Is RISC OS a 1980s OS?

https://www.eejournal.com/article/why-your-computer-is-slower-than-a-1970s-pc/

Modern PCs obviously have far more computing power than what is effectively a power saving CPU we use, but even with only a single core RISC OS is far more responsive. Maybe it’s why I enjoy it, the immediacy.

Of course, the lack of virtual memory, power and lack of modern development tools and applications hurt. I did a presentation on Acorn and RISC OS to my Linux group recently and I had to make the presentation on Linux (on my Pi) as there is nothing really comparable on RISC OS. However, Linux ran like a dog…and took an age to boot to something usable.

I was having a conversation with someone at the Retro Computer Festival on Saturday about the lack of applications, but I for one don’t want the abomination that is LibreOffice ported. Even on my 32GB 8-core Ryzen it takes a few seconds to open!

the abomination that is LibreOffice

There are issues with LibreOffice, certainly. But what else is there that’s free (or any reasonable price) that’s anything like as good, if you need to make files that are compatible with other people’s systems?

It works okay on my old Mac Mini – a bit slow to start, certainly, and can be slow in use in certain circumstances. But it works.

There’s an old engineering & printing aphorism: You can have it fast; you can have it cheap; you can have it correct – pick two.

This applies to software more than ever.

These days, that’s been refined a little in software circles: “Pick one”.

The project managers still want all three, obviously. But the end result is only one of them is truly realised, with the other two having to fight it out between themselves.

Hi Daryl,
Prompted by your apparent lack of presentation software, I had a quick peek on my Apps server, and found !NBoard, !OHP, !OHP2, !Playback, & !Presenter. There is also !Textease, which I’m sure has a presentation mode. Regrettably these are all 26-bit, so would need Aemulor, though 32-bit clean versions may exist.
HTH

There is Fade from the Really Small Software Company which is 32bit and although not PowerPoint, has a lot of nice tricks. I use it often, at shows and the like. Great for automatic presentations, but does “click to proceed” ones too.

Also, from the description of !OHP2 taken from the site which “have it in stock!”, this program is 32bit.
If it runs in newer hardware it’s another story I fear….

Fade is very good, I have it runnning 24/7 in a British Legion club on 3 computers.

A RISC PC showing whats on,what is sold, opening times and where the enterence is showing outside and 2 Pi showing whats happening what is sold plus some funny sayings inside,

You can have it fast; you can have it cheap; you can have it correct – pick two.

Yup, I’ve known that for decades too. Cheap and correct will generally do me now I’m retired; fast and correct was the rule when I worked at ARM.

IIRC OHP relied on quite a few additional modules to do its effects/object handling, and I think it may be those that stop it working on ARMv7. That being said, I can’t recall if the main program is C or BASIC. If the former, it may need to be recompiled, which could be a problem if source is lost.

Fade, however, looks excellent :)

I looked at Fade I think, or at least something similar. It just allowed transitions between images rather than editable pages. Yes, I could have exported each slide as a JPG/PNG, but it would be a bit tedious.

But I am happy to proven wrong!

But I am happy to be proven wrong!

Sadly, I don’t think you will be!

It does Draw and Artworks files too, as far as I can tell (dropping an artworks apple into the window seemed to work). Not very clearly advertised. That means that you can create slides in any vector graphics package of your choosing, or even in Fireworkz (which offers drawfile export) or other similar programs with “save area as draw”.

If we’re being creative, you could also create a PDF with !PDFmaker or !PrintPDF, then use !PDF to save a folder full of exported draw files. Then select all the drawfiles and drop them into !Fade. Darn, I love RISC OS! Seriously, that means you can use any RISC OS app to create your presentation slides, and get them into a suitable format with just a few clicks/drags. Then just use !Fade to manage the presentation/transitions.

I think that may be why so many people don’t “get” RISC OS though – you can achieve brilliant things by using all the bits together, but it doesn’t spoon-feed you.

Well, I admittedly never tried that and it would have been enough to get me where I needed to be. Next time!

the lack of virtual memory,

I’m not convinced this is a deal breaker.
Virtual Memory was designed in days when RAM was expensive and even back in the Windows 3 era, big programs took many megabytes. So the computer would have 8 or 16 megabytes installed, and a 300 megabyte harddisc and – look, magic, there’s seemingly endless amounts of memory as long as you tolerate churning.

