Questions from someone who last used RISCOS on an A310

I’ve got a fair weight of RISC OS books on my shelf, but no User Guide there. Historically I must have had three (A3000, Risc PC, Iyonix) but I have no idea where they might be now or whether I still even possess them.

It just happened that I needed to find how to populate a text area in Draw a few days ago. I couldn’t find any documentation on how to do it. Eventually I happened on an old Draw file that had been populated in a similar way, and I reverse engineered the information I needed.

So, bearing in mind how infrequently I need a User Guide, how likely would I be to buy a paper copy, or to support a bounty to produce some?

Elsewhere, we have been trying to go paperless for decades – with only slow success.

I like that suggestion as well and did say that one element earlier.

Sorry, overlooked that.

Thinking about it, there may have been a suggestion of a bounty for texts some while back (years)

I find ROS non-intuitive because i have used Windows for the last 28 years.
ROS filesystem paths are not something I’m used to.
Programs starting minimized in the taskbar is new.
Finding things in the system to set it up is detective work. Some easy to find, others not so much.
Pling/boot/obey all new/foreign to me.
I can purchase the books but shipping is something like $48-more than the $20 book cost and mail delivery can be slow in corona times.
I prefer printed books, but think a freely downloadable Users Guide & Welcome/Getting Started guides pdf’s are really needed. Keep the printed book option.
PDF is the correct format as it is the defacto standard and avaliable on just about every platform.
You need to think of new users more IMO.

I find ROS non-intuitive because i have used Windows for the last 28 years.
ROS filesystem paths are not something I’m used to.

As I suggested, you’ve sort of habituated on the MS model. I have a colleague who does Unix and struggles with Windows, so he’s a Linux home user.

Programs starting minimized in the taskbar is new.

Yup, and that kind of thing is covered in the User Guide.

So, if you use your Windows machine and download the “RISC OS Direct (5.27) bundle” on this page Set that up on your PC and then look in the documents folder you will have a copy (of the older 2016 revision) – as well as a collection of other interesting software.

File paths:- way, way, way back different systems adopted different separators for paths, quite why Microsoft chose “\” is unknown, but then MSDOS was basically a renamed QDOS written by a Bill Gates acquaintance. Quick and Dirty Operating System.
So it may just have been the first non-alphanumeric key he saw on the keyboard.

In the same vein, RISC OS inherited the use of “.” from the BBC Micro.

Students of early operating systems could probably give reasons. Right now, changing it would break everything.

Finding things in the system to set it up is detective work. Some easy to find, others not so much.

Useful information, if you make notes of the difficulties and drop the info here then people can advise and possibly change to meet a need.

Pling/boot/obey all new/foreign to me.

Its innards are a bit foreign to lots of people and quite a few think it needs changing. To what is not something anyone has given a clear answer on.

I can purchase the books but shipping is something like $48-more than the $20 book cost and mail delivery can be slow in corona times.
I prefer printed books, but think a freely downloadable Users Guide & Welcome/Getting Started guides pdf’s are really needed. Keep the printed book option.
PDF is the correct format as it is the defacto standard and avaliable on just about every platform.

I think you will have seen that people agree, and the interest in a paper copy just shows that the nay sayers for PDF aren’t quite understanding the market.

You need to think of new users more IMO.

Totally agree.

Students of early operating systems could probably give reasons. Right now, changing it would break everything.

Because the point is a natural way to separate things… and not needed for something else (extensions) in RISC OS?

File paths:- way, way, way back different systems adopted different separators for paths, quite why Microsoft chose “\” is unknown, but then MSDOS was basically a renamed QDOS written by a Bill Gates acquaintance. Quick and Dirty Operating System.
So it may just have been the first non-alphanumeric key he saw on the keyboard.

Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

The tl;dr:

It is probably fair to say that Windows today uses backslash as a path separator because 50 years ago, TOPS-10 used forward slash as an option separator.

In any case, RISC OS’s uniqueness is part of its appeal to me, but making it so new users can understand what in the world is going on is critical, and looking like some 25 year old Acorn manuals is far less critical. Consider this a vote for switching to free fonts if it means that the manual can be freely distributed.

Because the point is a natural way to separate things… and not needed for something else (extensions) in RISC OS?

Also there’s at least two conventions for expressing filetype info in the name that I’m aware of even within the RISC OS ecosystem – filename,xxx (admittedly, that one’s the on-disk format when interacting with non-FileCore filesystems and RISC OS hides it) and filename/ext.

Important: filetype != extension

Important: filetype != extension

Indeed, but when you’re exchanging files with a system that doesn’t hold the same metadata and relies on an extension to do (most of) the job of identifying the filetype they are pretty synonymous.

