“Over the years, RISC OS 4 and 5 have continued to move forward, however separate their paths. Despite reams of column inches covering on-going developments, it would appear that there is no up to date list of all the RISC OS features for either stream; instead details of new releases are strewn across various months old web pages and articles, some of which written in fairly technical and programmer oriented language. Here, we present our best attempt at summing up all the main features for both RISC OS 4.39 and RISC OS 5.09 under one friendly roof, so to speak, for both current users, those new to the platform and those curiously peeking in.”
There’s a distinct lack of layperson information online about new RISC OS versions – probably one of the reasons why so many are yet to upgrade from 3.7 or 4.0. Well done to Drobe.co.uk for this top effort.
I’ve been interested in RiscOS since I realized that pretty much all the ‘neat’ features I’d want in an OS, were in RiscOS. The whole folder-install, handlers, the expandable RiscPC, the way the processor was supposedly designed for the OS…
Of course, it’s on the wrong continent, and is sadly fringe beyond Linux…
“Of course, it’s on the wrong continent, and is sadly fringe beyond Linux…“
Well, it seems that some lesser known OSs are surviving quite well indeed in Europe and particularly the UK. Like RiscOS and Amiga OS being just 2 examples. As well as giving birth to a large hackers scene and even Linux!
Well the world is wide open for surviving OSs, and they seem to survive in the UK…
I think it would have died long ago in the US looking at how the other OSs have died there.
I think it would have died long ago in the US looking at how the other OSs have died there.
Well, they still have MacOS.
Ok, maybe ‘dying’ was the wrong word; I did notice they WERE selling new machines with USB 2 support, DVD burners, have .png support… I admit that’s not exactly a dying architecture.
Do those Iyonix PCs still have the reconfigurable monitors?
Personally I’m all for desktop computer systems that aren’t *nix or Windows.
Edited 2006-01-15 23:51
The ARM chip wasn’t specifically designed for RISC OS.
Acorn developed the ARM because they wanted to produce a next-gen computer and weren’t happy with the processor options available at the time. They decided they would basically bypass 16-bit, and didn’t like the 32-bit chips that were around. They’d also heard about this thing called “RISC” and thought it was a good idea.
Acorn was building a new OS to go along with the ARM chip which had the development name of ARX. This would have been an advanced modern OS with many Unix-like features. Unfortunately this project was poorly managed (very typical for Acorn) and it never delivered.
Instead of ARX the first OS that ran on Acorn’s ARM chips was called Arthur – the name is derived from Acorn Risc by THURsday. Arthur was essentially RISC OS version 1. It was essentially a rush job put together by a team that was mostly 8-bit microcomputer games programmers – not professional OS engineers. This legacy is still in many ways with the current RISC OS.
RISC OS is quite a nice OS that has some good ways of doing things which we now see in mainstream OSs.
On the down-side it adopts a cooperative multi-tasking model, and lacks memory protection.