On 18 September 2017 at 16:51, Zane Healy <heal...@aracnet.com> wrote: > I can’t help but think that in the US, this belongs in a museum.
I agree and that is Peter's thought as well. > > For those wanting to give RISC OS a try, it’s available for the Raspberry Pi > (and yes, that’s why I bought a Pi). Yes, I have a bootable RISC OS µSD card for my own RasPi 3. :-) > I would have thought that the RISC OS community would be appreciative of an > app such as Firefox being available. You would think, wouldn't you? However, by RISC OS standards it is a huge and very slow app, and being a ported Unix app, it does not follow RISC OS user interface conventions. http://www.osnews.com/story/15798/The-Slightly-Strange-World-of-RISC-OS/ So it was not widely adopted, nobody helped with the port, and it sort of withered on the vine. Tragic given the amount of effort that Peter put into it. He developed a library offering a Unix API to apps running under RISC OS: http://www.riscos.info/index.php/UnixLib There was, I think, an existing port of GCC: http://www.riscos.info/index.php/GCCSDK But again, RISC OS users didn't like it as you couldn't readily built RISC OS itself and RISC OS apps with it -- for that, you needed Acorn's very expensive Norcroft C compiler. Peter also wrote another library allowing X.11 apps to run under RISC OS: http://www.riscos.info/index.php/ChoX11 It also supported other apps, including SDL for some games: http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=655&hlt=peter+naulls They, or rather he with a little assistance, ported a number of apps and provided dev tools. https://archive.org/details/cdrom-riscos-cunix But the apps were considered large, inefficient, they did not blend in with existing RISC OS apps, so nobody else got on board. Also, RISC OS was and is proprietary and there's a strong culture of paying for software and hardware. There are commercial apps which on other platforms would be considered toys. They have the attitude that anything that's free can't be any good. The community is surprisingly lively, but they're mostly quite elderly now -- I used to go to the meetings in London and in my mid-40s was most often the youngest person there. They are 60-70 year olds who reluctantly moved to GUI computing some 30-odd years back and do not want to move on again, particularly to foreign (i.e. non-British) software which is, by RISC OS standards, huge and slow and inefficient. I have some sympathy -- I cut my teeth on RISC OS myself, and I retain a fondness for it. It was a blisteringly quick OS with a powerful, elegant UI. The _only_ other desktop OS I've ever used that came close was BeOS. OS/2, Windows, Linux and *BSD, all are horrid sprawling messes of half-implemented cruft by comparison. :-D I never even really "got" the Amiga and AmigaOS -- I chose an Archimedes instead and never regretted it for a second. All IMHO natch and I do not mean to represent any individual. Anyway, in the end, Peter took another job and basically dropped his involvement with the RO community. Tragic, but I understand why. Anyway, I think this is to whom he offered the machines: http://www.computerhistory.org/ Whether anyone else would want them, e.g. http://www.livingcomputers.org/ I do not know. But I hope someone rescues them. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053
