Why do YOU still use RiscOS

I just found out about it getting a new Rasp Pi, but it seems some members have never stopped using it since it’s inception. Let me hear your stories.

It’s familiar, I’ve been using BBC basic 30+ years, it does everything I need.

I’m now too old to bother about leaning a whole new way!

I was maybe 12 years old when I discovered that a BBC Micro could do my maths homework. Your teacher might not appreciate “PRINT 7/4” where it says “Show your working”, but that’s what I did. From there, some basic wanderings into BASIC expanded the capabilities to more complicated things (forget the TI-30 Galaxy, I had variables!).
One rainy weekend night I stole a copy of the BBC B User Guide and read it through the night (I was alone in the dormitory that weekend) from cover to cover. Shortly afterwards I popped open the case of one of them. One of the other kids said “complicated”. I said it looked like a road map. I didn’t then know what anything did, but I liked the layout, the organisation. I knew I had to have a Beeb.

I got a Beeb. Did a lot of things with it, and in latter days (1998-2005ish) used it to burn EPROMs, with Econet as the filesystem.

Come ‘87 and the Archimedes was released. I liked the idea, but thought the price tag was taking the piddly for such a lame duck operating system (Arthur). Skip forward a tiny fraction of time, the A3000 was released, with RISC OS 2. I was able to get one of those, with Acorn’s Desktop Publisher. Leaving the stuff “securely locked” in the computer room (ha ha), some twat stole the Acorn DTP discs. I wasn’t too upset about losing that as the software was rubbish. With the insurance I got Ovation which, in its Pro version, I use to this day.

You must remember, RISC OS, even the plain looking RISC OS 2 incarnation, was so far ahead of PCs at the time that it wasn’t funny. I was using a GUI with a full WYSIWYG DTP package when users of other systems were using colour-coded text and needed to change to a graphics mode in order to see a shrunken (non-readable) preview of what the page layout looked like. Their software needed to render a page, and the final result probably wouldn’t look identical. Me? What I worked with was the final result, and margin errors and ink density aside, what I saw was how it looked on a piece of paper. I had VIDC1 outputting to a TV quality monitor. They had CGA and EGA graphics cards.

In the early ‘90s I got a silly little ArmstrongWalker harddisc for my A3000. The software was full of quirks (reset CMOS, the harddisc will never work as it resets the IDE “wait for ack” timeout to zero seconds so it never waits for a reply from the harddisc – DUH!). But even as slow and clunky as the harddisc was (I’ve not examined the board, but it really seriously looks like it is driving IDE 8bit PIO mode using half of a 6522 VIA!) it was a complete and utter liberation from floppy discs. And as poor as it might seem today, it was light years ahead of the office PC that I used, an IBM PS/60 (and its bizarre configuration procedure).

Mid ‘90s I got myself an A5000 with a SCSI card and a 1GB harddisc. This was in a day when computers were still being sold with 60MB harddiscs fitted. It was dual partition and blisteringly fast. It ran hot enough to fry eggs on (well, not quite…) and it suffered a slow thermal meltdown. There was no important data loss as this was the beginnings of the Windows era and the transition from Windows 3.1x to Windows 95, so harddisc prices were falling faster than the value of the Rouble. The SCSI monster held on long enough for me to get a Simtec dual IDE card and some unwanted harddiscs in the 400-500MB range. I think my A5000 ended up with two internal drives and four hanging off each port of the Simtec card. The last drive fitted was 2GB and was split into five partitions. That meant my iconbar had 5+3+2 harddisc icons on it. Hehe…
I didn’t appreciate it at the time of purchase but I had C version 4 with the A5000. Later I decided to buy a book on C and try a few things. I’d used some Pascal at college earlier so I had a vague idea of a non-BASIC language. Oh my God, pointers. What a mess. Oh my God, anything you can do in BASIC that I can do in C, I’ll blow you out of the water. There’s just no comparing a compiled vs interpreted language.

Somewhere along the way I got a Compaq Presario. Running a Pentium 75, it was… somehow disappointing. It just didn’t feel terribly powerful. I fiddled the clock links and installed a heatsink with a fan and it still felt like it struggled. I put this down to the inherent design deficiencies of Windows. In this case, it was the original Windows95. The machine that I was sent must have been a display model, there was a lot of junk installed and then removed by deleting directories (and not the references within Windows). I got myself a bootleg copy of Windows 95 OSR 2 (because my installation CD never arrived despite promises) and wiped the machine and installed that. It was still crap but it wasn’t crashy crap.

