RISC OS

The OS was designed by Acorn for the (26) 32-bit ARM based Acorn Archimedes, released in 1987 as the Arthur operating system.

RISC OS was a rapid development of Arthur 1.2 after the failure of the ARX project. The first release was to be called Arthur 2, but was renamed to RISC OS 2, and was first sold in April 1989. It had multitasking with some limitations, but was not multithreading. It initially ran from a 512 Kb ROM module. The WIMP interface offered all the standard features and fixed many of the bugs that had hindered Arthur. It lacked virtual memory and memory protection[?]. The main advantage of the OS was its ROM; it booted very quickly and while it was easy to crash it was impossible to break. Its performance was further improved in that it was written in assembly language. The OS existed in modules and these could be updated by modules in RAM as improvements were made. Such was the modularity of RISC OS, that advanced users have been known to swap in their own replacement modules.

RISC OS 3 was released with the A5000 in 1991, it was almost four times the size of OS 2 and ran from a 2Mb ROM. It improved multitasking and also placed some of the more popular base applications in the ROM. RISC OS 3.5 was sold from 1994 with the first RISC PC. When the RISC PC was improved in 1995 the OS was updated to 3.6 which featured much better hard-disk access and built in networking including TCP/IP, although the OS remained in ROM. In 1996 the RISC PC was upgraded to a StrongARM processor and the OS kernel was rewritten to take advantage, the new revision being dubbed 3.7.

Acorn halted work in all areas except STBs[?] in late 1998, and the company was renamed to Element 14. RISC OS development was halted with the 1996 OS 3.7. In 1999 a new company called RISCOS Limited[?] was founded. They licensed the rights to RISC OS from the new owner, Pace Micro, and continued the development of OS 3.8, and released it as RISC OS 4 Select in July 1999. Their current version is 4.03, several thousand copies were sold according to figures released by them.
RISC OS 5 is a separate evolution of RISC OS 3.x from Castle Technology Ltd for their Iyonix PC line of Acorn-clones, which run on the Intel XScale ARM processor.

In July 2003, Castle Technology Ltd bought RISC OS from Pace Micro [1] (http://www.iyonix.com/iyonix/news/riscos.shtml).

External links

• http://www.riscos.com
• http://www.riscos.org
• The Drobe Launchpad (http://www.drobe.co.uk)
• RISC OS Programming Information (http://www.riscos.info)
• The Iconbar - RISC OS News & Resources (http://www.iconbar.com)