RISC OS
Relive the classic ARM-based RISC OS
RISC OS is an operating system with a fascinating history that dates back decades. Michael Reed tries it out in its current incarnation.
OUR EXPERT
Michael Reed has been RISCing his OS and chancing his ARM since the early 90s.
Back in 1987, British computer manufacturer Acorn released its Archimedes series of workstations that were aimed at educational establishments and home users. Rather than using an off-the-shelf CPU, Acorn designed its own – the ARM processor – which now powers the majority of mobile phones and portable devices.
However, we’re interested in the other half of that legacy: the software part. Specifically, this is RISC OS, the operating system that Acorn created for the Archimedes. We’re going to look at RISC OS 5, an open source version of the operating system that’s currently maintained and can be run natively on modern ARM hardware such as a Raspberry Pi. RISC OS was cutting edge when it was first released, but it’s now quite an old operating system, and it’s deficient in many areas compared to more modern offerings such as Linux or Windows. However, it’s fascinating to look at and use, and it may have a few features that we’d like to see in modern systems.
EXPLORE THE RISC OS INTERFACE
1 Icon bar
Drives and other hardware are on the left, applications are on the right, with system tools located on the far right.
2 Task Manager
A click on the Pi logo (on this distribution) opens up the Task Manager that neatly shows resource usage on the machine.
3 !Help
RISC OS’s help application is system-wide and provides pop-up descriptions of any GUI element under the mouse pointer.
4 Pop-up menu
This is the style of menu that RISC OS has instead of the more common pull-down menus of other systems.
5 Afiler window
This is where you launch applications and load and save files. Filetype is stored within the metadata.
6 Toolbox
RISC OS makes quite a lot of use of toolboxes, which are either glued to the side of an application window or free-floating.
7 Adaptable desktop
The backdrop itself can be used as an application launcher or to store minimised application icons.
Obtaining RISC OS 5
On the original Archimedes computers that RISC OS ran on, the operating system was largely contained within ROMs on the motherboard. This meant that they could at least boot without a floppy or a hard drive. If you want to run RISC OS 5 on modern ARM hardware, you can obtain it from RISC OS Open (www.riscosopen.org), a not-for-profit organisation that carries out most of the maintenance of RISC OS. There are various distros that support different ARM platforms, and in our case we’re going to run it on a Raspberry Pi 400. You can download it as an image file to be written to an SD card, and it’s even offered as an alternative OS in the Raspberry Pi Imager application.