In around Y2K I got a recon. RiscPC for a low price from CJE as part of their Programmer’s Initiative. That was quite an adventure, and kudos to Chris guiding my mother and I around Worthing in rush hour in horrible weather (him phoning my mobile as I ran out of credit). We arrived about half an hour after closing time. ;-)

Shortly after, one of the office PCs suffered a seized fan with the trauma that you would expect when the memory and processor start to cook themselves and start dumping the swapfile over what appear to be random parts of the harddisc. There was a loud crack and smoke poured out of the machine. I was tasked with repairing it (yeah, riiiight…) and the CPU and motherboard were dead. The CPU, in a ceramic case, actually cracked from here to here. And the motherboard? Scorchio! as a comedy TV programme around that time (The Day Today) might have said. The memory and harddisc were supposed to be installed into other of the other office PCs, but there was no way the memory was going to run at 33MHz. Kept on failing startup self test. The harddisc? It worked, but the format was utter gibberish. Some files might have been recoverable using a sector editor, but since I was not getting paid for this part, I said it was too damaged. The entire lot went into the bin.
Well.
Not quite. The memory that failed in the PC actually worked perfectly happily with the RiscPC’s lethargic bus. I ran test after test after test and it was reliable and solid. The harddisc, that was reformatted FileCore and used as a spare; the Simtec card was now in the RiscPC.

Coming over to France, I kept using my RiscPC for a while, but picked up a terribly slow 466MHz laptop with broken display backlight. I basically tore the display panel off and plugged it in to a monitor, and played with VisualBasic for coding; but the main thing is that it had a DVD reader. So the machine could play DVDs. And I did. A lot.

I have a variety of PCs and I had pretty much left RISC OS behind. Partly I saw it as a dying platform and partly the (in)famous infighting just got a bit too much. Acorn was gone. The Iyonix, nice but out of my price range, came and went, and it looked like the writing was on the wall for RISC OS Select or whatever. Besides, my main RISC OS machine had a nice UI and a friendly operating system, but it just couldn’t do the sorts of things I was doing now. I used to burn CDs of my internet sessions at the library, but when we switched libraries they didn’t allow CD burning (but turned a blind eye to using a little MP3 player as a memory stick). Well, this instantly ruled out using anything RISC OS.

2009 (I think?) I got the machine that I’m using now (an EeePC 901) and that was followed up by finally – after ever so long of being offline and out of the loop – getting ADSL. It didn’t take long to discover the fansub scene and it is something I make use of a few times a week (I’ve just discovered Marumo no Okite from 2009 which is so unbelievably sweet). This sort of thing, and ripping DVDs to watch on the netbook or tablet, are just capabilities that RISC OS doesn’t offer. I will always have fond memories of RISC OS, even today I cannot believe that Windows XP on a 1.6GHz processor can’t manage to get an error box and the ‘ding!’ to happen at the same time. And while the font rendering is a hell of a lot better with ClearType, it still doesn’t match what RISC OS could do on an 8MHz processor in 1987. So. Fond memories.

I got myself a mobile phone for work, and the package comes with a bundled phone. I’m on my third phone and amazingly the two year contract is up next month so I’ll be on my fourth phone. Plus I won an iPad. Yet… As much as a geek as I am, I have felt no inclination to program apps. Heck, I haven’t even jailbroken any of those things. They are tools. I’m going to finish this message and stream Grisaia no Kajitsu. I might check the weather. Pop back here before bed. I can write on the iPad (Bluetooth keyboard and Google Docs (easy to share with other devices, sharing stuff isn’t iOS’s strong point)) and I do (my current blog entry (Chess) was written in the car the other day) but mostly I use the devices as tools. If you compare hours of watching animé vs hours of making phone calls, until I got the iPad you would wonder if I even knew that it was possible to make calls with the mobile phone. It is a utility. And there’s the “big computer” for the stuff that is difficult to do on a smaller device (like downloading stuff off YouTube, or ordering things online).

