What RISC OS is vs. what it could be.

Not assuming no people (All you graybeards out there, Semmens, Pilling,..) or no good pension schemes around (move to Norway? Don’t. Unless North.) RISC OS can be saved by ditching most of what it assumes like programs that cannot use HD memory and reset all software if one program freezes – these we can do without.

And cooperative multitasking assumes all RISC OS programmers follow the Style Guide to the letter and are truly Saintly Beings. Guess what they’re not. Or not skilled enough to avoid said OS limitations by just barging on. Only a total rewrite of the OS can achive that, with a 100% sandboxed Emultion Environment for running most legacy software. Odd games on the !BeebEm interpreter – a simulacrum of software.

History is about recognizing bloopers in the past to avoid it in the present, and RISC OS’ birth on a eight-bit 6502 CPU (!) didn’t exactly leave its birthplace, in a limited 8-bit environment which after 43 years of experience and development has become Amber, frozen in time in too many respects to mention. At least they got the Desktop pretty right. Time for greybearded RISC OS programmer geezers to put heads together here.

Kindly post this stuff in Aldershot.
Then people can choose whether or not they actually want to read it.

I thought the survival of RISC OS through correcting (understandable) design mistakes and adding functionality would be of general interest. And doesn’t people chose to read or not any article?

You seem determined to pollute every forum section with this tripe.

I thought the survival of RISC OS through correcting (understandable) design mistakes and adding functionality would be of general interest.

Not when it’s complete fantasy, it isn’t.

And doesn’t people chose to read or not any article?

No, many people choose to read via “Recent Posts”, as you can see from the discussion which starts a little way down this thread, which is why we now have ‘Recent main forum posts’, ‘Test and Aldershot posts’, and ‘Everything’.

Please respect this.

The ancient GODS who wrought RISC OS knew about pre-emptive multitasking and did not implement it. Do you accuse the GODS of expediency.

There have been a few feel good movies about old guys… one about codger coders “A load of old Cobolers”.

Mention sitting around for years coding and I start to shiver.

I think I could probably get my head around FORTRAN again if the occasion demanded (easy to say, knowing the odds of it are zero) – but COBOL? In several short freelance contracts I probably spent a total of nearly two years of my working life programming in COBOL, but no way could I get my head round that again. I worked in FORTRAN a lot less, but it suited my brain a lot better.

OT warning. 8-]

One of the main reasons I loved the RO approach was precisely because it lets you cease WIMP multitasking and take over the machine entirely. Excellent for uses like running instrumentation.

When I retired from my old ‘day job’ someone came down to take all my old RPCs as he used the boards in the underwater robots he supplied for the North Sea Oil/Gas sector.

Whatever happened to “Intelligent Interfaces”? Anyone know? I guess that closed when the owner retired.

Whatever happened to “Intelligent Interfaces”? Anyone know? I guess that closed when the owner retired.

Assuming it’s this, http://www.intelligentinterfaces.co.uk/index.html , seems to have ceased trading in 2008.

@Jim and Clive
With !Compo Jim, I revisited my adaptation of PariGP, particularly to produce function representations.

In fact the application works well, it takes a little effort to understand the method to produce the drawings, it is necessary with this type of tool. But there are many possibilities and this with RISC OS.

The editor allows copy/paste, drag and drop in and from text areas + saving of text.

As electromagnetic waves interest me, I drew some curves by taking information here:
https://mathcurve.com/courbes2d.gb/orthogonale/orthogonale.shtml

So the purpose of this message is to find out if anyone is interested in tracing curves. Pari/Gp has a lot of functions (I know very few).

There are documents in English, but I think that a dedicated RISC OS tutorial would be welcome, but I am incapable of it, especially in English :-)

I hope to be understandable and not too long. Thank you for the feedback.

That’s the kind of purpose I have in mind. In effect to extract information from bitmap graphics so you can check or “re-purpose” some data that is only avaiable as a graphic. i.e. start with a graphic and recover the info it shows, and/or test/determine the mathematical relationship which gives rise to the picture sown in graphic.

Yes, one specific interest area is that E and H fields tend to be orthogonal. And the details link back to understanding the physics.