It is probably fair to say that Windows today uses backslash as a path separator because 50 years ago, TOPS-10 used forward slash as an option separator.

Plus the fact that having the “/” for command switch behaviour in DOS1.0 was seen by IBM as a good reason to retain that and to hell with future development – let the rest of the world change to match us…

I stayed away from replying to this topic over the weekend, but read it with a growing sense of disbelief.

Please understand, people, that there are two fundamental concepts in user device UIs.

There’s the Windows/Linux/Mac concept. While they differ on specific details, there is a lot of overlap in expected behaviour. Things like ^C, ^V, ^X etc (though Apple probably uses the Apple key more!). Things like running a program usually puts some sort of window on the screen. Closing all the windows of a program usually quits it. There’s going to be a bleedin’ obvious on-screen menu, either at the top of every window or at the top of the screen. The mouse behaves in a certain way and generally you have two buttons which do different things (in Windows it’s Select Stuff and Menu). You can access the underlying filing system, but you don’t usually need to. Programs are provided in some sort of menu that lists all the available programs, possibly organised by category. Each program that interacts with files will have some sort of private viewer into the filesystem, and it’ll often default somewhere logical like in the user’s personal documents area, so they might not even need to fiddle around in there. Likewise, auto-opening of a file viewer when a USB device is plugged in, and/or prompting to auto-run CD/DVD media (software or music/video) generally means that it’s only the nerds that know Explorer even exists.

The other way is the pokey-proddy single task at a time methodology that underpins stuff like Android and iOS.

RISC OS is neither.

RISC OS has a UI that may seen bizarre to a newbie. Running a program often appears to do nothing. Closing windows doesn’t make the program go away. It’s all heavily based around a filing system where different media is different devices, and it’s a file path format like nothing else on earth, not to mention a distinct lack of file type extensions (so how the hell does one tell the system that this file is a JPEG?). No menus anywhere. At all. And randomly pressing function keys to see if a menu could be found made everything freeze (the user happened upon F12, which really ought to be Shift-F12 these days for this exact reason). Sure, there’s a little prompt that appears now, but it’s maybe confusing if they’re looking for menus (remember, F10 can do it on Windows) and something utterly unexpected happens. And, while we’re at it, where the hell are all the programs? There’s some stuff in this thing called “Apps”, and there’s some stuff that people talk about that aren’t there. What does ‘$’ mean? How do I change the size of the screen to better fit my monitor/TV/eyeballs?

And so on.

And so on.

RISC OS is different.

With that in mind, the fact that there is no freely available beginner’s guide/user guide (as a PDF) to help new users come to terms with the freely available operating system…

…frankly that does us a disservice.

…frankly that does us a disservice.

Masterful understatement.

I’ve bought the dead tree version (and I would have done so even if there were a free PDF⁰), which I agree would probably make new users feel a lot more welcome. I’d be happy to pay for a digital copy as well, if it helped making it freely available to others.

⁰ Bibliophilia is a disease of the mind…

Windows/Linux/Mac

Windows.Linux.Mac
:)

Masterful understatement.

And another one there.

Bibliophilia is a disease of the mind…

Oh.
I have way more books than places to put them.

The disease of the mind? To me that’s when you go into some people’s homes and there isn’t one single book. No chick-fic, no readers digest, not even Jamie Oliver trying to convince them that they can make weird food proper easy like. Not even flippin’ Bella or a week old copy of The Sun.

How can a person exist in a place without literature?

How can a person exist in a place without literature?

Pass, never tried, but I think I met someone in my schooldays that may know. Abused for learning anything, but he could breeze through A-level physics problems when he was in the 1st year.

Would it not be sensible to create an HTML guide that is separate to the main users guide,

Like this one you mean. Which is already on the Rpi image.

More along the lines of the cut-down Users Guide that Acorn included on the HDD of the A7000+ machines.

That was pretty much the full RISC OS User Guide, which ran to 500 pages. I think the Welcome Guide (which covered the basics without going into the specifics of programs such as Draw or Paint) would be a better starting point.

If you were to take Acorn’s “Risc PC Welcome Guide” (134 pages) and remove items specific to the Risc PC itself, you would end up with roughly 60-70 pages of text. That would be about 10 times the size of the “welcome” HTML guide supplied with RISC OS Pi, and one-eighth the size of the User Guide. There is the small matter of copyright, natch :-(

It won’t be enough to slim down the Acorn Welcome Guide, as many new users will be familiar with other operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS etc.) so would prefer a “How this differs from other computers” guide.