Then something strange happened. There were rumours of bits of RISC OS source being released. And so bits and pieces were. I wasn’t interested in much as without the ability to build a functional version of the operating system, it wasn’t useful other than as a curiosity. I pored over the Econet sources, mind you. Just out of interest. I wrote a program in VB “ROView” to colourise the code sort of Zap-style as I was using a PC to read the code.

Then something really strange happened. I was given a Beagle xM at which point I discovered that not only was a RISC OS available but the complete source code was available. I did some work on a little hardware dodah for the Pi and got to keep the Pi (and the dodah for my efforts). And, there is was. RISC OS. On hardware that would have seemed like a wet dream not so long ago. Really, a 40MHz 16MiB RiscPC to a 700MHz 256MiB just doesn’t compare, and then there’s the xM’s GHz processor (faster yet as it is a newer technology than the Pi’s ARM11) with 512MiB RAM. What the hell? When I run all the stuff I need to run, all at the same time, I still have the majority of the memory (of either machine) unused. The xM unfortunately really struggles to generate a good stable display (and doesn’t seem to like going much over 1024×768), but the Pi doesn’t break a sweat with the 1280×1024 panel. It would also cope with the 1440×900 display that I am using with the EeePC. All these things seemed to come together in a really short period of time to mean that RISC OS, while nothing even remotely like Linux, can stand alongside it on the NOOBS distribution, and here on ROOL’s site. Just, you know, in case people want to see what the ARM can do.

So what, and why?

Well… Most of the internet stuff is done on the PC. Most of the video processing is done on the PC (I often have to mux the video (mp4) and subtitles (srt) into an mkv file so that it can be streamed from an old Livebox (if not muxed into the video file, they won’t be picked up)). A fast USB harddisc and a command line mkv muxer make this job tedious to do but fairly quick – at least I don’t need to transcode the video.

Most of the quick things, emails, and watching stuff is done on the iPad. It’s just a really nice display to look at, and being an iPad Mini (7" or so) it isn’t too large. It’s a good size.

The phone, I use for reading ROOL on the go. In the car, at work. Or, as is often the case, using an old version of WinAMP (before they sold out and made the useful stuff a paid upgrade) to play mp3s.

And RISC OS. RISC OS I use for fun. RISC OS is sort of where my heart lives. Writing ARM code is emotionally pleasing (even when I screw up!). The desktop – as very dated as it looks (even my mom commented on that!) – still has a few tricks that make it a more pleasing UI to use than Windows. It’s little things, like you can layer windows as you like, nothing needs to force itself to the top in order to be the document being edited. Apps can be present but out of the way until you need them; they don’t insist upon opening blank windows and quitting if you close said window. The filing system is quick and easy to navigate. The global clipboard might be a bit ‘iffy’, it is not as integrated as on Windows, but you can drag stuff from one app right into another. Cut and paste sometimes have limitations if not plain text and thus you end up farting around with temp files. RISC OS is simpler, yes, but that can be a virtue.
And the place isn’t filled with rows of on-screen menus that you won’t be using every moment. Instead, there are no menus at all, until you want a menu.
The only thing I wish RISC OS had is a little clock in the Switcher icon. I have this on Windows and I do glance at it from time to time. Sure, I could load Alarm, but that’s not the same thing…

The operating system itself is simple and lacking in protections. Which for getting stuff done is pleasant. I find that the more I wanted to do with Windows, the more the OS got in the way. I can understand that things can get very messy if software hijacks random bits of hardware, yet even things that should be fairly simple turn out to be more challenging than expected. RISC OS’s limitations are based around what isn’t available. It seems Windows’ limitations are based around what the OS doesn’t want you to do.

Another benefit is while the source is helluva complication (assembler in epic proportions), the integration of all the parts is fairly easy to understand. The details, less so, but you can look directly at RISC OS and it’s 100-odd modules and know more or less what each one does and how it fits into the scheme of things. It is easy to get lost in \Windows\System32 and the incredible mess piled up inside. It is easy to get lost in the equal mess of the System Registry. As for Linux and the seemingly haphazard arrangement of /bin, /sbin, and the user variations, plus it looks as if there is no real place to install “apps” (they seem to pile into /(s)bin), plus the init scripts stuff, the hellishly complicated command line (of which there are several). There’s no source to Windows, and I wonder if it is even possible to understand all of Linux these days. Your own part (UI, Gnome, fstab, kernel) perhaps. But all of it? RISC OS is more like Minix in this respect. It does what is necessary and not a billion things besides. It can be understood. Well, maybe not FontManager, that’s just a big pile of “HUH?” from the API downwards. ;-)

I have more or less ceased writing software for Windows. I never started writing software for Android. It is pointless writing software for iOS without a Mac. I didn’t really expect to be doing anything much with RISC OS……..yet here I am. A friendly OS. A friendly GUI. A friendly developer community. I don’t plan to make €€€ from my software, I just do these things because I enjoy them.

