RISCOS on the rise again ?
Ralph Barrett (1603) 123 posts |
Who would have thought back in 1989 that RISC OS would still be alive, and still being developed to work on new hardware 26 years later ! RISC OS is now largely a hobbiest OS, and in today’s terms of bloatware operating systems is almost a ‘bare metal’ OS. Few believed that RISC OS would survive Acorn’s long and painful ‘implosion’, or the following long drawn-out ‘forked-OS wars’. But RISC OS is still going and is now 32-bit. Back in the days of yore my first ARM machine was an early A310 costing GBP899 with 1Mbyte of RAM and a 4Mhz processor. The main problem was that Acorn machines were so expensive that few could afford to purchase them, so they became an expensive niche market. Now you can get an RPi for GBP25 (or less!) and other small form factor PCBs that run RISC OS at undreamed-of speeds and with huge amounts of RAM (by Acorn standards). I reckon that RISC OS has turned an invisible corner and is on the rise again – albeit slowly. And RISC OS will always be a good platform to learn some basic ARM 32-bit programming :-) Ralph |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
Since you can disconnect (or not using) almost every components, it is… |
John Sandgrounder (1650) 574 posts |
A much more positive view than that put forward by Private Fraser. And I think more accurate. |
Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
I was thinking while at work the other day1 about what RISC OS is in the modern world. I am not sure it is an “operating system” as such, as the criteria has moved on drastically from the Beeb MOS days. It would be possible to write a custom application that can start up on the Pi in around 15 seconds or so and run with the aid of RISC OS’s facilities, but less “interference” if it needs to talk directly to hardware. In other words, RISC OS gives you the framework to get stuff done. Maybe for this, it might be useful if some hardware-hacker types tried to work out ways of getting some of the more esoteric pieces of hardware working. For example: USB serial and parallel ports (if not already), USB barcode scanners (isn’t that just a serial port that echoes what is read to the keyboard buffer?), USB touchscreen overlays (would I be right in saying this would be mode agnostic if it worked in “OS units”?), and so on. Looks like the cheapest hardheld barcode scanner on eBay is about €17, though the description suggests that it is indeed just a serial port: http://www.ebay.fr/itm/231437912526 Touchscreen? There’s stuff like this: http://www.ebay.fr/itm/191459523841 €30 for a ~10" screen overlay. Resistive so not as good as a mobile phone, but ought to suffice for a POS and the like if the resolution is less than a finger size. Et cetera. ;-) 1 Mom has “flu with pneumonia complications” which means I’m not at work today. Or tomorrow. Or…? The doctor has signed me off which is causing all sorts of bureaucratic chaos at work as I have, technically, been medically signed off. But I am also, technically, not ill. Hmmm… 2 I’m actually surprised that nobody ever wrote a “UnixFS” sort of thing. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
aaaaa |
Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
Whoo! We’ve just reinvented DOS! :-) Sorry. I’ll go get my coat… |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7929 posts |
nearly true, but the MS combined IPv4 / IPv6 build is the usual standard. Look in the Windows network settings and untick the Link Layer Topology discovery and the IPv6 and then check how things work – I’ll put money on those little tweaks improving the user experience. Three little untick actions. Mind you, all the IPv6 stack implementations I’ve come across put so much crap onto the local network you really don’t want it active on a home network. |
Matthew Phillips (473) 685 posts |
In my experience USB barcode scanners present themselves as Human Input Devces, so they act just like a keyboard, As such, I would expect them to work with RISC OS already.
Someone did. Look for IscaFS. We have ARMLinux installed on our Risc PC (a veyr old version) and IscaFS allows you to open the Linux partition for reading under RISC OS. Probably needs an update though. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
aaaaa |
Rick Murray (539) 13401 posts |
I was being sarcastic! ;-)
Mmm, enough to display text and get a program loaded from a very simplistic filesystem.
People of a certain age will remember to fun of BGI libraries and some of the – shall we say – eccentric video hardware of the day.
Well Microsoft was somewhat late in recognising the value of networking. Some came before (like the Novell stuff) but by and large these things tended to be compatible with themselves. And not terribly fault tolerant if my old college’s network was anything to go by.
Hehe, probably the only time I wielded x86 code in anger was to replace the execrable serial COM code in the BIOS. The assembler code managed 56kbps, plenty for a 14k4 modem with compression and such. The BIOS routines? They flaked out over 9600bps. How was that possible? Did somebody actually attempt to write them that badly?
Yup – EMM386 and EXT and something else. I forget the specifics but then anything that needed a larger data size would be written on RISC OS as on a 4MiB machine I could demand a WimpSlot of 3MiB or so. Anything like that on DOS was a hellish mess of non-standard __near and __far pointers plus the joy of trying to pick the right memory model when none seemed appropriate, and then to cross the megabyte boundary, all of the above plus talking to some peculiar driver. Fun days. Really made RISC OS seem magical in comparison. That DOS developed into something useful is a miracle… |
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
I think it is exactly what an “operating system” should be without extra fluff to get in the way. If I got a copy of !MessengerPro for IMAP e-mail (currently using !MessangerPi with just POP3), a copy of !TechWriter for writing stuff (again using !Writer for the moment) then the only thing stopping me from using RISC OS as my single operating system would be the lack of an up-to-date web browser. Hopefully I can help address that last point and we can get some decent browser(s) back on the platform. But really it does exactly what I want without the extra stuff. OK, so I’ll continue using Debian/Windows computers to write programs on, but that is really only because the programs I’m writing are destined to be used by Linux/Windows/Mac users (and I have to earn a living somehow). OK, so I built a big Linux based gaming computer for use at home, but really I should have just waited and bought a new PlayStation (and truthfully I simply don’t get the time to play games that much). The main thing that attracted me to RISC OS (and the reason I have stuck around) is that it is a refreshing approach – I don’t think we should look to other platforms for a definition of what an “operating system” is, I think we should be setting the example: a thin layer that doesn’t get in the way but provides a common platform for applications to be built on and to talk to each other. |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
Not true. The Bios did integrate all the drivers.
… or the lack of applications connected to web services. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
aaaaa |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
It was made for DOS and 16bit world. DOS was made for 16bit world too :) |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
aaaaa |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
aaaaa |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
aaaaa |