One of the longest-lived GUI operating systems in the world has its origins as an emergency project – specifically the means by which Acorn planned to rescue the original Archimedes operating system.
This is according to the original Acorn Arthur project lead, Paul Fellows, who spoke about the creation of RISC OS at the RISC OS User Group Of London, ROUGOL [after some helpful arrangements made by Liam Proven – Ed].
On Monday, your correspondent hosted and moderated a reunion of four of the original developers of Acorn’s RISC OS.
Fellows explained that participating were “Paul Fellows (VidC controller, Palette, I2C interface, Real Time Clock and EEPROM), Tim Dobson (Fonts, Audio and Utilities), Richard Manby (Graphics and Desktop), and Stuart Swales (Fileswitch and Heap Manager).”
I’m told a video of the talk might well be forthcoming in due course - the person who edits them has a backlog of work.
It’s remarkable that ROUGOL have been holding (free!) monthly meetings for over 20 years, for RISC OS enthusiasts in reach of London. But recent meetings have been online rather than in-person, and I gather this most recent one, despite being in-person, had the guests appearing virtually, so not quite the real-life panel one might have hoped for. But it was free!
I just came across a much earlier talk by Paul Fellows also at ROUGOL - transcribed to webpage with photos here: ARX, Arthur and RISC OS - Paul Fellows (2012)
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance.
But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first “proper” computer: an Acorn Archimedes. The Archie remains one of the most beautiful computers to use and to program I’ve ever known. This was the machine for which Acorn developed the original ARM chip. Acorn also had am ambitious project to develop a new, multitasking, better-than-Unix OS for it, written in Modula-2 and called ARX. It never shipped, and instead, some engineers from Acorn’s in-house AcornSoft publishing house did an inspired job of updating the BBC Micro OS to run on the new ARM hardware. The result was called Arthur. Version 2 was renamed RISC OS.
