Computing from the past??? 2 - The Acorn Risc-OS family

Depending upon where and when you went, chances are that, if you attended school between 1989 and 1996, you would have had the pleasure of using an Acorn Archimedes. Following the success of the BBC Micro, Acorn followed up with the Archimedes range to decent praise and sales, primarily but not exclusively to the UK education market.

The Archimedes range was powerful for their cost and offered a viable alternative to the Mac and DOS/Windows computers of the time. However, marketing, perceived abilities plus some god-awful business decisions meant they remained a minnow to other formats. A legacy does, however, exist in the form of the ARM processing architecture, used by a huge proportion of mobile tech today. ARM, meaning Advanced Risc Machine used to stand for Acorn Risc Machine.

As a quick comparison, here are three screenshots, showing the desktop systems of 1993:

Windows in all of it's glory, still residing upon DOS

System 7 for the Mac

Risc OS 3.11

Now, from a personal point of view, I have always liked the way Risc OS looked. It felt clean and relatively uncluttered compared to the other main desktop operating systems of the time. Indeed, apart from the low screen resolutions that people just had to deal with, the current RISC OS is still a pretty sharp looking OS.

Modern day Risc OS

It also had what still to this day seems to be a very straight forward and versatile mouse set up: three buttons - select, menu and adjust. I have used both Windows and Mac systems since the 80's and still, to this day, the slight amount of extra effort needed to deal with three buttons is more than made up for by the sheer versatility of the set up compared to one and two button systems.

Hardware wise, I only ever owned one Archimedes, the A3000, picked up as a surplus machine when my old school was disposing of them. Although large compared to the similarly styled Amiga 500/Atari ST, it was built like a tank and the example I had still worked perfectly even after several years service.

The A3000 - not the one I owned.

The computer carried over the red function keys of the BBC Micro, a look that was discarded by the follow-on A3010 and A3020 where red gave way to a sickeningly bright green. The keyboard itself, as I recall, was a little spongy but it was robust. The operating system and basic apps were held on ROM chips, allowing them to be upgraded by swapping the chips out. The machine came with a single 3.5 inch floppy drive, no hard drive but did have built in networking (Econet). The system itself was very stable and practically crash proof, something that could not always be said of the Amiga (Guru Meditations, they were called on the Amiga, f***ing annoyances was my term).Whilst they were a tad pricey compared to the 16-bit competition, they offered 32-bit/26bit RISC processing power (32-bit internal to CPU, 26-bit address to the rest of the system - I believe, correct me please if I am wrong). This also meant they compared well to the more expensive DOS/Windows and Mac systems of the time. In fact, in some areas, these other formats were left far behind. They also came bundled with BBC Basic, which in my humble opinion, is the best Basic ever to grace a computer. The Comprehensive school I attended had two networks connected by Econet and I gained a decent grounding in networking because of this. Moving to PC's in the mid-90's seemed very much like a retrograde step compared to the Econet days.

As with the Amiga, there is still a Risc OS community in being today, with quite a few hardware options from the likes of Armini and Raspberry Ro and the operating system itself is supported by two vendors, one covering version 4.29 and 6, whilst the other covers the more open sourced version 5. Version 5 seems to be the most up to date and available version of the OS, which may seem strange but there was a fork in the OS history when two companies developed separate versions and they have kind of travelled in parallel. There is also CJE Micros, who stock an exhaustive range of Risc OS related hardware and software.

Modern hardware is based on ARM based dev boards or the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. Basic systems can be had for a couple of hundred pounds and it's not beyond the ken of many to do it yourself - source a Pi, grab a download of the OS (which is very cheap) and then off you go. The Raspberry Ro Lite is the aforementioned £200 system and whilst it may lack in the area of storage (easily remedied) and Wi-Fi (Risc-OS doesn't have support for this yet), it's a good beginners option and it can form the basis of a decent main system. The low cost of the hardware makes this a tempting hobby machine for anyone interested in alternatives to Windows, Mac-OS and Linux. If you want something more substantial, the Titanium board based systems can be bought which, if you must have the best, are a very good choice.

Personally, I am tempted by the Ro Lite, it being cheap enough but well-spec'd enough to act as a hobby/secondary system to tinker and get to grips with. And, unlike the Amiga, replacement hardware (the Pi) will never be extraordinarily expensive.

What has struck me with the retrospectives on the Amiga and Risc OS is that both formats remain, to this day, very capable alternatives to the mainstream formats. That is not to say you should bin your existing PC, as there are several areas where even the most up to date versions of OS4 and Risc OS 5 cannot compete It is, however, interesting that despite the passage of time since their originating companies closed their doors, there remains a substantial hobbyist market that keeps these older operating systems ticking along. Certainly, I will be keeping an eye on both formats in future.