I remember using a very `strange` looking computer with a nice designed operating system at school in Cambridge 1997 to play crosswords. It was an Acorn Archimedes running RISC OS 3.
The Acorn company was founded in 1978 by Hermann Hauser and
Chris Curry. In the 1980s, practically all British schools were equipped
with their computers. In England, this computers were also used as home
computers.
Acorn is a small company competing in a market of PC and software giants
who have much greater resources. But more and more schools switched over
to Windows or Mac platforms. Still, the educational sector remained an
important market for a long time.
On 17th September 1998, Acorn announced that all work on desktop computers
had ceased (the research for Phoebe workstation which had been scheduled
for November was cancelled) and that development would focus completely
on the digital TV market from now on. The even changed the company
to Element 14 early in 1999.
In my opinion this british computer uses a very good BASIC language
and it is possible to 'create small programs which do a lot'.
Released in 1979, Atom was the first computer of Acorn and the predecessor of the following famous BBC computer. With only 4 colors and 2kB RAM Atom (up to 16 kB) was quite a tough computer for that time.
A superb Atom Emulator for DOS written by Wouter RAS can be downloaded from the web. There are also lots of demo's and games for the Atom on his page.
After Atom, Acorn released the first very succesful Proton in 1981. Equipped with a 2 MHz Processor, a sound processor and 16 colours, it was already highly expandable. With the Z80, the Proton was capable to run the operating system CP/M and the progressiv language HI-BASIC
Because of the expandability of the BBC B, it was quite an expensive microcomputer
at the time. Acorn decided to produce a smaller, more limited "little brother",
called Electron. It was launched in 1983, and inherited the BBC micro's
wonderfully structured BBC BASIC language and the graphics modes, but not
the teletext mode, so it was obviously meant for the home market. Sound
was limited to one channel. Most of the expansion ports were also removed.
Still, because "BBC" and "Acorn" were quality and "educational" brand
names, parents provided for a huge demand near the Electron's first Christmas.
Acorn was not prepared for this demand, so most parents bought ZX Spectrums
for their children instead. The year after, the Amstrad CPC was released,
and included a monitor, tape deck and a reasonable version of BASIC. This
really finished the Electron off.
However, the Electron did become popular and was highly regarded among
its users, and for a long while, Superior sold more Electron versions than
BBC versions of their games.
Graphics modes 0, 1 and 2 were noticeably slower on the Electron because
of the lack of the 6845 CRTC.
The Electron had no separate Function Keys; the number keys doubled
up for them. To use them you needed to hold down a special "FUNC" key and
then type a number key. BASIC tokens (such as PRINT, LET) were printed
on the letter keys. If you pressed the "FUNC" key and a letter key the
token would be typed in. Acorn were aware that a similar system was popular
on the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum. Acorn User magazine even published a memory
resident program which provided similar functionality to BBC users, some
time after the Electron's release!
Archimedes computers were the first of Acorn's computers (launched in 1987)
with a 32 bit architecture. The later models featured graphics resolutions
of up to 800 × 600 with up to 256 colours, 8-bit logarithmic stereo sound
with eight channels, ARM3 processors (up to 25 MHz, I think) and up to
4 MB of RAM (16 MB with one model). Many of them can still be found in
British schools. The last OS version supporting them was RISC OS 3.11.
Note that the Archimedes was 10 times faster than an equivalent PC
at the time (386/16 MHz) !
- Archie is an Archimedes emulator for DOS
- Arcem is an Archimedes emulator for Linux and RISC PC's
The first generation of RiscPCs was launched back in 1994. Afterwards,
there were numerous, but not really significant improvements to the design.
The RiscPC has two standard SIMM slots and one non-standard slot for
1 or 2 MB of VRAM (can also run without VRAM), an IDE bus, a VIDC20 chip
combining video and sound output (up to 135 MHz pixel rate, 24bpp colours
and CD quality sound) and an IOMD chip that provides highspeed buffered
serial/parallel input and output as well as memory-mapping.
I heard that it is even possible to use the second slot for a 486 Intel
processor and running Windows inside of RISC OS.
