Twenty Years of RISC OS Open

I used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer.

I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It could be expanded with BASIC plugins to do just about anything! It was distributed by the Arcade BBS to start with then Acorn User magazine put it on the floppy disk that came with the magazine.

Amazingly Director was written entirely in ARM assembler (with the help of lots of macros). I used to really enjoy writing ARM assembler and used to grit my teeth whenever I had to read the assembly output of the C compiler! I remember writing quicksort in ARM assembler as part of this (to sort menu entries) which was a lot of fun.

I still have a RiscPC under my desk, but I don't think I've turned it on for nearly 15 years :-(

As someone that grew up using Acorn Archimedes it's hard to express to those that were never involved just how difficult what has been going on here is or how surprising it is they have stuck at it. The overwhelming majority of us had left long before 2000 (even before 1995 really), and it's not as if there were ever that many compared to the Amiga or ST universes.

The real value of a niche platform like RISC OS isn't measured by market share, but by how much of its design DNA survives elsewhere.

Twenty years, but apparently no screenshots. How can they be serious about making a graphical operating system with no screenshots anywhere on their web site?