PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes
stonetools.ghost.io
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Pipedream always was spectacularly odd, even at the time.
What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I forget it's name) where you could drag sliders to change how much various things were allowed to allocate.
The downside, of course, was that if some app crashed, it would take out every file you had open with it. But then, it didn't really have very good isolation, so often a crashing app would take down the whole OS.
The only reason I can think of is to not disrupt the user's flow by opening a window on top of the Filer windows. Maybe they intend to open multiple applications to use together.
There was a carefully written programmer's guide for UX. That might have an explanation.
Mac OS X has a variant. There's a little dot below the icons that indicate that the program is currently active in ram versus just visible in the dock.
Ps: wrt the demo programs. Did you notice you can eg. 'Save' files from !Edit and !Paint directly into !Draw (and IIRC also back into itself) ?
Note that RISC OS had to contend with running off floppy disks too. So you might start one application off one floppy disk, and the next off another, and you'd have them both in ram, but neither had any data in them yet, because that might come of a third floppy disk.
That's at least one concrete scenario where "application loaded" need not be the same thing as "having data open in a window".
It's been a while though. I just know they were extremely consistent in keeping the distinction between "application loaded" on one hand and opening a window on the other (or taking over the screen, in games) . This does help with your mental model of where your RAM is going, since you have a limited amount of it. Closing applications might free up ram you need for something, but now you might need to juggle floppies again. And so it went.
ppps
Also, windows (and some of mac os) seems to confuse opening a file with opening an application. It's not the same thing. An application can have 0, 1, or infinity files open in memory at any one time. "Why the heck does eg ms windows always open nonsensical empty windows when there's nothing to show?" I'm not sure it's a hill I'd die on today, but I used to have Opinions on this! "The window is not the application, an application can have lots of windows!" (Ha, you're reminding me of old rants back from decades ago ;-) )
Drag and drop is one thing we just don't really use more than, say, once every 1/2 hour.
There's no composability really. We have the stupid metaphor of an "App" and it's a little world in itself. You can't really plug things into each other - e.g. use the gimp brush tool in a facebook post.
It's a dead end.
Why ** ** do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
I used to use the ROX window manager and ROX Desktop - they were a great export of RiscOS features to Linux. I liked the way I could customise a menu option with a hotkey so easily. It's no longer maintained and I wasn't smart enough to be able to do it myself then. Perhaps now... :/
At least for me, when I tried RiscOS, it was annoying and more work to have to switch to the file manager and then open more window(s) just to save a file. That could also be with RiscOS not having(?) Alt-Tab. I do sometimes use the macOS "proxy-icon" (which I think was disabled by default a few versions ago) to save/move files into finder windows if I already have them open.
Or possibly I would make the whole thing document centric - you create a document in the folder you want it in and that opens the app. Then you can move it around like you would move any file.
That would leave me with the Filer window open over the top of the application/document. Middle clicking anywhere on the document wouldn't raise the application's windows over the Filer windows, so dragging the file to the destination was easy.
At the time I preferred it to the Windows 3.1 alternative, which gave you a completely different UI to the general file-browsing tool.
The button on the top left (next to close) on all the application windows is "Send window to back" (of the stack), which would be useful for showing any Filer windows opened earlier.
It has its annoyances, but I still like that style of saving.
PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.
I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.
I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it.
I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
They come up fairly regularly.
Be cautious of any that aren't shown to be working, especially if they don't include photographs of the area around the CMOS battery. These could leak after 15+ years and damage the board.
As to why ARM succeeded so greatly and is still among us as (originally) a RISC CPU, unlike SPARC, MIPS (the list goes on), it was because of its extremely low power requirements - something which wasn't even in the minds of the two designers at the time. However, when they first wired up the first chip and tested it, they noticed after a while that even though it worked, power had not been applied to the power pin.. it ran purely off parasitic power from the data lines.
So, it started to be used in portable, battery-powered devices, like first the Newton, and later all kinds of PDAs and then phones. After a while the yearly number of ARM CPUs sold numbered in the billions, more than any other particular CPU.
"Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt."
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2012/05/03/arm-creators-...
Our first computer was an Acorn BBC B Microcomputer.
Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!
It's possible that putting your site behind Cloudflare and enabling Encrypted Client Hello might fix this, though I haven't tested it.
I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
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 :)
"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.
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.
It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
In contrast of what we used to have.
> I still can't figure out what problem the "Adjust" button solves. It's semi-analogous to CTRL + Left-click on modern systems
Yes, that sort of thing. I think I most often used Adjust to open directories/files while closing the previous one, rather than leaving a trail of open windows.
Or, Adjust-clicking entries in menus and keeping the menu open.
Or, selecting multiple files/directories in the Filer to move/copy/open multiple files at once.
> Double-click "Select" on an application icon to launch it and... nothing. Its icon displays in the Icon Bar, and that's it.
This is the procedure described by the RISC OS Style Guide [1], the UX guide for programmers. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why.
I think most application developers followed these UX recommendations closely, even games would often launch this way. (A game might have a settings menu accessed from its Icon Bar icon.)
> Drag-and-drop really seems to be the RISC OS idiomatic way to manipulate files.
Yes, that was how people worked. If you were working on an existing file you can just click "OK" to overwrite it with updates, or you can drag it somewhere else to do what we'd call "Save As" nowadays.
Possibly this was to support an OS that originally assumed floppy-disc-only use. Unlike Windows 3 (I think…) you could have Filer windows open for multiple floppy discs. You could drag a file to one of these, and the OS would prompt you to switch discs if it wasn't the one currently in the drive.
> 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."
Anything you change in the !Configure application should be persisted in CMOS RAM, check your emulator if this is not happening.
Otherwise correct. Users with a hard disk would typically set up a !Boot file. On our family computer we each had one, but not loading on boot. They were in our personal folders, so opening that folder loaded our settings.
(Maybe floppy-only users did something similar, but we had a HDD from when I was about 7 years old so I don't remember.)
> Pipedream.
We had !Fireworkz installed on the family computer, but I think the most I would have done with it was make an army list for Warhammer.
It's nice to see what this software was capable of.
> The emulator itself expects some specific keyboard, with the \ | key situated between LEFT SHIFT and Z.
Keyboards with this key are using the ISO/IEC 9995 Europe physical keyboard layout (this extra key + a tall enter key). It's used by most European keyboards; having \| there is the British version.
You're spot on for the British phrases :-D
[1] https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Software%... / https://www.riscosopen.org/zipfiles/platform/common/StyleGui...
[-] I also found the RISC OS 3 Programmer's Reference Manual: https://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/