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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 )

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I'll grant you excel.

*sheet

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

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.

.. 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".

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

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

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

Thanks - about 25 years too late. Plus I didn't have the Internet then! :)

Much more authentic:

https://twitter.com/bbc_micro_/status/572313372345016321

The plastic which held them in place was always broken on the school computers :-)

In all seriousness though, I personally owe a great debt to Sophie Wilson et al for building computers and software that made it very easy to start programming the second after turning a computer on; A BASIC interpreter and an Assembler available instantly from ROM. I had endless hours of fun building parallax scrolling star fields by poking directly to video RAM and slowly rendering 3d scenes in Render Bender. It was just a shame that the computers were so expensive.

I spent about a year of savings on my 'beeb' and it was the best money I ever spent. All tricked out it cost as much as a very decent second hand car, a very large amount of money for me back then, I very much recall that I bought the drive enclosure long before I could afford the drives (I basically bought the whole thing piece-by-piece as money became available). Because I couldn't afford the drives I hacked my Sony cassette deck to function as a sort of poor-mans disk drive by connecting the buttons to the user port and the end-of-tape detector to an input pin so I could tell roughly where the head was on the tape. Really slow, especially during on-tape sorting but it worked.

A friend of mine who had rich parents got his + 2 HD drives for his birthday, I had to take the long way around but eventually got there.

Without that machine I'm pretty sure my career would have started 5 years later.

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.

"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.

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

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

Thanks, yes I remember the package now.

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

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.

They sold a BSD port called RISCiX.

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.

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.

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.

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