[HN Gopher] The RISC OS GUI
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The RISC OS GUI
Author : rbanffy
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-05-18 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (telcontar.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (telcontar.net)
| teddyh wrote:
| See also:
|
| * <http://toastytech.com/guis/indexriscos.html>
|
| * <https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/riscos>
| lizknope wrote:
| I searched for "ARM" and didn't see it in the article. The Acorn
| ran on ARM (that's what the A in ARM stood for anyway, Acorn RISC
| Machine)
|
| You can run RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi which is also ARM based.
|
| https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-pi
| sillywalk wrote:
| I do like the "Adjust" mouse button.
|
| EDIT: especially that you can use it to do multiple menu
| selections without actually closing the menu.
| fidotron wrote:
| > When a program needs to allow the user to choose a file, drag
| and drop is again used, with the window providing a drop area to
| collect the file
|
| The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another,
| without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at
| all.
|
| I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust".
| Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth
| position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.
|
| Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which
| whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the
| lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them
| back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions
| in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested
| in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they
| didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the
| RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a
| more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the
| late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > serious OS internals
|
| There is a "moonshot" effort to redo the internals of RiscOS
| from RiscOS assembly.
|
| https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2025/03/28/moonshot...
|
| https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/risc-os-moonsho...
| fidotron wrote:
| Yeah, I'd seen this. I've not been a participant in the RISC
| OS community since the 90s, and clearly do not share the same
| enthusiasm some have for aspects of it.
|
| I'm honestly of the view the wisest thing to do would be
| focus on making it play well with being emulated, right down
| to enabling enhancements when doing so (such as graphics
| acceleration), but then not being in that world it really is
| not my call at all.
| Lammy wrote:
| > rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop
|
| ROX-Filer is still to this day my file manager of choice for
| any X11 system.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, ROX-Filer is an amazingly good bit of software, once
| you figure out its UX quirks
| ajb wrote:
| Acorn just plain didn't have the manpower. They failed to
| effectively enter the international market and so other
| companies with a wider customer base out-invested them.
|
| They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel,
| Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time
| after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.
|
| The internals of riscos were creaking by the end; it didn't
| have a proper library system and only had cooperative
| multitasking. There was an internal project ('galileo') to
| replace it, but it suffered from second system effect and NIH
| and never saw the light of day.
| fidotron wrote:
| > They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel,
| Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time
| after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.
|
| Are you referring to RISC iX? I had no idea there were
| serious users of that to be honest.
|
| A few years ago some Acorn strategy documents leaked from the
| early 90s and it showed they basically knew the game was up
| long pre-Risc PC. I don't think any number of people would
| have helped them by 1992. There was this odd void where
| everyone (such as Xara) kind of knew the PC was going to take
| over everything, but it just wasn't quite there, and then
| suddenly it was.
| ajb wrote:
| Yes, RISC iX. I've no idea how many users it had to be
| honest .
|
| They kept going for a period by virtue of owning ARM. When
| the shareholders persuaded them to list it directly, the
| game was over. Before that they bet on set-top-boxes and
| the supposed PC replacement, the NC (thin client).
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Yeh that was pretty neat - as I remember the OS/libraries had a
| concept of whether the place you had dragged to was file
| storage or another application, so that an application could
| know not to mark itself as 'saved' if you just dragged to
| another application.
| rjmunro wrote:
| > The Save dialog is normally presented as a menu, into which you
| enter a filename
|
| > This menu however is deeply confusing.
|
| No, this is the greatest piece of the RISC OS UI. It makes all
| other systems save dialogs seem like total nonsense. You just put
| files where you want them. The only thing is that the OK button
| shouldn't exist.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| One of the biggest problems I've noticed with younger computer
| users is that they have no idea where they saved a file. Having
| to drag it to a specific folder seems like it would be harder
| to forget in that case.
| Sophira wrote:
| I grew up with the RISC OS desktop, and it's one of the biggest
| reasons why I'm so comfortable with the multi-window interface of
| the GIMP, because it's very reminiscent of how things worked on
| RISC OS.
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