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FWIW, I have running RISC OS machines that I still use occasionally for the few applications that had, and have, no peer. I'll be watching closely to see if any of my older work will be of use to the community.
You must mean Chocks Away?
;)
What applications have no peer?
!Draw, for one. I have yet to find an application that lets me draw things as quickly and cleanly as that. Anything else that has the same capabilities is a pig to use in terms of menus, actions, clicks, etc. Other packages that offer more are often harder to drive and too fussy, and anything that offers less is usually not good enough for what I want.
!Draw hits the sweet spot, for me, of capability and usability.
+1 for !Draw. I nearly cried when I got my first PC which had Paint on it. I then spent 5 years dredging through various applications and I still haven't found something better.
Did you ever try DrawPlus or ArtWorks?
Obviously ArtWorks, with significant UI changes, morphed into Xara, but I think DrawPlus got ported to Windows in some form too.
Napster?
This is all very interesting from a nostalgia viewpoint (the Open VMS cluster hit that spot for me ;)) but have we seen much in the way of cutting edge OS work on this device?
The Pi gives us a great experimental platform to explore new possibilities does it not?
My own point of view, given its supposed background as an educational tool, is that this should have been on the device from Day One, and work should never had been started on it supported Linux. The immediacy of an insta-booting machine with BASIC is one of the things that cemented my interest in computers and programming as a ten year old.
I may, of course, just be being nostalgic here...
I know what you mean - for a programming learning device then a near instant boot into a programming language style run time (and wow Basic was great for that - I cut my teeth on a DEC PDP 11-70 running RSTSE and the terminal started with the Basic "Ready" prompt) is just about perfect. Coherent, succinct and ready to go.
But there are other things to be learned as well - hence my interest at the OS level.
but some other people are looking forward to use pi for more 'serious' applications. luckily a quick google revealed that risc os supports lua and python, although jvm would be nice.
I'd argue, having used it extensively in the 80's and 90's, that the BASIC variant shipped with RISC OS it is very serious.
It's a different league to your usual BASIC variants and scales up very well to large applications and even down to system programming.
It's completely unique and people could learn a lot from how little time it takes to knock out something useful, fast and powerful in it.
FWIW, we've developed and supplied safety-critical, soft-real-time applications in BBC BASIC. It was a genuinely serious language.
I also developed symbolic execution and partial verification systems for it, and that helped confirm that our systems were appropriate for the context in which they were used.
Please tell me who you work for, so I know to avoid any of your products. Using BBC Basic like this terrifies me. If anything, because its total lack of type safety for anything but the simplest of values.
Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety.
I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms.
Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints.
Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do:
REM win
p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr%
REM fail
p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr%
When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut:
Out of interest, let me ask: Do you believe it's impossible to write safety-critical software in C?
+1 for awesomeness :)
but it's missing "hip" language constructs like closure or functional approach, unless there's something like CoffeeScript for basic
Yes there's nothing hip about it at all. But for the best part of 30 years of BBC BASIC, I've not heard a single complaint about that fact.
Looks like I need to get myself a proper (no-scrollwheel) three-button mouse again. :)
What would it take to get Sibelius running on this? Is it possible to get binaries of this still?
That would require some serious work I imagine. Sibelius was 26-bit ARM (the status register was mixed with the program counter if I remember). It would require some extensive rework to do anything useful on later fully 32-bit addressed ARM processors.
I wonder what this means for the demo scene - I bet some awesome demos can come out from this.
I don't know why anyone downvoted this. Some of the demos on the old archimedes platform were awesome.
RISC OS was so awesome.
Windows looked like a dinosaur compared to this at the time
It's still a dinosaur in functional gui features. Separation of document window and app. Resize, move, scroll, click and type in windows without bringing them to the front of the stack. A send to back of stack button. Drag and drop load and save. Menus you can select and item and keep the menu open.
> Drag and drop load and save
This.
Open/Save dialogues simply aren't necessary with a proper desktop metaphor. Shame no-one uses them any more.
ROX brings some of RISC OS goodness to Linux/Unix desktops BTW.