There. My story. Thanks for reading. [and Beast must be in festive spirit, it didn’t throw this away just ’cos]

Thanks Rick, that’s just the kind of story I wanted to hear. :)

I got my first taste of microcomputers in the late 70s when Joe Taylor fetched a dozen Apple ][s from Heathrow in his own estate car. They had been ordered for the maths department at Sussex University and were probably the first in the UK. It was in the summer vacation and anybody interested was encouraged to take a manual home to read.

There were lots of micros available at that time in the UK. I knew that I wanted one, but which brand? I considered an Exidy Sorceror but in the end I decided to get an Acorn Atom, chiefly because of the tutorial on 6502 assembly language in the manual and the assembler built into Atom Basic. Loeliger’s book, Threaded Interpreted Languages, got me interested in Forth, which I implemented on the Atom. Atom Basic and Forth could call routines from each other.

In the fullness of time the Acorn BBC B came out. They replaced the Apple ][s and I ordered one for myself. It arrived a few days before I was due to depart for Columbia University NY for a year, so I left it with a friend for the interim. On my return I bought an EPROM programmer and Joe Taylor and I set up a partnership to sell sideways ROMS that enhanced BBC Basic with matrix manipulation (the MATROM). We sold to the gas board, to various observatories and others. I do not think we made any money, but it was interesting experience. It taught me that software development is 5% programming and 95% document maintenance. Later Acorn updated BBC Basic with many of the features of the MATROM, but weirdly they did not include matrix inversion, which I reckoned was the MATROM’s major feature.

Then the Archimedes replaced the BBC B, and at that point I found myself involved with teaching programming and with maintaining a network of Archimedes, using an Acorn Riscix server, for use by staff and for teaching labs. I found myself being arm-twisted to be chairman of the university’s first computer-science department, without giving up my duties in the maths department. I protested that I was only an amateur, but was given the lie that everybody was. However, contact with real professionals taught me a lot, and in particular about functional programming languages and their implementation. I made a wimp frontend to Bryan Scattergood’s implementation of Gofer for the Archimedes and used that for teaching.

All this was many years ago, but I have stuck all the while to RISC OS. I just prefer its user-interface. The coming of the Raspberry Pi has halted a long sad decline. I use the Raspberry Pi with RISC OS as my main machine, and my ancient Iyonix as backup. I have an old Advent XP notebook on which I can use Virtual Acorn, to which I have reluctantly to resort when I need to do online banking or order prescriptions. Unfortunately, the Advent has been so reluctant to connect to websites recently that I find myself using my wife’s more modern Toshiba laptop instead. I cannot get to the bottom of why Firefox cannot connect in circumstances where NetSurf connects immediately – they both go through the same router, use the same DNS servers, etc. It occurred to me that malware might be the culprit, and I have tested with a number of packages that claim to detect it, with nothing showing up so far.

Again, excuse this subjective ramble.

I did use RISC OS from around 1994 to around 2004. For business: as journalist, as developer, as manager of a company and then as a software editor. Then I leave this platform.

I came back to RISC OS around 1 year ago. That’s really a pleasure. The same spirit as 8bit computers, but much more powerful. Works on modern hardware (and with virtualization, it will work on any Cortex-15 Cortex-A5x computer). And most important: viable (I can’t tell the same of SMSQ/E, FreeTOS or AmigaOS).

