One of the things I loved about RiscOS was a small UI feature. There were no open or save dialogs. Instead, when you saved a file, it minimised to its icon and then you dragged it to the relevant folder. To open a file, you located it and double-clicked.

For me drag-and-drop is not complete without also being able to save by drag-and-drop. On RISC OS you can save your files by dragging the file icon to the place you want to save your file. This can be a directory window, or it could also be another app icon on the taskbar, or an open app window.

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.

iOS (particularly iPadOS) seems to get this about right. Copy / paste / sharing seems to work very well for various work pipelines I use. I rarely if ever touch the filesystem.

Good point.

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.

Yeah same here on the primary computer front. It's certainly the best hassle vs results computing device I've ever owned.

One of my favourite things about RISC OS was the font manager: At the time, it was normal for every application to manage its own fonts (Macintosh may have been an exception), but on RISC OS, fonts were shared between applications. Not only that, but the same renderer was used for screen use and printing, so you really had WYSIWYG, unlike the Mac, which used different rendering on screen and paper (using PostScript for printing and something else for screen use), which resulted in subtle differences, including things that lined up perfectly on screen being not even closely lined up in print (that hit me several times when using the university Mac). Furthermore, the screen renderer used anti-aliasing, so edges would not appear as ragged (on the fairly limited screen resolution), and allowed characters to be positioned at quarter-pixel resolution. And you could scale fonts to any size, as they were rendered from cubic Bezier curves.

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.

Yes! This sort of universal drag-and-drop is something I've been hoping other OSes would pick up on, but you only ever get part-way implementations.

I liked that but sometimes it was a pain in the butt. Particularly if you'd forgotten to open the destination directory window already and the save thing was down 3 levels of menus.

Indeed. RiscOS embraced the file/folder metaphor in a way that modern UIs could really stand to learn from.

I really wish someone would pick up and modernize the ROX Desktop -- which is the Acorn RISC OS UI, on top of Linux.

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/

It would partner really well with a distro such as GoboLinux or possibly even sta.li.

I think it'd be a good fit for Hello [0], AppDirs and AppImages being very closely related, but I don't think probonopd agrees, sadly.

[0] https://github.com/probonopd/hello

Yes I also thought this was great, and I still ofetn think it would be nice to have it back. I already have my folder open in Finder or Explorer, so my no let me drag it there to save.

I guess you kind of have the same thing in mocOS with the proxy icon.

I couldn’t stretch to an A440, but did get an A310. What a great machine. It was blindingly fast for the time (1987). In about 1994 it still out performed a new 486DX100 PC

Yeah the A440 was not cheap. I didn't understand money as much as I do now back then. Equivalent inflation adjusted is about £6500 now (!). Which is why my parents had a heart attack when I just blew it instantly on that. Absolutely would not have bought it if I had some more clue. But to this day I have no regrets as it gave me an excellent foundation, understanding and career in computing.

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?

I facilitated a talk at the London RISC OS user group by the lead architect of RO, Paul Fellows: http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/

From what he said about ARX, I suspect not...

Thanks for this. Will read later.

Wasn’t ARX basically Unix reimplemented in Modula2 ?

I used an A310 and later an A440 as my main machines right up until the late ‘90s when we got one of the original bondi-blue iMacs.

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.

Idle thought: I imagine that as soon as the Apple ARM development boxes drop, someone is going to start evaluating how to port RiscOS to Mac (either on the bare metal or, more likely, via virtualization).

Never thought of that. I'm getting even more excited now, which is a rarity as I'm a miserable sod.

Yeah that would be amazing.

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.

Not sure whether you're confusing some OS or application performance with the performance of the CPU or are misremembering. A 8MHz ARM2 performed at about 5MIPS. That was impressive in '87, but in '90 my 20MHz 80386 ran at about 6MIPS. The 486DX100 of the mid nineties was much faster.

Possibly in terms of feel. They really ran a pile of crap on a 486DX100 in comparison. The RISC OS machines of the early 1990s had a similar feel to a modern PC on the performance front with every-day tasks.

I'm not sure if hack-job OSs are 'ahead of their time'. These were also the days of MS-DOS.

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.

Oh yeah the entire 1990s was a shit show where they burned the entire company to the ground through incompetence.

> the OS was a quick hack job

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!)

Yes Arthur was the hack job I was referring to :)

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.