Picture
The BBC BASIC became famous for its rich set of built-in features. Where
other dialects at the time referred the programmer to "PEEKs" and "POKEs"
to produce decent graphics and sound, and were otherwise not much more
than simplified assembly language with numeric and string variables, the
BBC BASIC had almost all you could ask for:
Graphics: MODE (set graphics/text mode), COLOUR (set text color), GCOL
(set graphics operation color and drawing mode (normal, AND, OR, XOR)),
MOVE (position graphics cursor), DRAW (draw a line), PLOT (provided a lot
of primitives, like points, lines, filled triangles). The only thing missing
was sprite graphics, and this is where BBC games lost out on some of their
competitors'.
However, the above features were perfect for educational use, both
with 2D and 3D graphics. Also, this shift of emphasis resulted in a number
of innovative, mathematically powered blockbuster games which started their
lives on the BBC, but were ported to most micros around. The most prominent
examples of such hits are Elite (of course), Sentinel (by Geoff Crammond)
and Thrust. Aviator was heralded as the most accurate flight simulator
to that date, and Revs did the same for racing simulations (both written
by Geoff Crammond).
Have a look at those commands of my BBCBASIC page.
BBC userguide (260kB)
BBC interpreter
(called brandy) for Linux, BSD, DOS and RISC OS.
Arthur was the first (non multitasking) operating system from Acorn with a graphical user interface developped for Archimedes.
In 1988, RISC OS is released. It is a multitasking operating system and
graphical user interface, supporting anti-aliased fonts and laser printers.
Features:
Single-user, co-operatively multitasking, but not multithreading (you can multithread within one task with the help of an extension module).
Provides a desktop with window environment. From the very beginning, there was an icon bar showing icons for filing systems and programs. The Task Manager module lists all tasks together with the memory they take up and allows you to alter the amount of memory for applications that let you.
The OS is not loaded from disc, but comes in 4 MB of ROM. This saves you a lot of RAM, makes the machine more invulnerable against viruses, allows for machines without harddisc (predestined for networks) and makes booting very fast. (The minimum is about 3 seconds with a StrongARM processor!) Replacing old parts of the OS without copying all of it to RAM is also possible: The ROM is subdivided into 4k pages, each of which can be replaced by a page in RAM. Alternatively, you can also replace one of the over 100 modules making up the OS.
Consistent look and feel across all applications. In part, this is due to the OS providing many routines to easily implement it this way, and in part to Acorn's efforts at setting up very useful rules about how a program should behave. (E.g. what names the mouse buttons have and what effect they should usually have - the whole Style Guide is 130 pages long.) The result is that for any new programs you get, you hardly need to peek inside the manual - it's all self-explanatory.
RISC OS has always supported what Big Bill had the nerve to call "Plug & Play" - Acorn users cannot quite understand why you should first have to fiddle about with interrupts etc. before an extension card works.
All filing systems (CD, HD, Floppy, ROM, RAM and soft-loaded ones) also install icons on the icon bar, which allow you to access them quickly. The RISC OS equivalent to Microsoft's Explorer is simply called the Filer. It opens a new window for each directory. Copying/moving files is achieved by dragging them from one directory to another. Similarly, to save a file from an application, you just have to drag the file icon to a directory window. The Drag & Drop method will also work between applications, e.g. you can write some text in a text editor and then directly 'save' it to a word processor window without saving to file or to some clipboard.
Nice 3D look of windows. The excellent Outline font manager anti-aliases fonts in real-time as it draws them to the screen. You can choose any font for your system font, and in contrast to Windows, those fonts are very readable even on a low-resolution screen... A special mode even allows anti-aliasing to work with multicoloured backgrounds. This feature is not known for Microsoft products before Win98 or WINNT. Are antialiased fonts supported for Linux? Some applications like Acrobat Reader or KSIAGuse this feature but there is no general support for any application at the moment
Printing has been implemented in such a way that you don't need a new printer driver for each program you buy. Instead, programs print by making calls to the OS which will turn the graphics primitives either into PostScript or into bitmaps and send them to the parallel port, to a file or over a network. You only need one printer driver to allow all programs to print.
You can change the screen resolution and number of colours at any time.
A very fast BASIC interpreter is supplied as part of RISC OS. Using it, you can create programs running in the desktop - you need not buy any expensive development software. The interpreter also contains an excellent ARM assembler.
There must be also a RedHat Linux version for RISC PC's but unfortunately I haven't had the time to futher investigations yet