RISC OS - My other OS

10th February 2021

So, as you know, I like FOSS, and that usually means I'm a Linux user who likes Mastodon, IRC, XMPP, Keybase etc. Which I am, but there is one OS that I use which I prefer over Linux, it's called RISC OS, and I'm going to tell you a bit about it...

RISC OS was created by the British computer company, Acorn. Acorn had been a massive success in the early 1980s, mainly in the education market, with the 1982 BBC Micro, affectionatly known as: The Beeb. The Beeb was THE best and most popular computer in the education sector, and for many British 80s kids, was the first computer they ever used. They stuck around until the mid to late 1990s, when they were finally supplanted by the might of the PC compatibles, and their World Wide Web and Gopher support.

By 1989, Acorn was in trouble, they had been bought out by Italian typewriter company Olivetti, after they had been losing serious amounts of money with the flop that was the Electron (although it was a very good system).

After this buyout, Acorn were left hamstrung, with no new products to work on, and thousands of Electrons to shift, they couldn't afford to innovate, which put them at great risk.

This was the case until Herman Hauser, one of Acorn's founders, slammed down some new papers from the US universities about the new RISC system (Reduced Intruction Set Computing). At this point, no one had created a RISC chip, and, with Acorn seeing the project as a good investment, they set to work on the ARM chip (Acorn Risc Machine CPU), ARM is now world famous for being the chip used in most mobile phones and in the Raspberry Pi, a popular open source hobbyist computer, which I regularly use myself; but sadly back then, nobody saw any value in it, and stuck firmly with the then-current crop of CISC chips, Acorn even tried valiantly pitching ARM to Apple, but alas, they wouldn't see the light until the present day.

Of course, ARM and the RISC architecture needed it's own special OS, because there were none around at the time (it would be at least 15-20 years before the first ARM Linux distros were made), and so what became known as RISC OS, was born!

RISC OS, in terms of user interface, is quite odd, and difficult to understand for a novice; it's application (or 'Plings' as they are called) launching system is odd, for example; you have to navigate to the Pling's directory, click on it's icon, then move down to the icon bar (a little bit like the dock on Mac OS X), and either right, left, or middle click on it, to launch it into a window (this is called: exiting Pling standby mode). However, this is but one feature, transferring files between directories is even harder. But, putting all this aside, once you get settled in to the GUI and get to know your system, it's really fun, and intuitive, and you soon realise that RISC OS is just a vicim of what I like to call: '90s-centric design, much like Haiku or AROS etc.

There is no shell/command line as such, you launch what is called a task window in a text editor (either !Edit or !StrongED), which will display an asterisk as a prompt, and will basically do the same job, just minus little things like ANSI support etc. You also might find that a few common features, at least to the average Linux user or techie, like SSH or wget, however, these functions can be easily added via !PackMan or !Store, the latter being an App Store-esque package manager, several years before Apple got there with the iPhone, choc full of both FOSS and paid software; it's also worth noting that you can find lots of software out there on the web as well.

Overall, RISC OS is an excellent OS to run alongside Linux on things like the Raspberry Pi, it is a little old fashioned, with a lack of wireless support, and only support for PPP and Ethernet, but it makes up for this in droves, especially with BBC BASIC V just a few keystrokes away!

I would highly recommend you go to RISC OS Open and grab a copy if you are interested, and be sure to chat with the community there!

Thanks so much for reading! It is much appreciated!

RISC OS Open Website

The homepage awaits!