> When a program needs to allow the user to choose a file, drag and drop is again used, with the window providing a drop area to collect the file
The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another, without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at all.
I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust". Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.
Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.
ajb · 2h ago
Acorn just plain didn't have the manpower. They failed to effectively enter the international market and so other companies with a wider customer base out-invested them.
They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel, Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.
The internals of riscos were creaking by the end; it didn't have a proper library system and only had cooperative multitasking. There was an internal project ('galileo') to replace it, but it suffered from second system effect and NIH and never saw the light of day.
fidotron · 1h ago
> They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel, Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.
Are you referring to RISC iX? I had no idea there were serious users of that to be honest.
A few years ago some Acorn strategy documents leaked from the early 90s and it showed they basically knew the game was up long pre-Risc PC. I don't think any number of people would have helped them by 1992. There was this odd void where everyone (such as Xara) kind of knew the PC was going to take over everything, but it just wasn't quite there, and then suddenly it was.
ajb · 35m ago
Yes, RISC iX. I've no idea how many users it had to be honest .
They kept going for a period by virtue of owning ARM. When the shareholders persuaded them to list it directly, the game was over. Before that they bet on set-top-boxes and the supposed PC replacement, the NC (thin client).
Lammy · 2h ago
> rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop
ROX-Filer is still to this day my file manager of choice for any X11 system.
fiddlerwoaroof · 1h ago
Yeah, ROX-Filer is an amazingly good bit of software, once you figure out its UX quirks
sillywalk · 2h ago
> serious OS internals
There is a "moonshot" effort to redo the internals of RiscOS from RiscOS assembly.
Yeah, I'd seen this. I've not been a participant in the RISC OS community since the 90s, and clearly do not share the same enthusiasm some have for aspects of it.
I'm honestly of the view the wisest thing to do would be focus on making it play well with being emulated, right down to enabling enhancements when doing so (such as graphics acceleration), but then not being in that world it really is not my call at all.
trebligdivad · 1h ago
Yeh that was pretty neat - as I remember the OS/libraries had a concept of whether the place you had dragged to was file storage or another application, so that an application could know not to mark itself as 'saved' if you just dragged to another application.
lizknope · 4h ago
I searched for "ARM" and didn't see it in the article. The Acorn ran on ARM (that's what the A in ARM stood for anyway, Acorn RISC Machine)
You can run RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi which is also ARM based.
> The Save dialog is normally presented as a menu, into which you enter a filename
> This menu however is deeply confusing.
No, this is the greatest piece of the RISC OS UI. It makes all other systems save dialogs seem like total nonsense. You just put files where you want them. The only thing is that the OK button shouldn't exist.
ranger_danger · 1h ago
One of the biggest problems I've noticed with younger computer users is that they have no idea where they saved a file. Having to drag it to a specific folder seems like it would be harder to forget in that case.
The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another, without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at all.
I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust". Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.
Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.
They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel, Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.
The internals of riscos were creaking by the end; it didn't have a proper library system and only had cooperative multitasking. There was an internal project ('galileo') to replace it, but it suffered from second system effect and NIH and never saw the light of day.
Are you referring to RISC iX? I had no idea there were serious users of that to be honest.
A few years ago some Acorn strategy documents leaked from the early 90s and it showed they basically knew the game was up long pre-Risc PC. I don't think any number of people would have helped them by 1992. There was this odd void where everyone (such as Xara) kind of knew the PC was going to take over everything, but it just wasn't quite there, and then suddenly it was.
They kept going for a period by virtue of owning ARM. When the shareholders persuaded them to list it directly, the game was over. Before that they bet on set-top-boxes and the supposed PC replacement, the NC (thin client).
ROX-Filer is still to this day my file manager of choice for any X11 system.
There is a "moonshot" effort to redo the internals of RiscOS from RiscOS assembly.
https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2025/03/28/moonshot...
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/risc-os-moonsho...
I'm honestly of the view the wisest thing to do would be focus on making it play well with being emulated, right down to enabling enhancements when doing so (such as graphics acceleration), but then not being in that world it really is not my call at all.
You can run RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi which is also ARM based.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-pi
EDIT: especially that you can use it to do multiple menu selections without actually closing the menu.
• <http://toastytech.com/guis/indexriscos.html>
• <https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/riscos>
> This menu however is deeply confusing.
No, this is the greatest piece of the RISC OS UI. It makes all other systems save dialogs seem like total nonsense. You just put files where you want them. The only thing is that the OK button shouldn't exist.