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by iamcalledrob 37 days ago
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".

The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.

Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.

Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
2 comments
mattkevan 37 days ago
Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.
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2b3a51 37 days ago
Quote from the article we are commenting on...

"Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file.""

OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.

Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.

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kybernetikos 37 days ago
Most of the hardware had rom with its drivers in it. Meant just about everything was a plug and play experience.

And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.

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LeoPanthera 37 days ago
Archimedes computers had CMOS RAM for persistent settings, so I imagine the author's emulator was not set up correctly, as many settings including almost all the ones they describe do persist on a real computer.
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