RISC OS

I've been meaning to give it a go on my RPi, though I expect it to be a tad to antiquated to be of any actual use these days.

>>59706508
Make sure you update it first since they added monitor detection.

RISC-OS used to be an education platform so I'm sure you'll be able to find word processors and spreadsheet programs, and there's NetSurf ported to it.

>>59704883
It used to be cool but these days it's pretty dated.

Seems a bit riscky desu.

>>59706508
Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. It's the same OS that was very useful in the 90s. Same with anything from that time. I'd say that anything from about the late 80s onwards is "useful" in its own confines, with the Amiga being a great show of this since its still getting software written for it.

>>59707694
The Amiga is a great example.
It's hobbyists still make great use of the OS and the hardware possibilities.

>>59706888
Kek, afraid of losing an ARM or leg?

>>59704883
looks comfy, solaris like

>>59704883
>ARM SMCs
SMC? You mean the versions of the OS that run on embedded systems without user interaction?

..or did you mean SoC?

>>59707784
They could have also meant SBC = Single-Board-Computer, I've seen them called that.

>>59707755
I'm of the opinion that they've been, for lack of a better phrase, artificially outdated. What people want from computers (let's be honest) really hasn't changed since the turn of the 90s, what has changed is that there's been several unrequired technologies put in place to stop them being useful. There's really no reason, as an implementation, that chat applications can scale all the way back to 8bit machines (what's a dial-up BBS or IRC channel if not a text chat interface?).

It's the same with the web itself, with Javascript being a requirement (which is a whole thread in itself).

Not to say we should have just applied the brakes in `95 (maybe in some areas...) but I think people need to rethink the context of a machine before deciding its outdated. I mean, let's say all you use a computer for is e-mail, you'd be fine with a machine well over 20 years old.

>>59707886
>They could have also meant SBC = Single-Board-Computer, I've seen them called that.
Oh, makes sense, thanks.

>>59707886
>I'm of the opinion that they've been....
True that, the rapid development in computing performance has made developers lazy.
Obviously much of the things we use our computers for could be made easily on far far weaker hardware without any problems, only with good software optimization.

But there isn't really a problem nowadays either, hardware is cheap and nothing is going to change anyways.
I'm more looking forward to new architectures that end our legacy shit we have nowadays.

>>59707694
Even the early '80s, really anything can be made useful for something. It can still do math faster than you ever will. It's just a matter of convenience, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

>>59707886
>What people want from computers (let's be honest) really hasn't changed since the turn of the 90s
That's only partially true, the web is a much bigger deal now and our expectations of it are very different in 2017 from what they were in 1997, it's as much an application platform now as it was a hypertext delivery platform, and let's not even get started on security considerations, although they aren't really that computationally expensive unless you're going far back.

>>59707962
The college-age hippy in me is actually quite excited for the low-power technologies coming about. I hope these <3w machines really take off in development for that reason. RISC-OS Open is, if nothing else, a brilliant proof concept that it flies even in a RPi 1. It shows that you can make a nearly-modern OS on very minimal hardware, and be very comfortable as you do so.

>>59708006
With a bit of intelligence the consuming parts of the web can be done in a more intelligent way, but while its encouraged to be lazy about it people will continue to produce heft sites and bloated browsers. It's not as if we're at a point of no return either since now its trendy to have a small efficient car rather than a truck or gas guzzler.

If you had a youtube-browser app that threw the videos into mpv or something then you'd absolutely be able to play them on something like a ARM SoC (or an expanded Amiga which can play mpeg now).

I think we really need to encourage cleverness again.

>>59708111
There still is cleverness in some developers, just that most don't do that, already because they lack the knowledge for it.
We need so many developers because our software library has rapidly expanded, it's just easier for them to use pre-designed APIs and frameworks that are bloated by themselves or just result in bloated products.
Every OS focuses on it's software also being developed like that, for ease of use or security reasons, the times programs did their own memory management and had direct access to the metal are over.

But it is good to see people still doing it at least as a hobby.
With platforms like the Pi or Amiga we can see people still coming up with clever ideas, sadly there isn't any work for them on the market, even the simplest embedded systems are powerful enough to cope with unoptimized code.

>>59704883
Used to love it back in the acorn days, wish it was better supported.

>>59708256
This is why I think there should be an interesting limited machine. I mean, the Pi itself sold 10 million (according to them). The hunger for things that aren't power houses but are interesting is out there, there just needs to be a machine that can combine the cheapness of the pi and the expandability of a retro computer. Stick a cool sound chip in there as well and I bet it would eclipse the Pi.

>>59708419
Half of the Pi's are laying in a dusty drawer and the other half is in dedicated projects like emulation machines though.

True, they could make even more interesting devices that would probably spark interest in people again. But we will never see a machine like that replace anything as a daily driver.

>>59708489
Let's be honest, most "daily drivers" these days are phones, not computers. Even half of 4chan posters are on phones.

RISC OS was actually my first OS, pretty much every British school used Acorn systems in the 90s and my brother managed to snag one from a dumpster when they were getting rid of them.

Sadly it didn't last long, IIRC I dragged the HDD icon to the trash can and then it froze and wouldn't boot anymore. Sad because it had some great games, but that got my parents to get me a real PC so it wasn't all bad.

I really should get it running on an RPi sometime, not just to relive nostalgia but for those sweet code bounties they have running: https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty

>>59708511
Exactly. But the deal with phones isn't any better.

>>59708540
People happy to replace computers with phones wont care about any of this at all anyway.

>>59708531
Their RC is out of date (2015), so you need to update it a newer build.

Considering there's people downgrading from smartphones to dumbphones it wouldn't surprise me to see people trading their 'fun' computer to a 'productivity' computer. Shit, I might even need to be one of them with all the time I waste on this shitty modern web.

>>59708814
Not even being funny, but you could make a "productivity" computer with just a Linux install without X.

Fun fact: emacs can work as a spreadsheet if you open a file with it, where the extension is *.ses. Here's a tutorial:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/ses.html

>>59704883
it's quite fun to mess around with, but there's not really a practical use for it.

>>59709373
See: >>59707694

>>59709357
Emacs is a great OS, text editor is kinda lacking though