Our biggest applications are the GCC ported ones. MuView is something like 35MB running to 45-50 when opening a document. Otter is tens of megabytes with a hundred odd in shared libraries.
You can load both on a Pi2 (or equivalent) and it’ll use about a third of the available memory. Which leaves sufficient for, oh, let’s pluck a figure out of my ass – a hundred and sixty four copies of OvationPro. Imagine that on the icon bar. ;-)

All of that, and still no need for VM.
That’s not to say there is no call for VM. PhotoDesk provides its own in order to permit big images to be used. However, generally speaking, VM would not be useful to a modern generation RISC OS machine. I mean, it’s a rare day when I don’t have about 800MB sitting there doing exactly diddly/squat.

power

I do wonder, sometimes, why things seem to be slow when it doesn’t always make sense.
For instance, archiving a large file using SparkFS on a 900MHz core takes about thirty odd seconds. My 2.4GHz P4 box? Takes about half a second.
Even fudging the maths for 900 vs 2400, and one core vs two (sort of), the values still show a disparity. Is SparkFS slow? Is RISC OS slow at doing file ops? Is ARM slow at raw number crunching? I don’t know.

The ironic thing, however, is that the UI behaviour is much quicker. There are many times when I’ve moved my pointer into place for when a dialogue pops up, ready to dismiss it, and a couple of seconds later (after dialogue dismissed) the machine gets around to making the “ding!” sound.
RISC OS, by its smoke-and-mirrors task switching, is much more immediate. CLANG! and the error box is there. Click an icon, stuff (usually!) happens. I suspect the majority of my double-posts are due to “Dammit Windows, are you paying attention? Click! Click! Click! Click!” only to find out that Windows, ever one to perform logical actions, registers that not as a bunch of clicks on an icon by an annoyed user, but a bunch of separate clicks on the icon by a user who is going to level up from annoyed to mildly livid.

and lack of modern development tools

Oh, I dunno. It seems to me that half the modern development tools are oversized letharic crap written in Java.
The primary reason I’ve not added more functionality to my NetRadio project (like buffering) is because using the Arduino IDE to generate ESP32 code from a “sketch” that is… what… 8K? 10K? Whatever, it isn’t big.
It takes ages. I mean, like something in the ballpark of half an hour.
Like actually longer than it takes to build the entire RISC OS ROM from scratch on RAMdisc (including downloading and unpacking the tarball).
It is a most miserable way to program anything. Wait forever just to have it throw up some tiny typo and then realise you have to endure the punishment all over again.
I used Eclipse several years ago (when Android 2.3 was cutting edge) and it wasn’t much better. About the only useful thing it seemed to offer was variable name completion, but this was because so many structures had weird illogical names (so maybe a usage case in RISC_OSLib then?).

Maybe there are cool dev enviroments. But, thanks, from what I’ve seen I think I’ll stick with Zap and the DDE.

We do, however, need a Debugger that isn’t rubbish. Maybe it’s just me but I find DDT to be far too crashy to use as anything other than a last resort. Plus, it would be nice if there was some sort of way of talking to it via a serial port (so maybe one could extract information from a crashed machine?).
I’d also like a debugger that can hack module code, but I know the various technical issues involved in that.

and applications hurt.

Define “Applications”. I have a horrible feeling these days that means WhatsApp and… that swipe-right dating one ¹. Stuff like that.

I think our biggest missing piece of the pie is video support. Kobi… no, wait, that’s a misspelled sea port… Kodi shows what a basic Pi is capable of. My Pi Zero was more than happy to deal with HD videos. Our video player is software based, so it about manages 320×240 at lowish bitrates on equivalent hardware. Sure, a Titanium might be capable of HD, but it’ll be running flat out to do what a base Pi can do with its eyes closed. :-/

as there is nothing really comparable on RISC OS.

Everybody has pointed to useful software.

When I did a demonstration (a decade and a half ago), I simply made a bunch of static frames as DrawFiles, and wrote a dead-simple program to call the DrawFile_Render SWI to plot them to screen. It was basic, but it got the job done.

