On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 01:49:01PM +0000, Tony Finch wrote: > On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Matthew King wrote: > > > > For its time (and with the rose-tinted goggles of hindsight) I can find > > very little to practically hate about Risc OS and its ancestors. > > No memory safety. Shit multitasking (but still better than contemporary > windows and Mac OS). Windows only resizable from one corner (like the > Mac). Unkeyboardable GUI.
The limitations of ADFS E format. (77 files to a directory, max 10 character filenames) (Sure, there were other file systems, but not useful for the local hard disk) The lack of a (viable) shared library system. (As demonstrated by the Toolbox in 3.5, followed by the Toolbox in ROM, followed by the !Boot thingy to unplug the Toolbox modules, because being in ROM caused problems) Lack of virtual memory and demand paging. (Everything was blocking waiting, despite the fact that the lowest level disk accesses provided a DMA-based API, so the lowest levels of the OS provided the right foundations) Lack of development tools, caused by Acorn spinning out ARM but not securing a useful-to-Acorn licence for the toolchain as part of that deal. Nicholas Clark
