[batou]

I think there's a lot of fondness for Acorn, at least here in the UK but I'd like to offer a slightly more accurate history.

I was the owner of many Acorn machines including BBC B, Master, A410, RiscPC 600. The hardware, clearly designed or at least originated by Sophie Wilson was remarkable. It was robust, well designed and incredibly expandable. To this day there is not a single computer that actually made sense more than anything that Acorn kicked out. A human could learn everything about it in intimate detail without a problem.

However the software was a source of constant pain. Firstly nothing was finished initially when the Archimedes came out. The Arthur OS was apparently named as a "A Risc operating system by THURsday" because their internal OS project, apparently Unixlike, went down the crapper during development and they had to hack something up quickly so they had a minimum viable product. What I ended up with was a barely usable OS that consisted of a quick port of Acorn MOS from the BBC Master series and a naff GUI chucked on top for my £1400 investment (a hell of a lot back then and even now) that wasn't fixed properly until RISC OS 2 came out in 1989 so I sat there with a lemon for a year. After that we were stuck with a cooperatively multitasked operating system with a worldview completely different to anything else at the time or in the future. A lot of progress was made but it never had any prospects despite a lot of us clinging onto the initial investment.

Now I certainly enjoyed the platform but in retrospect, I'd have invested my money in something else back then if I knew what was going to happen.

I full respect the achievements here and more importantly the legacy (I have 12 ARM processors still in various things in my house!) but for us footsoldiers who paid up back then, it wasn't all love and happiness.

[mattbee]

I learned almost all my low-level computer knowledge from Archimedes & RISC PC through the 90s. Very glad that ARM code is still a useful skill, even if knowledge of absolute memory address of OS_ SWI patch tables went in the dustbin :)

But it was only after Acorn imploded in 1998, and a a couple of years of working with Linux that I thought "hmmm, you mean I can write shared libraries for my C code that aren't kernel modules?" and "what, you mean the computer can just switch away from my task even though I've not called Wimp_Poll? What if I'm not done?" and "What, you mean the OS will just kill my task if I address some memory I'm not supposed to? How does it not know I didn't intend to patch the OS from my desktop application?" etc. etc.

Also the Archimedes (at least) was pretty much the most expensive computer on the planet at the time - something like £3000 in 1988 money - it's amazing they sold so many to people just on the strength of Zarch :) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALfnZjCiuUQ )

[mavhc]

Windows and Mac OS were both cooperatively multitasking until 1995 and 2001, although they did have more memory protection than RISC OS.

As to the worldview, everyone had their own worldview before the internet, / vs \ vs : vs .

Mac OS Classic had filetypes, same as RISC OS. Bit odd that the web uses them really, considering it has mimetypes.

The RISC OS GUI is still miles ahead of everyone else. Its application packaging was pretty good, easy to edit (although the !boot system should be restricted in what it can do).

But they never went through the transition that Windows did (twice), or Mac did to OS X.

[david-given]

The GUI was amazing, and is still one of the easiest-to-use GUIs I've ever encountered, even though there were some major omissions, the main one being total lack of accessibility --- you couldn't drive it from the keyboard at all. (Win 3.1, OTOH, had amazingly good accessibility and still beats a lot of modern software.)

The underlying OS was not amazing. There were some good parts; the relocatable module system was very elegant, if rather alien by modern standards; the ability to resize nearly all memory areas on the fly (by dragging bars in the GUI!) was great; proper pluggable filesystem modules in the 1980s were a revelation; the built-in BASIC was super fast and reasonably comfortable to program in, even though it didn't have structured types (some of the built-in ROM software was written in Basic!)...

But the bad parts are bad. The underlying technology is really primitive, being a non-preemptive OS with no memory protection that's worth anything, and then it's suffered from many years of ad-hoc organic growth... e.g. a lot of the core APIs pass flags in the top 8 bits of addresses, because back then the ARM had a 24 bit address bus. Running on a modern machine with more than 16MB of RAM? Good luck with that. APIs are duplicated everywhere with slight changes. There are lots of undeclared dependencies between modules (including recursively, which isn't really supported). Platform independence isn't really a thing, except when it was crudely bolted on for some platforms.

Plus there are some... questionable... design decisions. My favourite is the big chunk of myserious code in the main system allocator which gropes up the call stack every time you try to allocate memory. Why? It's looking for stack frames belonging to the system allocator, so that it can tell whether it's being called reentrantly. Why is it doing this? So it can detect whether it's being called from an interrupt, at which point it goes through an alternative call path and return memory from a different pool!

