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.