RISC OS in the wild?

Hello,

Sorry if this thread has already been posted by someone else in the past.

I’m wondering, have you ever encountered RISC OS ‘in the wild’? To clarify, I mean, RISC OS being used by people who aren’t long-time users or enthusiasts, for some serious purpose, for example controlling industrial equipment, or something like that.

Of course, Acorn computers were common in schools in the 90s. I mean after about 2005 when Acorn & RISC OS were mostly forgotten by the general public.

Or have you unexpectedly come across an old Acorn computer still being used for something at some business or organisation? I’ve heard stories about very old 386 class computers still being used for special purposes such as controlling CNC machines.

The last acorn computers I saw in public were probably the ones at my secondary school. It was around 2002, and they weren’t being used anymore as far as I could tell. There was an A5000 and a RISC PC. Although nobody ever used them, they were still plugged in, and I sometimes played on them during lunch break.

Vince Clarke of Erasure continued to use BBC Micros long after most folk had migrated to Cubase etc. Here is an article (from 2002, funnily enough) where there’s a few mentions of his then-still-current Acorn set-up.

I think the problem you’re going to run into is that, generally, when I have been made aware of RISC OS “in the wild”, there was no obvious indication that it was – in fact – RISC OS.

Example? Graphics for the National Lottery (earlier days) and various BBC game shows. One of the (recent?) show talks discussed this. I’m sure somebody with a better memory could post a link.

I wonder how many people bought a Bush Internet box (circa 2001ish) and knew that it was a cut-down RISC OS machine running a bastardised version calling itself “NC OS”? If you have an iomega Zip drive and a bunch of modules to push into the thing, it’s certainly possible to fire up Ovation on it! ;-) (although, being designed to plug into a TV, it looks a bit rubbish…)

I think of MediX, an Electronic Health Record system, operational in the south of The Netherlands, developed and maintained by Paul Reuvers of X-Ample, Eindhoven. It’s browser accessible, and therefore platform independent, but the core is ARM assembly and BBC Basic, running on RISC OS computers. Paul Reuvers even wrote the entire server software (called Pollux), which is also purely RISC OS. I’ve seen a short demonstration years ago, and I’m still impressed.

Example? Graphics for the National Lottery (earlier days) and various BBC game shows. One of the (recent?) show talks discussed this. I’m sure somebody with a better memory could post a link.

Paul Emerton. He’s been bringing (some of) the stuff he’s acquired from the BBC’s special projects department to the London show for the last few years, and gave a talk at the last one.

Graphics for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, famously.

ALL the computers on the first season of 24 (yes, really).

Reason: Instant on. Genlock.

If it’s any consolation, a small part of RISC OS is in most printers on the planet, but don’t tell anyone I told you.

ALL the computers on the first season of 24 (yes, really).

http://www.iconbar.com/news/uploaded/spoiler.html

That makes sense as 24 is American. It’s probably something faked up on a Mac or an Amiga…

…I believe The Chart Show and a lot of the effects on the Robocop TV series were made using Amiga with the VideoToaster. I think also the SeaQuest (three initials I forget) used it as well, as the way the Amiga was designed made it easy to plug into NTSC source material.
Not RISC OS I know, just a nod to the fact that there was quite a bit of competing technology around in those days.

a small part of RISC OS is in most printers on the planet,

I understand both of my current printers have ARM cores. But the question is what part of RISC OS? They have web interfaces and IPP (shame there’s no support for this on RISC OS!), so I could well imagine it’s running some version of ARM Linux which was originally ported by Russell King to an A5000 then the RiscPC… So maybe some cruft got left behind, like my printer that has no card reader could, if it did, understand FileCore format media?
Something like that?

If it’s any consolation, a small part of RISC OS is in most printers on the planet, but don’t tell anyone I told you.

Certainly an ARM core in the processors of several of the large manufacturer products that I’ve come across¹, don’t know about any portion of RO.

¹ and the processor in lots of network interfaces in ‘PeeCees’, again dunno about any trace of RO. At one time the main processor and the network interface in HP were both ARM, lost track in recent years as I rarely print or have dealings with such items – in fact if we could persuade the payroll people to accept the on-call info as a soft copy I wouldn’t even be doing the once a month printout for that.

I did say a small part… but reimplemented in C so it’s on many different platforms. HP, Canon, Lexmark, Ricoh, Sharp, many others.

We probably take little bits of RISC OS wherever we go. For instance my VeroDes package for Windows, written in VB (the real one)… How it handles internationalisation is extremely similar to DeskLib’s Mags library, which in turn is based upon how MessageTrans works. ;-)

There’s stuff in use at work that was originally part of BBC BASIC programs I came across or hacked together which got translated to VBS. Although in use now¹ it was written (cobbled together) in 2003.

¹Actually it will get run at 00:01:00

I once implemented Impression-style tabulator icons for a Java WYSIWYG word processor. Along with a RISC OS-style caret to replace that very minimal Java Swing style “bar” caret. In red of course!

I think also the SeaQuest (three initials I forget)

DSV. I think it was “deep sea vessel” or something to that effect.

;-) I recently spotted a couple of RISC OS related YouTube videos in the wild.

The first one concerns a RetroComputing YouTuber who provides us with a bit of history around the RISC PC, that includes a detailed look at its innards and a quick demo of the PC card.

Whist reading the comments I found another Paul Emerton – BBC Special Projects video . One thing I found interesting in Paul’s video was the reason for the RISC PC’s retirement – lack of HD (High Def.) support.