
ARX, Arthur and RISC OS (2012) - mr_golyadkin
http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/
======
kiwijamo
A shout out to those involved in Acorn, RISC OS, etc around the late 1980s and
throughout the 1990's. Around 1992 or so, our family bought our first computer
(when I was around 5 years old) which was an Acorn A3000 running (if I recall
correctly) RISC OS 2 on ROM. The school I went to also had Acorn computers
(including the RISC PC toward the latter half of the 1990’s).

Nowadays I consider myself extraordinarily privileged to have experienced RISC
OS on Acorn hardware in its heyday. I see so many things in modern computing
inspired by RISC OS. The taskbar in modern era Windows and Mac OS is
remarkably similar to RISC OS 2 which was released in 1988. RISC OS was also
an early pioneer of anti-aliasing fonts and had it years before it appeared in
Windows.

However, sadly, there are many things now lost to history. A machine running
RISC OS 2 booted in literally <3 seconds. It was basically just a console
screen with “RISC OS 2048K” (or something along those lines) and a second or
two later you were at the desktop. It is near impossible to find any modern
computing device that boots as quick as the A3000 running RISC OS did.

RISC OS also had a wonderful file-save dialog which was simply the file
icon—which you were to simply drag and drop directly to the folder you wanted
to save the file to! Given you usually had the right folder open anyway, it
was usually a case of just dragging to your already open folder. So much more
sensible than having to search for a folder in a small explorer window.

Thanks to all involved. Acorn and their RISC OS sparked a lifelong interest in
computers. Thank you!

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I guess because I'm in a bit of a mood thanks to arguing with Linux Desktop
evangelists lately, I'd like to point out that Rox Filer implemented exactly
this file saving functionality (and many other good ideas RiscOS) on Linux.
Then they built Rox Desktop around it. It was great. There were AppDirs,
context-menu-only, spacial file management, drag-n-drop to save, etc.

Naturally, the project's reward for trying to improve the Linux Desktop
experience was to have all its ideas ignored by the wider Linux community as
it faded into obscurity.

If anybody was ever wondering why all these people who have gripes about the
Linux Desktop experience never seem receptive to your pleas of "contribute!
you can make it better!", this is why.

~~~
twic
I've been thinking for a while that the only way to get a decent desktop
experience on Linux is going to be to start from scratch. The graphics drivers
and Wayland are probably adequate. But absolutely everything from there on up
- window mangers, GUI toolkits, applications, configuration tools - needs to
be written from scratch by people who know what they are doing and can build
all of it as a cohesive whole.

This would be a huge project, and i don't know who has any incentive to do it.
It's hard to imagine that it would be possible to make a business out of it.

~~~
jfb
I mean, this is what Android did, right? They use a Linux-based kernel but
completely reimplemented the display systems. The real problem is that there
isn't anybody who is willing to pay for that sort of work, either on the
supply side or the demand one.

~~~
pjmlp
Not only that, Android IPC builds on top of Xerox PARC ideas.

Although it is very underutilized, you can compose Android applications
(Activities) as Lego pieces, with each one doing just one thing right.

------
jeffrallen
The whole thing is fine, but this passage is GOLD:

> We had a really interesting time with part of that, we had one of the
> machines that we just could not get this thing to boot reliably. You could
> boot it, turn it off, reboot it and sometimes it would work and sometimes it
> wouldn't. It turned out, it would boot fine if you left it long enough, but
> if you didn't turn it off for very long then it didn't reset properly, and
> this was because the fan on the board was still spinning and the back EMF on
> the fan was enough power to keep the ARM running. And that's why you've got
> an ARM in your phone today, it would take no power to keep a 3 micron ARM
> with 25000 transistors would run for 30 seconds off the energy stored in the
> fan.

~~~
m0xte
There's quite a bit of power in that sort of stuff. If you move the steppers
on my 3d printer while it's not plugged in it'll light the backlight on the
LCD screen very brightly!

~~~
jeffrallen
I double dog dare you to put your tongue on it!

~~~
m0xte
Hahaha no way :)

------
fanf2
Arthur Norman’s SKI Machine was interesting: rather than being LISP (as
mentioned in the talk) it was a combinator reduction machine
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic)
\- SK combinators are the way Miranda does lazy evaluation, so the SKI Machine
was basically Miranda in hardware. Miranda was a forerunner of Haskell
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_\(programming_language\))

------
codeulike
The development of the first ARM chip is just such an amazing story.

 _I just wanted to say a bit about why Acorn decided to do this whole RISC
thing at all, Acorn was a manufacturer of home computers, why on earth would
you be crazy enough to design your own chip?

Sophie did an analysis of the compiler output for a lot of common compilers as
part of the process of trying to choose which chip we should use next, we were
looking at things like the 68000 and the National Semiconductor 16032, or
32016 as it got renamed. I don't know if you remember, a second processor was
done with that 32016 and Nat Semi had produced a poster that said "32016 is
not a late 16 bit machine it's an early 32 bit machine", a year later we
crossed out 'early' and wrote 'late' on it. This analysis showed that all of
the complicated instructions and all of complicated mem-copies, the compilers
just don't generate them. They generate Load/Store, add, subtract, and/or,
compare, branch, that's about it really, the rest of them, unless you're
writing in assembler, you just don't use them, so they're a complete waste.

Now, the aforementioned, Arthur Norman, who had written the LISP interpreter
for the BBC Micro, and was in and out of Acorn the whole time, had come up
with a design for a machine with 3 instructions called the SKI machine. Whose
instructions were called 'S', 'K' and 'I' and it ran LISP in hardware and he
built one of these things, it never worked, it was so big and covered in wire-
wrap it was always broken. The idea was to prove that you really didn't need
very many instructions for a general purpose machine._

...

 _Tony Thompson, who had done that implementation of BASIC 64, he got to do
the core of the operating system, so the real guts of Arthur itself. That
brought it out of reset, powered it up, organised all the memory and so forth.
We had a really interesting time with part of that, we had one of the machines
that we just could not get this thing to boot reliably. You could boot it,
turn it off, reboot it and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn 't.
It turned out, it would boot fine if you left it long enough, but if you
didn't turn it off for very long then it didn't reset properly, and this was
because the fan on the board was still spinning and the back EMF on the fan
was enough power to keep the ARM running. And that's why you've got an ARM in
your phone today, it would take no power to keep a 3 micron ARM with 25000
transistors would run for 30 seconds off the energy stored in the fan._

------
quattrofan
Fabulous read, and a lot of it really made me laugh especially the F0 keyboard
bit.

