were all managed by the head IT teacher. Now my school has Windows they needed to employ 5 IT technicians. Cost savings just went out the window. And they have to pay them every year, whoops.
Basically RISC OS lets you get the work done faster, mostly due to the design of the GUI, which wasn’t designed to run on 1984 hardware, and therefore isn’t still limited by those concepts, unlike Windows/MacOS. Noone asks me to find their file because they don’t know where they saved it, due to rubbish GUI design.