Item — HN Reader

> the desktop background is called the "backdrop"

Hmm, non-British AmigaOS also used backdrop¹. Was that perhaps the common name back then?

Plus, you can experience /some/ of the quirkiness of RiscOS on Linux by playing around with rox². rox-filer is packaged for Debian and it spits a Choices directory in to ~, even though it is now just a bunch of symlinks to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME³.

¹ https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop

² http://rox.sourceforge.net/

³ http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html

1 comments

AmigaOS was Canadian. We all know that's like halfway to being british. :)

Rox is a great theatrical production but I want to encourage people to spend some time with RiscOS ... it becomes less and less normal the more time you spend with it. You can do shell scripting with BBC Basic for instance and the coding styles honestly look closer to some elaborate preprocessor language than Basic.

RiscOS is essentially what I think would happen if you took a bunch of programmers and threw them on an island in 1985, told them to write an operating system and that you'd be back in a few years.

Meanwhile, an occasional soiled computer book would wash on the shore like tanenbaum's operating system book with 80% of the pages missing and the programmers pieced together incomplete passages based on conjecture and consensus like a bunch of biblical scholars with a torn ancient codex.

I read a comment on a forum where someone said programming in it reminded them of GEM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEM_(desktop_environment)) but I haven't spent any significant time programming applications on either system so I can't really confirm.