Can Acorn Ltd. be reincarnated?

Just wondering. It worked back then except they were too successful designing the initial Acorn RISC Machine architecture. Having at least three separate companies twiddling with 32-bit RISC OS source code is a waste of effort not prone to forestall a dwindling/extinct user base.

Can these companies plus competent 3rd parties make up a “virtual Acorn” to bring RISC OS into this century? Proper project management can quickly identify who are best at doing what to achieve the primary goal in the shortest time possible. This writer is a project developer ad as such will refrain from micromanagement apart from insisting to keep the acorn as a logo/system icon. The cogwheel is rather daft.

Having at least three separate companies twiddling with 32-bit RISC OS source code is a waste of effort not prone to forestall a dwindling/extinct user base.

At least 3? For RISC OS 5, there is only ROOL.

RISC OS 5 is 32-bit, so my argument still holds. The benefits of cutting the umbilical string from 32-bit and go to 64-bit are obvious, given the existence of transparent 26/32-bit emulation – multi-core, multi-cpu, GPU support for several GFX libraries, on and on.

And: The fact that Arm Ltd has ditched 32-bit support in their 9th architecture revision ought to send a wind up the back of even the most hardcore 32-bit fanatic. Being retro is one thing, being extinct another, unless someone can mention another desktop-based operating system still being 32-bit only with a reasonable user base.

Basically, going 64-bit can only be good business sense, if any sort of revival is to be slightly likely. Even written in C it’d run in circles around the fastest CPU 32-bit RISC OS can run on today. Apart from the WIMP system it wouldn’t have any of the RAM/HD-addressing limitations it has today (ADFS is no longer A(dvanced), really..)

Yes, we know all of this. But I do not understand the point to revive Acorn Ltd to replace RISC OS Open Ltd and RISC OS Developments Ltd.

The point is to maximize the efficiency of RISC OS development, and avoid dupli/triplication of programming effort. The RISC OS community isn’t big enough to sustain 3 companies working the source code in the long run, certainly not when new recruits are a dwindling resource to replace the de-incarnating old guard, or those going Mac/PC.

A symptom here is the minuscule fraction of Raspberry Pi users who actually use, never mind has actually heard about, RISC OS. Extrapolate this to the general market, and we’re talking promille.

The reason I’m so concerned about this topic is stated elsewhere (keywords: user friendly productivity) and that Acorn Ltd. was killed because their 47% holding of Arm Ltd stock were “way more worth” than their other business – a bloody bean-counter observation, ignoring the historic inventiveness of Acorn Ltd’s developers/programmers.

A “Virtual Acorn Ltd” would necessarily be very decentralized since the necessary skill-sets are spread over several countries, maybe with a majority in the U.K. with maybe Germany a good second. Online teleconferencing can be quite efficient, backed up with yearly physical developer conferences.

One has to be inventive and flexible to come up with the best practical/efficient solution here, to save our favorite computer platform for a foreseeable future (post-2030..).

Acorn Ltd. was killed because their 47% holding of Arm Ltd stock were “way more worth” than their other business

Which is just another way of saying “Acorn’s core business was worth approx. zero or even less”, which was the main problem to begin with. Neither NCs nor STBs really took off, and the dwindling Desktop stuff probably made a loss since 1988.

There’s something about a shoemaker staying with his core business. And 20/20 hindsight is wasted. The NC/STB thing wasn’t even their idea afaicr, but a notion from Oracle/Ellison. It can make sense in a mass-user setting (schools, businesses) as a smart-terminal booting off a server and lowering administration cost. But that wasn’t the focus; STBs there should be, in a day and age there was neither the TV resolution nor data bandwidth to make that a pleasant experience.
It’d work better today.

Going by information in the semi-documentary “Micro Men” Acorn did overproduce certain comps (the Electron?) which they couldn’t sell because of bad timing, and if similar things happened to other models I can see why they had a net loss.

The question is if there’s room in the market for something other than Windows, MacOS and Linux in professional settings – shifting boxes to schools and enthusiasts plus a few niche-oriented businesses like desktop publishing is not a big enough market in total to sustain a separate computing platform, obviously.

I haven’t seen sales figures from those companies producing modern RISC OS computers but suspect the business isn’t booming, maybe just enough to cover operating cost ad put butter on the bread, not much more. So the whole idea about a RISC OS revival may be a lost cause. If it should have a chance to happen it’d probably be with the distributed model I proposed and just-in-time production. Of 64-bit desktop computers, laptops and maybe smartphones provided there’s a market waiting and ready to make the project a bit profitable. Is there?

