Back in 1987, British computer manufacturer Acorn released its Archimedes series of workstations that were aimed at educational establishments and home users. Rather than using an off-the-shelf CPU, Acorn designed its own – the ARM processor – which now powers the majority of mobile phones and portable devices.
However, we’re interested in the other half of that legacy: the software part. Specifically, this is RISC OS, the operating system that Acorn created for the Archimedes. We’re going to look at RISC OS 5, an open source version of the operating system that’s currently maintained and can be run natively on modern ARM hardware such as a Raspberry Pi. RISC OS was cutting edge when it was first released, but it’s now quite an old operating system, and it’s deficient in many areas compared to more modern offerings such as Linux or Windows. However, it’s fascinating to look at and use, and it may have a few features that we’d like to see in modern systems.
EXPLORE THE RISC OS INTERFACE
1 Icon bar
Drives and other hardware are on the left, applications are on the right, with system tools located on the far right.
2 Task Manager
A click on the Pi logo (on this distribution) opens up the Task Manager that neatly shows resource usage on the machine.
3 !Help
RISC OS’s help application is system-wide and provides pop-up descriptions of any GUI element under the mouse pointer.
4 Pop-up menu
This is the style of menu that RISC OS has instead of the more common pull-down menus of other systems.
5 Afiler window
This is where you launch applications and load and save files. Filetype is stored within the metadata.
6 Toolbox
RISC OS makes quite a lot of use of toolboxes, which are either glued to the side of an
