RISC OS is an interesting beast, but I’d LOVE to see RISC/IX ported to the RPi a...

repelsteeltje · 2024-05-03T08:33:43 1714725223

You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel?

I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.

xyzzy3000 · 2024-05-03T09:47:12 1714729632

Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4

If only it had been given the RISC OS GUI with BSD underneath - that would have been way easier to port to modern Unix-like foundations and may have had a healthier-but-niche future as something 'modern' beyond Acorn's existence.

repelsteeltje · 2024-05-03T10:00:59 1714730459

Ah yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected.

Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.

sillywalk · 2024-05-03T19:51:09 1714765869

IIRC, KDE was created because Motif/CDE were proprietary, but QT was free and had an open-source license, but wasn't compatible with the GPL. There was an agreement with Troltech, the creators of QT that would make QT available under a BSD-style license if they didn't release a free/open-source version after a year.

GNOME was created because of license issues with QT not being compatible with the GPL, so GNOME used GTK which was created by the GIMP project because Motif wasn't free.

rbanffy · 2024-05-03T12:14:44 1714738484

There was a free implementation called “lesstif” IIRC. Motif was proprietary until much later, as was CDE.

IXI’s desktop runs on top of Motif.

lproven · 2024-05-03T10:27:32 1714732052

[Article author here]

> You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel?

No. (Although that sounds fun, I never heard of such a thing.)

RISC/ix was Acorn's ARM UNIX. It had nothing of the Acorn GUI -- it was fairly standard X11, I think with Motif or something Motif-like.

Acorn did add some Acornish tweaks to it, including its text editing and its memory allocation, but it looked and ran much like any other late-1980s UNIX, as far as I now. I have never got to try it myself, sadly.

rbanffy · 2024-05-03T12:37:50 1714739870

I still think it’d be fun to bring it back to life. I don’t think there are many copies still usable and it was picky about hardware - it wouldn’t run on more modern Acorn boxes.

lproven · 2024-05-03T13:32:12 1714743132

RISC/ix?

It was based on BSD 4.3. The efforts went into BSD 4.4 and that went into NetBSD and NetBSD 1.2 incorporated Acorn's ARM port.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.acorn/c/G19nI9eac-o/m/q...

https://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-1.2.html#port-arm32

I'd say that the bits that matter mostly survived and still do.

rbanffy · 2024-05-03T14:13:05 1714745585

For me, the desktop apps are vitally important to rebuild the experience.

xyzzy3000 · 2024-05-04T14:19:00 1714832340

SCO owned IXI at one point and sold the desktop to various vendors until CDE emerged.