I bought a fully stacked A440 when they were released, many thanks to the kindness of a deceased relative and much to the dismay of it mother who said I should have bought history books and art materials instead.
Really if they had something RISC OS 2 quality on day one, which would have been a monumental feat like the hardware was they’d have done better. I enjoyed every moment of using the machine after RISC OS 2 came out. Before that I was slightly scared I’d burned a monumental amount of money.
This way it is possible to create workflows where you have small specialized apps that complement each other. You would open a file by dragging it to the first app, edit it, drag the result to a 2nd app do some more editing, then drag the result to the next app and so on and save only the final result back to disk. This is basically supporting the Unix philosophy of having many small programs that do one thing well, and combining them to achieve the desired result.
Instead what we now mostly have on all platforms are huge monolithic programs that try to cram every possible feature into a single package. One reason for this, is in my opinion, that a workflow that is similar to the RISC OS way of dragging from app to app is just to cumbersome on systems without drag and drop between apps, as every step one has to go through the filing system, saving a file by browsing through a directory tree and browse the directory tree again when loading the file in the next app.
I tend to use my iPad as my primary computer - and once you get your head around the fact that everything runs off the share menu it's basically the same concept, without the physical dragging.
This was 1988. TrueType for Mac was not until 1981, and it used quadratic Bezier curves, which are inferior to cubic, and AFAIR did not use anti-aliasing and the hinting system was inferior to that used by RISC OS.
I really wish Acorn had licensed their font technology to other companies, but like many other of their technologies (such as Econet and the video codec used by RISC OS) Acorn developed these for their own use only. It is almost a miracle that the ARM processor escaped the Acorn-only fate of so many other technologies.
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/
It would partner really well with a distro such as GoboLinux or possibly even sta.li.
I guess you kind of have the same thing in mocOS with the proxy icon.
But yes the things lasted a hell of a long time. Mine went until 1998 at which point it was replaced with a Pentium II box running Windows dual booting with Linux. Got 10 years out of that machine which is remarkable considering the progress and change in the 1990s.
I'm on a Mac mini at the moment with an iPad Pro as a secondary machine so the moment an ARM Mac comes out I'm back with an ARM desktop again. It's all a big circle. Perhaps ARX was going to be an early macOS X contender... who knows?
From what he said about ARX, I suspect not...
Wasn’t ARX basically Unix reimplemented in Modula2 ?
Loved RiscOS - I knew it inside out and backwards, and it was so ahead of it’s time, that using one of the terrible RM Nimbus 286 PCs they had at college felt like being suddenly transported back to the Stone Age.
As an aside: I'd love to see the alternate timeline where RiscOS continued to be developed, instead of getting bogged down with pointless legal issues for 20 years.
What would it be like? Would it have gone through a Mac OS-like transition from RiscOS Classic to RiscOS X?
If it was open sourced in the early 2000s, could it have become a viable competitor to Linux on the desktop and Android on mobile? As a lightweight but powerful OS for low-powered ARM devices it should have been perfectly placed.
But it's certainly good to remember that not everything Acorn did was shiny and golden. They deserve to be remembered more than they often are, but they've had their fair share of misses too.
You mean Arthur? I have to agree - the only impressive thing about it was that it was written in BBC Basic. I also spent too much on an A440 (and a multisync monitor that literally made my hair stand on end when I turned it on). Still, I have no regrets. As you say, RISC OS 2 delivered the goods. By day, I was working in monochrome text mode on a clunky old 16-bit IBM XT. By night, I was in the glorious high-res colour 32-bit future. One of the finest computers even made IMHO (except for the mouse!)
My father was using a 286 by then. It was vastly inferior however he built some software with MS PDS (quickbasic) I think it was and made a lot of cash. Software in the blood.
That would be 22 bit, which seems quite unlikely. Perhaps you're thinking of 4096 (= 2^12 = (16)^3)? It seems only 256 of them could be shown at once and only 240 could be modified [1][2][3]? If those are correct then it is more limited than VGA, which could show 256 colours chosen from 262144 (= 2^18 = (64)^3). Some Archimedes resolutions were more like low-end SVGA though [1].
[1] https://lowendmac.com/2018/acorn-archimedes-computers/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth
Edit:
[3] Original brochures! http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu... and http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu...
4096 colours. :-)
Otherwise, yes, pretty much. I bought a 2nd hand A310 in 1989 and it easily outperformed the fastest machines my employer sold (e.g. the IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21, a blazing 25MHz 80386DX with 64 KB of secondary cache) by a factor of about 8×.
Given that the state of the PC OS art at that time was MS-DOS 3.3, which very few people bothered to put Windows 2 on top of, Acorn's RISC OS 2 was astonishingly advanced, too.
Acorn had a tendency to be ahead of its time. Our first home computer, the Acorn Electron, could be expanded with a 3.5" floppy drive. Later, when we got a PC, we moved from 3.5" to 5.25" floppies. That was my first disappointment in having to make a step backwards in tech.
The Archimes' successor, the RISC PC, could even have an Intel processor as co-processor. Or, instead, a card with 4 or 5 more ARM processors. At the time is was probably the cheapest way for a consumer to get a multi-processor machine.