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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see RISC OS I always assume it's something for RISC V.

I know this is not about that actually, just makes me think about it.

But obviously it's for original RISC i.e. ARM. But anyway I still wonder if something like RISC OS could work on RISC V.

I saw a youtube demo of someone running RISC OS on Raspberry Pi and it was very snappy. Something older like that has had less time to acquire features (that can slow it down or just be bloat).

Besides eliminating bloat, I feel like RISC V is an opportunity to start with some new assumptions. So I am interested to hear how operating systems and software evolve for it. Linux is great but I believe that there is always room for a fresh approach after a few decades.

So I wonder if things like Fuchsia or MirageOS or new Rust things etc. will be targeted to RISC V.

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> But obviously it's for original RISC i.e. ARM.

Not sure if you actually mean that, but to me it sounds like you're implying that ARM is the "original RISC".

The first RISC processor was called RISC-I and came out of Berkeley research in 1981.

Around the same time came out the MIPS cpu, from Standford university, by a group who shortly after founded a company that by 1985 commercialized the first RISC CPU, the R2000.

ARM, SPARC and PA-RISC came out just about the same time.

The ideas were brewing for some time, but I think it's safe to say historically that the name "RISC" was not invented by ARM and that the R in ARM references a pre-existing term that has been developed at Berkeley.

The original RISC was the IBM 801, in ~1975, or arguably even the CDC 6600 in 1965. It is hard to identify anything that originated in the RISC-1.

Didn't register windows originate at Berkeley?

Sure, the IBM 801, the CDC 6600 and others were forerunners, but it was the Berkeley research project that popularized the acronym IIRC.

Okay so it was just the most popular RISC and not the original one.

So good job on that correction but it doesn't seem necessary to downvote me. I thought I had some interesting comments about the future of operating systems on RISC.

Most popular hasn't always been accurate either. If you asked in the 90s there'd be alpha, ppc, sparc. There was a time when I would have put all of those as more relevant than ARM.

It really was the original RISC in a personal computer; you could actually buy one (especially in the UK); and run it at home; the others were things that lived in computer rooms and drove green screen terminals.

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