> On 2021-02-28, at 5:11 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am well aware of RISC OS. I distributed some fractal generators for
> RISC OS back in the 1980s. :-) I have a RPi 3B+ running RISC OS Direct
> sitting right next to me.

Good; not enough people know of it.
I was involved before it was even a Thing, and kept using as my main work system (even coercing assorted research labs in Silicon Valley to support me in this insanity) until about 2010.


> I wrote some of it up in a blog post, here:
> https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/73983.html

I'd dispute a few of your assertions there but, yeah, mostly. I don't think one could 'improve' RISC OS into a usefully modern OS but I do think one could create a modern OS with the 'spirit' of RISC OS. And nobody would use it. :-(


> I still play around with RISC OS today. The reasons that I do not
> think it is a suitable candidate for new efforts are:
[snip]
Pretty much the case. It *was* a simple design, but grew .... complicated, over the decades.

> 
> Other interesting lightweight vintage OSes which are now FOSS:
Mention not these primitive abacus's.


> I was not merely looking for a lightweight OS. I had a demanding list
> of criteria.
> 
> I looked for:
> • a clean, simple OS, with SMP support, that supported pre-emption,
> memory management etc.
> • in a type-safe language, with a native-object-code compiler — not
> JITTed, not using a VM or runtime
> • and a readable language, not something far outside the Algol family
> of imperative HLLs
> • that was portable across different architectures
> • that was FOSS and could be forked
> • that was documented and had a user community who knew it
> • that can be built with FOSS tools (which RISC OS fails, for instance)
> • which is or was used by non-specialists for general purpose computing
> • which can usefully access the Internet
> • which runs on commodity hardware
> • which does not have a strongly filesystem-centric design that would
> not fit a PMEM-only computer (i.e. not an xNix)

Well, as Ken says, that's pretty much an empty set. 

I'd certainly not accept the 'not jitted' criterion since I am going to stand on my claim that it would make it much easier to write and maintain a flexible system. 
I'd also point out that the OS per se has nothing at all to do with whether an in-use system is suited to general users or experts - that's the domain of the software running on top of/in the OS. With sufficient work and inspiration one could even make Windows tolerable at the user level.

If you can find a way to engage a few tens of millions of plausible currency units then there may be avenues to success. Some of us on this very list have seriously tried in the past but if you have any way to get it done... fabulous!

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: STOP: No Op