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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

It's odd how arguably the most relevant of the lot was fairly obscure at the time: Acorn computers, creator of the ARM processor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

You can run RISC OS on a modern ARM like the Raspberry PI - it gets weirder the longer you work with it - menu items with input boxes and other GUI widgets, a strange DOS VMS UNIX hybrid CLI that appears at the bottom of the framebuffer, scrolling your graphic screen up as you type and full of terminology that's incredibly excessively British.

Go to 10 minutes to see the shell https://youtu.be/oL4w3AK6Qpw?si=Vdu2ur1fM0N9Tl2X&t=10m and http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_... for the documentation

Also see 8:50 for the British terminology and 12:34 for an example of the weird menus

The thing I like about it is the creators clearly knew what the dominant paradigm was and made a decision to be different. It's nice.

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It's funny that you mention the scrolling, also mentioned here: https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/kicking-off...

The Acorn-type CLI is interesting (in my view), and I never realised why until I started using a PC rather than the BBC Micro: there's no shell. The idea doesn't even really exist. The fundamental system call (the OS_CLI SWI on RISC-OS, OSCLI entry point on the BBC Micro) takes an entire command line string, and do whatever that says to do. It's like the shell is permanently there. You never need to parse the string.

This is actually pretty useful, because it means that for a lot of stuff you can simply defer to the OS. No need for interfaces to select filing system, choose floppy disk/hard disk, change directory, tweak key repeat rates, print disk catalogue, etc. - there are CLI commands for all of these, and more, so a program need only provide a way to enter a command to be subsequently executed by the permanently resident CLI. And as the program calls it, any commands so entered affect its state rather than being discarded on exit.

The average file load/save UI on the BBC Micro was that you entered a file name. All the other stuff you might want to do first (select filing system, choose disk type, select drive, change current directory, check file exists or not, etc.) would be done by executing CLI commands via the program's interface for submitting such things. Feels like RISC-OS's unusual drag'n'drop file save mechanic stems from a similar mindset.

That's very Oberon (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)). I had no idea

I don't feel as if there was so much of a dominant paradigm back in 1987, when RISC OS first came out, at least not outside of the US?

I recall that period more as a melting pot of ideas and approaches from lots of manufacturers independently trying to figure out what paradigms might stick.

There were many disparate approaches to text-based OSs: MS-DOS, Acorn MOS on the BBC which is the predecessor of the shell found in RISC OS, Sinclair, Atari, etc. Likewise, separate approaches to GUIs: Mac, Gem, RISC OS / Arthur, the Amiga, etc. Windows 2. Teams from Acorn, Research Machines, Sinclair etc all basically did things in their own way.

While the Macintosh UI paradigm was considered dominant in some market segments at the time (eg DTP), there wasn't yet a universal expectation around how GUIs would work. That started happening more after Windows 3 came out, in 1990 iirc.

Certainly there must have been cross-pollination of ideas between these different groups. Pretty sure these Docks and Task Bars with icons, that we all have at the bottom of our screens now, was an idea first seen in RISC OS.

> Pretty sure these Docks and Task Bars with icons, that we all have at the bottom of our screens now, was an idea first seen in RISC OS

No way. Windows 1.0 had it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microsoft_Windows_1.0_s...) . The RISC OS workflow of click on bottom to create new instance paradigm is probably from Xerox Star 8010 although might be earlier

https://interface-experience.org/site/wp-content/uploads/201...

The GUI unification theory is fine but we're talking RISC OS 2023 being still like this. All the weird quirks are still there.

Other systems have merged. Even ArcaOS, the successor to OS/2 has dropped all those strange tab systems that OS/2 Warp 3 took from PenpointOS. It's fairly hard to find something that's notably different that's ostensibly still being worked on.

Those Windows 1 icons are on the desktop, not a task bar.

http://toastytech.com/guis/win1012.html

You can call it whatever you want but it's an inviolable horizontal container on the bottom of the screen reserved for iconified applications and storage controls upon which applications can not occlude.