At work, for our two-yearly “don’t drink the chemical agents” refresher course, they use PowerPoint. Complete with marching text, fading in bullet points, all sorts of swirly visual crap that makes me want to snatch the keyboard off the table and smack it over whatever management numpty created this awful mess, and probably took hours doing so.
I mean, does it help to have a Johnson/Diversey/SealedAir/F&PDiversey/WhateverTheFThey’reCalledTHISYear product label slide in from the side of the screen and sort of bounce into place like some sort of children’s animated programme? If they think the staff are so stupid ² that they need such things, maybe just maybe it might be better not to let them loose on concentrated sodium hydroxide?

However, Linux ran like a dog…and took an age to boot to something usable.

Yes.
I noted that Ubuntu on my box takes longer to start up than XP. And, depressingly, they’ve even done away with the screenfuls-of-crap-as-it-boots and that nifty whizzy atom thing. I don’t recall what did happen, I do recall thinking “well, that sucks”.

but I for one don’t want the abomination that is LibreOffice ported.

I would. I widely used and widely known office suite with interchangeable files, instead of niche products (Ovation[Pro], Impression, etc) that are more or less only compatible with themselves?

Even on my 32GB 8-core Ryzen it takes a few seconds to open!

Sorry, the first thought that comes to mind is “diddums”. I mean, what a first world problem than an application takes a few seconds to open.

When I were a lad….. we used to load stuff from cassette tape. Literally an audio recording of a bitstream (on the Beeb, typically 1200 baud ³).

¹ I only vaguely know this because the girl on iZombie talked about swiping right, so I Googled to work out what she was on about.

² In the interest of diplomacy, I shall say NOTHING.

³ Which, to put into context… basic ADSL is 20Mb/sec or 20,480,000 bits per second. Tape is 1,200 bits per second – about 17,000x slower.

Now you’re sending me down memory lane.

About 12 or 13 years ago, when I was still a leader on the Computing & Electronics holiday that used to be advertised in Archive, they had a bit of a retro theme going. Someone mentioned teletext, so I whipped up MODE 7 on my RISC OS machine (probably a RiscPC or RISCube). Anyway, long story short, we needed a way of displaying stuff on screen in MODE 7 so “PowderPoint” was born. It was basically a MODE-7 based presentation program which did text, scrolling, ASCII-gfx, music, synthesised speech and so on, driven by a crude/simple markup-language. It was a 10 day camp and took a 2-3 afternoons to cobble together before it was running the evening meeting projector sessions ;)

The kids loved the fact that they were seeing presentations done on software that they could literally watch being written and make suggestions and stuff. I wonder whatever happened to that program?

And yes, it was rather fun having metal-mickey voice syntheses reading MODE 7 song-lyrics to 80s pop songs.

As for the linked article, I saw the “timing tests” it mentions a couple of months ago and did my own similar test on my Pi 3 with OS 5.24. I don’t remember the exact results, but as you probably expect, it was competitive with the old (fast) machines, not the new (slow) ones.

When I were a lad….. we used to load stuff from cassette tape.

I actually started to write a long reply, but flamewars are no fun. We do basically agree with each other, and I posted the article because I agree that RISC OS is more responsive and fun. Considering the machines I run Linux on, it should really be smoother.

I don’t agree on Libreoffice. It’s not even that attractive, performant or user friendly on Linux (but not like there is an alternative). On RISC OS? No thanks. It would feel out of place, but maybe that’s just me, I prefer applications to look and feel native.

I’m 45, more than old enough to remember loading tapes on my Speccy. Although thankfully my dad felt sorry for me saving code on tape and bought me a BBC Micro with heavenly disk drives.

I will admit that I tend to groan when I first load LibreOffice and press a key (Windows version, on many fast machines with SSDs) and literally wait to see the first character appear. Only a second (maybe less), but it’s a very long second. From then on, I don’t notice any problem, but that first character… (rolls eyes). That’s all down to coding, though, and loading/caching of fonts I suspect. Still, how you can create a word processor on a 4-5Ghz CPU that can’t display a character instantly (or near enough) under any circumstances is, erm, “sloppy” and suggest somewhat “missing the point” priorities.

Now it is making a fool out of me. It looks like they’ve improved it in the last year or so or something. So, it now responds as well as I’d expect, albeit taking noticeably long to load and be ready for typing. So, my apologies to LibreOffice.