The point is to maximize the efficiency of RISC OS development, and avoid dupli/triplication of programming effort. The RISC OS community isn’t big enough to sustain 3 companies working the source code in the long run, certainly not when new recruits are a dwindling resource to replace the de-incarnating old guard, or those going Mac/PC.

Why keep you saying there are 3 companies working on the RISC OS source code? For RISC OS 5, there is only ROOL. Yes, we can see some third parties ports (open source or not: their problem), but no real fork so far. How an Acorn company could change that?

A “Virtual Acorn Ltd” would necessarily be very decentralized since the necessary skill-sets are spread over several countries, maybe with a majority in the U.K. with maybe Germany a good second. Online teleconferencing can be quite efficient, backed up with yearly physical developer conferences.

Exactly how ROOL works, even if it could be more perfect. But guess what: they don’t have enough human ressources.

STBs there should be, in a day and age there was neither the TV resolution nor data bandwidth to make that a pleasant experience.

Sorry, no. STB were very successful. RISC OS ones even sell at millions in France. for satellite TV. If new TV boxes ditched RISC OS, it’s simply because it’s a legacy offer, not compatible with modern needs. Linux is just better for this.

The question is if there’s room in the market for something other than Windows, MacOS and Linux in professional settings

Heu, the main computer of almost every home or business user is today an Android or an iOS device. PC becomes a niche market.

I am not even sure why anyone would WANT to resurrect “Acorn” as a name. As a company, Acorn was mostly a failure. It is mainly remembered for boring education computers, underpowered and overpriced. Outside of the UK and possibly other parts of the Commonwealth, it is more or less unknown.

The only positively connotated name from the Acorn past is probably “Archimedes”. This is quite well-remembered in e.g. German retro circles as the dream machine that the C64, CPC, Amiga and Atari ST owners would have bought if they had the money.

Confusingly, “RISC” is still connotated mostly positively, so I don’t think you will find a much better label than “RISC OS”.

I agree. And if you look at the timescale of RISC OS, RISC OS is now more a ROOL (or a Charles) product than an Acorn one…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS

I am not even sure why anyone would WANT to resurrect “Acorn” as a name.

Ditto. Whether or not Acorn was good, bad, or otherwise is not really relevant. What is relevant that, apart from a few years being a generic PC shifter (that we can close over as it was just somebody using the name for a while), “Acorn” ended a quarter century ago.

It’s legacies live on, the ubiquitous ARM processor, and RISC OS.

As much as Acorn meant to me as a child/teenager, Acorn is in the past, and that’s where it should remain. It’s “RISC OS Open” now, to highlight the name of the OS and it’s open nature, and “RISC OS Developments” to highlight the name of the OS (again, I mean, that’s why we’re here right?) and also to suggest that “stuff is happening” as in “it ain’t dead yet”.

I, honestly, can’t see what “Acorn” in any sense could bring to the table. It’s not the Acorn we knew nor can it ever be. So… what’s the point?

for boring education computers, underpowered and overpriced

My lowly A5000 held up quite well against the actual boring, underpowered, and overpriced education machine around at the time. The RM Nimbus things that sported an 80186 processor and some utterly weirdo sort of networking protocol that wasn’t compatible with anything else on earth. Had them at college. They could barely manage to run Windows. So we used to use stuff like TurboC in DOS. And me? Did it using PCEm (the software one) and it was almost as fast.
Of course, there were better education machines too. The arty-farty guys had Apple machines with massive monitors and millions of colours and they were so damned expensive that you had to be authorised to even go in the same room as them, never mind touch one.
(and all that fancy DTP stuff? I could dupe most of it with Ovation!)

Yes, Acorn machines were always expensive, but then attach words like “business” or “education” to something and the price automatically bumps itself.

Outside of the UK […] it is more or less unknown.

Yup. I make a snarky reference to this in my most recent YouTube video (about my MIDI sequencer).
“It is written in C and it runs on RISC OS, which granted, most of the world probably hasn’t heard of, suffice to say it’s a small lightweight operating system that works on a Raspberry Pi.” (cut to picture of the Pi in question…)

I think the key issue here is the fact that distributed systems in most cases are much more resilient than centralized ones. If one compare the number of programmers in ROOL who develop RISC OS compared to those who has the skills to contribute to its development it may be a 1/20 relationship. This is key to my argument.

The benefits of cutting the umbilical string from 32-bit and go to 64-bit are obvious.

I am afraid not.

Look at how much didn’t work with the the ever so simple change to 32 bit.

