On Sun, 28 Feb 2021 at 19:32, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>
> Good; not enough people know of it.

Agreed.

> 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.

:-) Did you know or work with Paul Fellows?

We have a mutual friend and I managed to arrange for him to do a talk
at ROUGOL back in 2012. It was fascinating.

There's a transcript here:
http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/

> 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. :-(

Corrections welcomed, as they say.

A friend of mine was the late great UK IT journalist Guy Kewney, an
exceptional writer and commentator on this field. One of my favourite
bits of his -- I can only paraphrase it, sadly, I've never found it
online -- was a review of WordPerfect 5.

He said, roughly:
"WordPerfect 4.2 was pretty much the best word-processor on any
platform in the world. It had outcompeted all the competition on
everything else. It did everything you could ever want, and it did it
quickly and well with an elegant if odd user interface. Looking at
WordPerfect 5, therefore, I am driven to wonder how the management of
the company decided to create this. Did they look at each other and
say, 'So, we have a great bicycle here. Everyone agrees it's the best
bicycle  in the world. So what we're going to do it, we're going to
put 11 more wheels on it."

WP5 added pull-down CUA menus, bolted rather clumsily on top of 4.2's
function-key based controls. It was bigger, slower, buggier, took more
memory, and had an ugly 2nd UI as well as its original one.

It's funny, looking back now, that the _next_ release, WordPerfect 5.1
for DOS, is the one that almost everyone today looks back upon as
being the peak of the DOS line.

Me -- supporting it back then, but never being a big fan --  I have
WordPerfect 6 for DOS running on PC-DOS 7.1 on a Lenovo Thinkpad. It
was lambasted for being big and slow when it was new. Now, on
decade-old kit, it's blindingly fast, and seems elegant, tiny and
polished.

Funny how time changes our perceptions.

I think I agree with you. It might be possible, with a tonne of work,
to modernise RISC OS into something with pre-emptive multitasking,
multi-threading, multiple processor core support, wifi and bluetooth
and OpenGL and a 3D-composited desktop and all the other things people
expect in a modern OS.

But it wouldn't really be RISC OS any more. Its charm is that it's
tiny and fast and efficient. It's a great bicycle but if anyone tries
to turn it into a motorcycle, I fear it will be a poor one.

There _are_ some things in that blogpost that I got wrong -- I clarify
some in the comments.

RISC OS Developments are porting the OpenBSD TCP-IP stack to RO5. This
will give it IPv6 support and wifi as well with any luck. Bluetooth is
far less important, TBH. And a chap in the ROOL forum has a
proof-of-concept multi-core add-on working. Another chap has NetBSD
executing on one ARM core while RISC OS executes on another, which is
splendidly impressive if slightly insane.

Apparently there is a plan for ARM64 support, too. It's a bit like
Apple did with Classic MacOS on PowerPC: run a tiny kernel underneath
the OS that emulates the old platform on-the-fly. Apparently ARM32
emulation on ARM64 works well and is very fast indeed.

It may get these modernisations anyway. I will be very interested to
see how it goes. I am very tempted to get a RISC OS PineBook as it is.

> Pretty much the case. It *was* a simple design, but grew .... complicated, over the decades.

I agree.

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

:-D Excellent. Very nearly a Douglas Adams quote!

I do have a QL, but I barely know how to operate the thing. SMSQ/E
does seem to have evolved into an interesting, capable OS in the end,
though...

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

I don't think it is. I submit that the Oberon OS ticks pretty much
every single box. Only the A2 variant is SMP-capable, but I have it
running in VMs and on the bare metal here and it's very impressive
indeed.

There used to be a StrongARM version. The code is already
cross-platform and runs or has run on x86, NatSemi 32000, ARM, and
RISC5. I suspect that getting it working again on modern ARM would not
be that hard.

> 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 have to defer to your superior knowledge on this.

I just want to remind folks that the reason I'm here is that I'd
really like to see Squeak running on A2... I think it could be a good
partnership.

> 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.

Very true.

> 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!

Aye, there's the rub.

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