Incidentally, I wouldn’t use it as a productivity tool myself (I find I can only be productive on RISC OS), but it is useful for reading/writing foreign document formats.

Another amusing anecdote – I was helping a chap the other day who writes all his text in Ovation 1 (thanks Rick!) and then saves it into easi/techwriter so as to save as .doc to give to his PC-buddies! By the end of the call, he was making PDFs from Ovation 1, and was utterly delighted!

It does Draw and Artworks files too, as far as I can tell.

It does, although I seem to remember a pitfall that I can’t quite recall.

The last time I did a presentation on RISC OS, I used a multi-page ArtWorks file and ran the presentation using AWViewer. That way, I could easily use multi-page layers and quickly update the standard bits of the slides if required. It worked fairly well, as I recall – but it was to a room full¹ of existing RISC OS converts.

¹ In as much as user group meetings ever are “full” nowadays…

If I’m writing plain text, I use any old text editor, whatever I’ve got on the machine I’m using at the time. If I’m doing anything that needs formatting for print, I use LibreOffice, and can’t imagine any reason why I’d use anything else. It’s far better than Microsoft Word, and nothing else is as universally compatible with other people’s systems.

But I don’t need LibreOffice on the Pi; I’ve got it on the Mac, and I don’t expect to run everything on the Pi. The Pi is for the things the Pi is good at – Acorn Draw, and little homespun apps to process files in ways the Mac people haven’t thought of, or make too much of a meal of.

If one day I can have !IKHG back, or some other (easy) way of writing my own keyboard drivers for the Pi, I’ll use the Pi for entering non-English text without having to go through the ridiculous palavers I have to go through to do it on the Mac. It’s the one activity I regret the demise of my last RiscPC for.

nothing else is as universally compatible with other people’s systems.

Wrong. Google Docs.

There is an app for Android, however as long as the machine has a reasonably competent browser I can use Docs. No need to install anything. Apart from DVD ripping and uploading stuff to my website (WinSCP), I’m finding less and less reason to need to turn on the power hungry PC. These days, 10W is excusable. 200W… less so, given that apart from specific applications, there’s nothing that 200W can do that 10W cannot.

I’ll use the Pi for entering non-English text without having to go through the ridiculous palavers

Yeah. I’m using a Bluetooth keyboard with Android, and it’s pretty much game over if you want anything more complicated é or è. I’ve not found the " yet… Oh, and just realised it is @ over the 2. I’ll have to fix that, but it’ll probably break the accents.
The best layout I ever used was WinXP British International. Second best was RISC OS.
Android and iOS pale in comparison. But then, I guess they don’t expect one to use keyboards with mobile devices. They really want to get over that for people to take them seriously – as there’s a limit to what one can write with poking a screen with a finger.

Only a second (maybe less), but it’s a very long second

If you pay attention to Windows, you’ll see that quite a lot. Hit Ctrl+F to Find, expect a little hiccup.
I’m not so much sure it is lame application code as an effect of lazy task swapping that only maps in the bit of code when it is ready to be used. Something you won’t ever experience under RISC OS (due to no VM, and smaller application size).

I blame the paging in on demand of applications on both Windows and Linux. Just because you can see somewhere to type, doesn’t mean all the necessary code has been paged in yet. Of course, once they are loaded and “warm”, the problem mostly goes away.

It’s one of the things about RISC OS I like, the immediacy.

Wrong. Google Docs.

Perhaps I stand corrected, I don’t know. (A) is it as powerful as LibreOffice – will it perform all the tricks I need it to? (B) Does it run locally, on my own machine, or does it insist of trying to communicate with the internet? © Is it really universally compatible with other people’s systems? I’ve never seen it mentioned as an option for submission to publishers.

Second best was RISC OS.

The beauty of RISC OS was (when !IKHG worked) that you could write your own keyboard drivers, so I could switch easily between the conventional layouts used for different languages. I’ve yet to see a traditional Deva Nagari keyboard layout on any system other than the one I wrote for RISC OS – all the typing on computers in India is done using an inferior one introduced by Indian IBM engineers who knew Hindi but whose typing experience was in English on a US layout keyboard, and who never bothered to check what Hindi typewriters looked like…worst of all, Unicode’s treatment of Deva Nagari arose the same way, rather than with any reference to actual Hindi type composition practice.