"We must now Single-click "Select" on that icon to actually bring the application to the forefront and activate it. I don't know what that's all about, but that's how it works."
What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I forget it's name) where you could drag sliders to change how much various things were allowed to allocate.
The downside, of course, was that if some app crashed, it would take out every file you had open with it. But then, it didn't really have very good isolation, so often a crashing app would take down the whole OS.
Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?
I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was at the time.
I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it.
I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
I had an Archimedes back in the day, they were incredible machines. I remember hearing about Pipedream but never got to try it, it sounded wild:
PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.
I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.
Author here, thank you for pointing that out. I don't know why "Tray" was so stuck in my mind; the vernacular of the OS never quite embedded itself in my brain. I've updated the article to "Bar."
I used PipeDream on the Cambridge Z88, and only briefly tried it on other platforms under the PipeDream (Archimedes, MS-DOS) and Fireworkz (Windows) names. I think it was a great moonshot of an idea, ahead of its time when you consider Affinity has done the same thing with Illustration/Layout/Photos.
The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though
I find current UIs weird and stupid and extremely dull - which is why I think the CLI is still used so much by at least developers like me.
Drag and drop is one thing we just don't really use more than, say, once every 1/2 hour.
There's no composability really. We have the stupid metaphor of an "App" and it's a little world in itself. You can't really plug things into each other - e.g. use the gimp brush tool in a facebook post.
It's a dead end.
Why ** ** do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
I used to use the ROX window manager and ROX Desktop - they were a great export of RiscOS features to Linux. I liked the way I could customise a menu option with a hotkey so easily. It's no longer maintained and I wasn't smart enough to be able to do it myself then. Perhaps now... :/
> Why * * do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
At least for me, when I tried RiscOS, it was annoying and more work to have to switch to the file manager and then open more window(s) just to save a file. That could also be with RiscOS not having(?) Alt-Tab. I do sometimes use the macOS "proxy-icon" (which I think was disabled by default a few versions ago) to save/move files into finder windows if I already have them open.
Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself.
It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.
Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.
"Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file.""
OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.
Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.
Most of the hardware had rom with its drivers in it. Meant just about everything was a plug and play experience.
And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.
Archimedes computers had CMOS RAM for persistent settings, so I imagine the author's emulator was not set up correctly, as many settings including almost all the ones they describe do persist on a real computer.
Author here. Technically the webmaster is Ghost blogging platform itself, because I just rent a subdomain on their servers. This is frustrating and I'm checking it out now.
"We must now Single-click "Select" on that icon to actually bring the application to the forefront and activate it. I don't know what that's all about, but that's how it works."
What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I forget it's name) where you could drag sliders to change how much various things were allowed to allocate.
The downside, of course, was that if some app crashed, it would take out every file you had open with it. But then, it didn't really have very good isolation, so often a crashing app would take down the whole OS.
Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?
I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was at the time.
I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it.
I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
It looks like there's an fpga implementation as part of the mister project. It could scratch the itch if the real hardware is out of reach.
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Archie_MiSTer
I had an Archimedes back in the day, they were incredible machines. I remember hearing about Pipedream but never got to try it, it sounded wild:
PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.
I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.
The "Icon Tray" here is actually the "Icon Bar" and discussed so widely it's the name of the main Risc OS forum to this day.
Pipedream always was spectacularly odd, even at the time.
Author here, thank you for pointing that out. I don't know why "Tray" was so stuck in my mind; the vernacular of the OS never quite embedded itself in my brain. I've updated the article to "Bar."
I used PipeDream on the Cambridge Z88, and only briefly tried it on other platforms under the PipeDream (Archimedes, MS-DOS) and Fireworkz (Windows) names. I think it was a great moonshot of an idea, ahead of its time when you consider Affinity has done the same thing with Illustration/Layout/Photos.
The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though
I find current UIs weird and stupid and extremely dull - which is why I think the CLI is still used so much by at least developers like me.
Drag and drop is one thing we just don't really use more than, say, once every 1/2 hour.
There's no composability really. We have the stupid metaphor of an "App" and it's a little world in itself. You can't really plug things into each other - e.g. use the gimp brush tool in a facebook post.
It's a dead end.
Why ** ** do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
I used to use the ROX window manager and ROX Desktop - they were a great export of RiscOS features to Linux. I liked the way I could customise a menu option with a hotkey so easily. It's no longer maintained and I wasn't smart enough to be able to do it myself then. Perhaps now... :/
> Why * * do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
At least for me, when I tried RiscOS, it was annoying and more work to have to switch to the file manager and then open more window(s) just to save a file. That could also be with RiscOS not having(?) Alt-Tab. I do sometimes use the macOS "proxy-icon" (which I think was disabled by default a few versions ago) to save/move files into finder windows if I already have them open.
Brings back good memories of playing fun games with my siblings.
Our first computer was an Acorn BBC B Microcomputer.
Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself.
It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
Author here. Working on getting better takes, sorry. (in my defense, I called out my own "bad takes" in the Captain Planet image)
My browser had this down as a phising site? The actual content seems fine though.
Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.
Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!
The site is fine. Doesn't show up as anything bad on Firefox on Mac. I've been reading the site for months, never had a problem.
Same here (Firefox on Windows). But when I opened it in Firefox on my Android phone, it seems fine.
Confirm via uBo. Didn't bother with content because of that.
Actually parts of the content aren't loading, probably also due to it being listed? Strange though! I wonder what happened?
Looks like the source is on PhishTank: https://www.phishtank.net/phish_detail.php?phish_id=9419370
Interesting, the source is (a subdomain on) the Ghost blogging platform.
Author here. Yes, I don't self-host exactly because I was hoping to avoid stuff like this by relying on a more robust back-end than I could provide.
Author here and... what the heck?!
In some ways Archimedes' RiscOS was ahead of its time, in some ways it was a disappointment. It never matured due to lack of momentum, market share.
I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.
Quote from the article we are commenting on...
"Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file.""
OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.
Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.
Most of the hardware had rom with its drivers in it. Meant just about everything was a plug and play experience.
And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.
Archimedes computers had CMOS RAM for persistent settings, so I imagine the author's emulator was not set up correctly, as many settings including almost all the ones they describe do persist on a real computer.
Why is U-Block telling me stonetools.ghost.io is in the fishing/badware list... If the webmaster is here, you might want to take a look.
Author here. Technically the webmaster is Ghost blogging platform itself, because I just rent a subdomain on their servers. This is frustrating and I'm checking it out now.
PipeDream was a wild piece of software. Even as a young teenager in the early 90s I could tell it was a weird paradigm.
I think fireworkz pro was the next evolution of the concept.
Author here. Fireworkz was next, then Fireworkz Pro, both of which are discussed in the article.