Thursday, May 2nd, 2024

British operating systems, part one
===================================

By some weird  coincidence Ralf  from The Sysop Tale Phlog  installed
RISC OS 5.30 on the very same day as I did, while writing about it on
one local IT news server. About a year ago I dedicated for RISC OS my
old Raspberry Pi 2B, for which I didn't have any relevant use anymore
and since then I am amazed by this nice operating system, in fact the
one and only true  ARM operating system,  which was designed with ARM
in mind back in 1980s.

As Ralf mentioned[1] it is a very responsive OS given the hardware on
which it runs. And not only on Raspberry - Pi is for RISC OS what the
128core EPYC would be for Windows XP  - it's way more horsepower than
whatever the original authors had in mind,  when creating the system.
It runs well even on some  of the ARM based hardware from  the 1990s,
like the RiscPC.

But what amazes me most is, that RISC OS doesn't have the  preemptive
multitasking,  just the cooperative one.  That means that it's mostly
up to every running application  if it releases the CPU and passes it
to a next task in queue.  If any running task refuses to cooperate or
just freezes,  everything locks  and reboot is about the only option.

This is the very same kind  of multitasking that  Windows 3.x  or the
original MacOS had and constantly had problems with it. I was quite a
big fan of pre-OS X Mac, but I admit that running there more than one
resource hungry  app was way straight to hell  or to some bomb-themed
system error.  No such things happen here.  I don't know how they did
it, but if I didn't know this isn't a preemptive multitasking system,
I would never guess it from the user experience, it just works.

And I also  like all the little  and big differences  between RISC OS
and the rest of the world.  Context-menu evoked by middle click? Apps
starting with no window by default  and you have to click the icon in
the dock?  Colons and dots instead of (back)slashes in paths?  Saving
files by dragging icon from the save dialog to the disk?

Why not?

And it's still not even  the weirdest british operating system I use.
But that is the topic for part two of this post...

(Written in StrongED, RISC OS 5.30, Raspberry Pi 2B [2])

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/ralfwause/phlog/010524.txt
[2] gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2024-05-02_riscos_screenshot.png