Maybe calling it an iconify dock is more appropriate. Microsoft called it "Icon Area": https://archive.org/details/microsoft-windows-1.03-hp-150-3....

Windows 1.0 doesn't really have a desktop metaphor in the modern sense as in some rectangle with free floating icons which represent arbitrary files or folders. Windows 2.0 made the icon space the entire background which can be occluded by applications and 3.0 introduced the merging of the metaphors into a "desktop" that we're all familiar with. Stating they're all equivalent I think is a bit of stretch.

> You can call it whatever you want but it's an inviolable horizontal container on the bottom of the screen reserved for iconified applications and storage controls upon which applications can not occlude.

But it wasn't a concept that Microsoft was particularly wedded to. It disappeared in Windows 3.x.

Windows itself wasn't a concept microsoft was wedded to until windows 3.0 ... after 1.0 it was mostly axed. It took a giant internal effort to get windows 2.0 resourced for development and release and then there was a bunch of politics that started with TopView (which had many clones such as quarterdeck desqview) and ended with OS/2 1.3 that got 3.0 out the door. MS was probably fully committed to OS/2 up until about 1989/90"

IBM was still pushing its MCA based PS/2 machines at the time and the writing was on the wall when the gang of nine did EISA as a response instead of forking over a license fee.

I don't know what this has to do with anything. Claiming that RISC OS invented the dock or was the first to do it is bunk. I'm a huge fan of innovation and like RISC OS but I'm a bigger fan of accurate history.

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* accounts differ on this. Some, like Ferguson in the Computer Wars depict as a bad faith sabotage, while others such as in hard drive, brush that off as a conspiracy theory while others such as in barbarians led by Bill Gates say there were fundamental opinion conflicts by important primadonna programmers. I think it's likely all the above, there's enough people involved and the theories don't necessarily conflict

There was more diversity in paradigms and technologies before Wintel stamped it out. In particular, non-American companies were more prominent. I can't speak for Intel but I feel that Microsoft held the industry back with their remarkable commitment to shoddiness and tastelessness.

I feel a tinge of sadness reflecting on this fact when I walk through the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Go to Living Computers in Seattle when they figure out how to reopen. CHM is a shadow of Living Computers.

There's things like Xerox Altos and Apple 1s there that you can use. Sit at and actually do things with.

They sadly do not have a Pixar image computer which is a remarkably obscure little thing I've wanted to see working for a while. I've seen 2 of them but they were just in display cases. There's a few rips online with demos https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhGfdkK9Ek but nothing really going over the machine

I don’t think there’s been any indication that anyone is trying to figure out how to reopen Living Computers.

Likely some other philanthropist would need to buy it and fund it in order for it to reopen.

Paul Allen’s sister seems to have little interest in continuing to fund his smaller philanthropies / interests after his death (Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum: closed 2020, sold 2022, reopened by new owner; Cinerama: closed 2020, sold 2023, reopening planned by new owner; Living Computers: closed 2020, no public updates)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831880

Is it open‽

> Acorn computers, creator of the ARM processor.

Whoah! I didn't realize they were the same company!

Fun fact: the ARM 1 was designed using some custom software on a BBC Micro and tested in simulation (sub 1KLOC) before they submitted the design for tape-out and production. First silicon actually worked!

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/acorn/microarchitectures/arm1

oh sure, design an entire cpu on a 6502 with 128kb of ram, no problem.

It's wild how spoiled we are. The ATmega328p on a $10 Arduino Nano is 10x faster than that

Probably more like 64 KB, assuming 6502 second processor...

(Actual usable space is less! The second processor's onboard OS uses 2 KB. The BASIC interpreter uses 16 KB for its code plus another approx 1.1 KB for workspace.)

Yup. ARM == "Acorn RISC Machine"

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