If anyone's interested, a few years back I wrote a proof-of-concept RISC OS kernel reimplementation called R2: http://cowlark.com/r2/index.html

Unlike the real thing, it runs everything in user mode except for a tiny stub to handle SWIs. (There's a built in ARM emulator.) It's complete enough to run Basic. While reverse engineering the operating system I found out way, way too much about how RISC OS worked inside. shudder

[mattgodbolt]

Weird and wonderful it was, but also amazingly hackable. Using similar tricks to the allocator, I was able to "ROM patch" RISC OS 3.1 to look like 3.5 [1] using only a few bytes of module space. I do miss those days :)

[1]: http://xania.org/201212/finallook-a-risc-os-3.1-hack

[digi_owl]

Not until 2k/xp finally retired the 9x/DOS line did Windows "work".

9x was just so finicky that you didn't really want to push the multitasking.

[mavhc]

Windows 98 BSOD'd if you opened too many windows, at least Windows Me fixed that

[jacquesm]

I too owned a whole bunch of Acorn stuff. Most of the software was excellent. The best basic interpreter around and a very good shot at a DOS.

The Acorn 'Unicorn' was excellent but too expensive and this is roughly where the parent comment comes in. So Acorn did a lot of good stuff before they lost the plot, roughly around the time they released the Archimedes, which was an amazing machine for the time but the Amiga had far surpassed anything Acorn could offer software wise and the ST and Commodore were gobbling up the lower end.

[batou]

Yes the BASIC interpreter was the best thing there was on the platform. Mainly for me at least because it was heavily structured, didn't require line numbering like earlier versions and had a stupidly powerful inline assembler.

I had a 1040ST and an Amiga 500 at the time as well (spot the geek) and the software wasn't that great on those platforms either IMHO. Even PDS on DOS was nicer to program in with the 2kg pile of manuals.

The killer was the rise of the PC and you know what; I'm glad it killed everything. Perhaps controversially, a couple of years down the line and as someone who wanted to get shit done back then, things like Windows 3, VB, Word, Excel, OLE appearing were clearly the future.

[jacquesm]

I'll grant you excel.

[Donch]

*sheet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewSheet

[jacquesm]

Yes, sheet was pretty good. (As was word!), but Excel really had the edge there, even when it first came out.

It's the one product by MS that stood out as being best-in-class straight from day one.

[pjc50]

.. by being a careful GUI clone of the existing successful product, Lotus 1-2-3. Right down to being largely formula-compatible and having the same hotkeys. That's why F2 is "edit current cell".

[agumonkey]

Excel was so nice I wrote my documents in it. I wonder how much of Microsoft was built on its fame.

[batou]

It was ok until I lost the function key strip :)

[jacquesm]

http://rayharper.co.uk/acorn/bbc_images/fn_key_strips.pdf

[codeulike]

I was lucky enough to have an Archimedes when I was 14, and despite the Arthur OS, it was the best thing in the world for writing games: fastest desktop computer in the world, easy to use 256 colour sprite system and interpreted basic as a programming language. When the basic compiler came out a few years later it all got even faster. The desktop ui seemed pretty amazing to me compared to what else was around that I had seen. But it was an expensive machine, granted.

[keithpeter]

"Now I certainly enjoyed the platform but in retrospect, I'd have invested my money in something else back then if I knew what was going to happen."

I take your point about Acorn as a business but I used a 'lab' full of RISC-OS 2 bases A310s at College with 20Mb Rodime hard drives. We did scanning, dtp, Genesis multimedia packages &c and various home grown projects.

What else could we have bought at that time for similar use cases? Not trolling, my memory of the time is hazy and I recollect being extremely underwhelmed by DOS based PCs in another 'lab'.

EDIT: flashbacks to Aldus Framemaker on Apricot PCs, Amstrad PCW spreadsheet applications being used in a theatre box office, and an early 9" screen Mac being used with some form of DTP software.

[rjsw]

I found it fairly easy to port stuff to the Atari ST. My local university used them in labs too.

[fred2133]

My college had an (experimental?) machine they got from Acorn that dual-booted into a 'nix OS. It got stuck in a corner and forgotten about, but if it had been a few years later I think it could have been an amazing project for them.

[linker3000]

When I was in secondary school, we had a plain grey, all-in-one keyboard and system desktop case that had a microdrive and was connected to a hacked colour TV via a massive umbilical cord. It turned out to be a BBC Micro prototype.

[batou]

They sold a BSD port called RISCiX.

[wglb]

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

[wglb]

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

[keithpeter]

Thanks, yes I remember the package now.

[pjc50]

This is true; it's like the Domesday Project laserdisc/BBC micro system. Or Minitel. Ahead of its time at launch, but a technological dead end that ends up as a sunk investment.

[dasmoth]

Is there a good source of information about ARX (the originally-planned OS for the Acorn ARM machines) out there? I did search around a bit a few years back and found very, very little.

[batou]

Absolutely noting unfortunately. I assume they burned it all and hoped people had forgotten about it!