About us: RISC OS Open Limited FAQ
- What is RISC OS Open Limited?
- Who are RISC OS Open Limited?
- What is RISC OS?
What is RISC OS Open Limited?
RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) is a company formed by five people who have been involved in RISC OS projects for many years. ROOL offers professional services to customers wishing to deploy RISC OS commercially and delivers value to its clients by being expert in the design, development and integration of products built around ARM compatible processors. The core team of ROOL’s engineers originally formed the nucleus of Pace’s Cambridge Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) development team and previously worked for Acorn Computers.
The ROOL team is able to help partners and customers to quickly integrate, optimise and deploy efficient RISC OS based solutions in order to take advantage of the market leading MIPS per watt performance from the ARM architecture. ROOL can author software for an existing hardware design or develop a complete hardware and software solution. In addition to its professional services, ROOL is managing the RISC OS source opening activity on behalf of Castle Technology Ltd, as a not-for-profit activity.
RISC OS Open Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 5852060. For full contact details, please look here.
Who are RISC OS Open Limited?
The founding company members are, in alphabetical order by first name:
Andrew Hodgkinson
Andrew has over eleven years of experience with RISC OS and ARM based systems including Desktop and embedded products in a wide variety of markets.
Currently a freelance engineer, Andrew first worked at Acorn Computers, Element-14 and Pace Micro Technology, primarily on projects in the DTV market. He has had further roles in the Digital Radio and Mobile Telecoms industries. Andrew became part of RISC OS Open Limited after working with other ROOL founders at Tematic, the software engineering division of Castle Technology Limited.
In addition to extensive embedded ‘C’ skills on Linux and RISC OS, Andrew has many years of Web design experience working with technologies such as (X)HTML, CSS, the DOM, JavaScript, Perl and Ruby. He created the ROOL Web site, a collection of tightly integrated open source applications running on the Ruby On Rails framework.
Andrew Moyler
An Executive Director of ROOL, Andy has 22 years of experience within the Telecommunications, Digital TV, I.T. and Consumer Electronics industries. This has included seven years as an Executive Director of three consulting and professional services companies and a further seven years in Business Development, Sales and Marketing within both products and service sectors.
Andy is a Chartered Engineer who has completed a Masters degree in Business Administration specialising in Strategic Management and Corporate Finance. He is a founder and Executive Director of RISC OS Open Ltd, Mediabright, Endurance Technology and Corton Consulting. He has led Management buyout and trade sales.
Ben Avison
Ben Avison is a freelance software engineer operating in the Cambridge area, specialising in digital TV and related technologies. He has been involved in the design of many RISC OS based products, both in the embedded space, including several IPTV set-top boxes and the Bush Internet TV, and in traditional RISC OS workstations, including the Phoebe 2100 and the IYONIX PC.
Ben has worked for companies including Acorn, Element 14, Pace, Tematic, Castle and Broadcom. He has extensive knowledge of a number of media architectures and codecs.
Richard Nicoll
Richard has 20 years of experience as an Executive Director in the digital interactive TV, consumer electronics and automated teller machine markets. Richard is experienced at managing and growing R&D teams under changing and challenging circumstances, as well as at developing new business internationally and having responsibility for P&L.
Degree qualified with a BSc in Computing Science and an MBA, Richard is a Founder and Executive Director of Corton Consulting and Endurance Technology. Richard is also a non-executive Director of Strategy & Technology Limited.
Steve Revill
Steve Revill is a Director of ROOL and officially works as the Technical Project Leader. For the last four years, he has been operating as a freelance software engineer under the trading name 7th software, dealing with RISC OS and other systems.
Steve has been the Technical Project Leader for a number of projects at various companies, including Castle Technology, Tematic, Pace Micro Technology, Element-14 and Acorn Computers.
He has over a decade of embedded software engineering experience in industry working on both desktop and embedded software technologies, particularly for digital interactive television over IP networks.
What is RISC OS?
RISC OS, pronounced ‘risk oh ess’, is a computer operating system specifically designed for the ARM processor. RISC OS first appeared in 1987 as the operating system of Acorn Computers Limited’s Archimedes range of computers. For this range of computers, Acorn also designed their own 32-bit RISC microprocessor, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), because no existing processor suited their needs. RISC OS stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer Operating System.
RISC OS is believed by many to be the most user-friendly and stable operating system in the computing world today. Unlike many other desktop computer-based operating systems, most of RISC OS can reside in ROM, so corruption of the operating system as a result of user error or by a computer virus is practically impossible. A compact footprint, high performance and ROM base make it ideal for embedded applications. Much of the kernel and driver software is written in hand optimized ARM assembler making it the highest performance OS solution for the ARM architecture and allowing it to operate in a minimal memory footprint. These characteristics have led to separate strands of development within the embedded CPE market resulting in IPTV products being deployed around the world, notably in North America and Taiwan for major service providers.