If we want to continue using RISC OS beyond 5.28 then we need to embrace 32 bit. (and forget about multi-core)

So there isn’t even emulation for 26-bit software in the 32-bit system.. what hope is there then the for emulation of 26/32-bit software in a hypothetical 64-bit environment. This is worse than I thought. Major Erk.

26-bit emulation on 32-bit: try !Aemulor, !Arcem, even my own lowly offering.
The ‘ever so simple’ change to 32 bit was not so simple imho. To adapt programs for 32-bit you have to insert extra opcodes (MSR,MRS) for which you need one extra register, you have to change register allocation for this. And if you stack R14, extra space is required for this MSR register. All address comparing instructions had to be changed into unsigned ones because addresses can sit above &80000000. Strongarm corrected which value of PC (+2 or +3) was put on the stack but broke previous expected behaviour. Add to this the change in APCS, and the changes in unaligned load/store later.
Just today i tried 64-bit Bookworm RPI OS on a Pi4 and both Risc_OS_Linux_Binary and RPCEmu (multiple Risc OS versions) appear to work brilliantly so hopefully they continue to work when Pi5 arrives. All is not lost!

The fact is that very few RISC OS programmers a bit expert on both early ARM assembler and modern pure C code are few and far between (and dwindling in numbers along with the general user-base) don’t conspire and just do it.

Do you actually program, yourself?

@ Simon

I would suggest to not waste your time with people that clearly have no clue and just try to steer nonsensical discussions.

I was hoping he’d head back to his bridge.

Well mostly Brothers in Arm, how to get from here to there is always a question. Thinking simply “Arm CPUs and GPUs and State of the Art” and RISC OS running on it, well it wouldn’t even boot in its current state. Hence all my “Go 64-bit” campaign here lately.

Sota CPU is here I think; https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/supercomputer/a64fx/#anc-04
and SOTA GPU is at https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/announcements/posts/gaming-performance-unleashed

Given that the RISC OS WIMP system is an integral part of RISC OS but a very little part of programming compared to the core and RM’s – could the RISC OS WIMP go 3D, an expansion of Acorn’s “Room” system, using the Immortalis GPU to do the desktop in its spare time, backed a bit by Fujitsu’s monster Arm GPU? Technically speaking, never mind funding. It’d be a megor rig to work on*.

To create games/AV content. Tiny spinoff market from the global Gamer box scene

Can Acorn Ltd. be reincarnated?

It has been, once, but it was nothing to do with our hobby.

In other respects: the answer is No. It would be utterly pointless even to try.

My point is that several companies working on more or less the same development in a shrinking market is a waste of resources, better utilized in a single company with a single vision on product development. If it happens they may use “Acorn” as their company name, or something else. The main issue is unification.

Forgot one item in my “optimal RISC OS computer” description above, namely the use of EPROM to store the O.S. with a RM checking for and performing O.S. updates. That way it’d boot in ~4 seconds flat and be hardened against virus/malware.

When the OS updates happen every couple of years, hardly worth it! And the proportion of users who’d go for automatic update I’d estimate at 1%. We like control.

is a waste of resources, better utilized

Absolutely.
We need to do something about this state of affairs.

I propose we petition our elected representatives to support RISC OS. Start here…
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/check

single company with a single vision on product development

Steady on now, there are antitrust and monopoly issues to consider here. We need to make a proper plan for how this will work.

If it happens they may use “Acorn” as their company name

…right up until the point where the person who currently owns that name notices. So we’d need to allocate funding for buying the rights to the name and familiar logo (no, it’s not freely available).

namely the use of EPROM to store the O.S. with a RM checking for and performing O.S. updates

EPROM? Yes, I suppose it would be a very RISC OS solution to hot-melt-glue an UV LED on top and work out solutions for how to safely handle Vpp… (what EPROMs did you have in mind? 12V? 15V? Or the old timey 21V?)

That way it’d boot in ~4 seconds flat

Realistically you’re looking at about 10-12 seconds from power on to usable desktop. Or twice that if you use DHCP. ;)
The only way you’d speed that up is by skipping the boot sequence and, well, that doesn’t leave a terribly useful machine.
It is, of course, orders of magnitude faster than Windows, Linux, or Android boot from cold.

and be hardened against virus/malware.

Absolutely. If RISC OS needs to perform internal handwavey magic to reprogram those EPROMs, ain’t no way a virus is going to touch them. RISC OS running from EPROM will be far safer than even MacOS.

This looks like the beginning of a winning plan.

This looks like the beginning of a winning plan.

Clearly, irony is not an action that takes creases out of clothes.