Let’s face it: alternatives (to Windows/Linux/BSD) are almost all dead. Today, there is still RISC OS and Minix. I love both, but use only one :)

Just need a modern browser, or a stable VNC client. Avalanche hangs every minute on my Iyonix. Perhaps it will work better on the Panda. Of course, I’ll need to be sure that HOMM2 will work on my PandaBoard :)

Just need a modern browser, or a stable VNC client

Did you mean stable server? If so then the latest version from Jeffrey is OK.
Using RealVNC viewer with the settings for mouse event taken away from default and deliberately introducing a delay effect it seems quite stable on a beagle-xm.
Something not quite right in the mouse/keyboard buffer on the server I suspect.

No: the client. Here Avalanche simply does not work. Perhaps a problem with the the VNC Server I use (TightVNC), with the setup of my VNC Server, or something linked to Geminus. I hope it’ll work better on the PandaBoard.

I use Avalanche in combination with TightVNC on my Iyonix and it hangs only every 5 minutes. Reload is a matter of seconds, even less. This was also true on my old Iyonix. But at some point in the past, Avalanche stopped working properly with VirtualAcorn at the other side: the desktop gets displayed, but the mouse doesn’t react.

I use Avalanche in combination with TightVNC on my Iyonix and it hangs only every 5 minutes

Even 5 minutes, it’s too much for me. I use my PC for work around 6 hours a day (the same with my RISC OS computers). I still hope to be able to use only my RISC OS computers for all tasks…

Have you tried using RDP instead of VNC? It’s faster. There is a good RDP client for RISC OS.

I can’t speak for or against the reliability of either; I’ve not made intensive use of them on RISC OS.

I use RDPClient against Windows 7 Pro and Windows Server 2008 on the local network and Windows Small Business Server 2011 (Server 2008 underneath) on a remote network – works great other than having to retype the username when you login each time as it doesn’t handle the Unicode string which shows the last logged in username correctly.

Sorry. No RDP Server on XP Home.

Sorry. No RDP Server on XP Home.

Maybe this helps.

As for me, I hadn’t used – or even seen – RISC OS before getting a Pi. I ran into someone from Acorn (unfortunately I can’t remember his name!) and we ended up talking about various things and I promised to give RISC OS a try. The main reason that I’ve kept with it is the speed. Raspbian is painfully slow, especially on 256 MB, but I don’t need to tell any of you about the speed of RISC OS on the same hardware.

I’ve gradually been learning my way around C (I use C# at work so the bulk of what I have to learn is around SWIs and other platform-specific stuff) and I hope to release something eventually. At my currently trajectory it’ll be years off :)

Risc is lighting fast on the Pi, Raspian was indeed, sloooooow.

Risc is lighting fast on the Pi, Raspian was indeed, sloooooow.

Yup. Written for ARM vs. adapted to ARM

Raspbian is essentially Debian modified for the Pi chipset.
RISC OS on Pi is essentially a 1980’s OS written for 4MHz processors modified slightly to run on a board with different IO and a processor running at 700MHz or more.

No doubt if people spent the time re-writing much of the debian core in optimised assembler it would run faster. Not the modern way though.

Maybe this helps.

No. Too complex for my setup. I still hope to have a stable VNC setup :)

Remembering more than 30 years ago, we founded a little company in Belgium (Elitech) to develop a full 32 Channels EEG digital system for the University of Liège, at that time, 80386 with their poor graphic cards where to slow to display and analyse the data furnished by our systems, and then came the Archimedes announcement! We began developing this machine on an A310, quickly jumping to A440 and ultimately to A540 to provide enough computing power to do the task. I really enjoyed this period, we were young, with the help of talented developers we brought the first fully digital EEG machine to the world and it was with the help of this wonderful Archimedes machine. Time passes and I forgot the Archimedes for some years, but I began to play with the Raspberry Pi and took a look at the RISCOS system, and suddenly, bam! the joy of developing and programming came back! , of course, I have a lot to remember and work, but no other system gives the feeling to be so close to the hardware, actually, I am playing hard/soft by designing a little card for the AKA10 1MHZ bus, linking my old A410 with the Raspberry pi through the 1MHZ bus, what I want to achieve is to be able to use my Archimedes keyboard, mouse and disks through a ‘bridge’ with the Raspberry pi new Riscos system. So I could have the old feeling with the new OS… best of both world in fact… extension to the bridge could be using the econet card from the A410, some podule hardware (like the AKA10), etc… but one thing at a time, for the moment I’m still struggling with the bridge for passing mouse and keyboard information…

linking my old A410 with the Raspberry pi through the 1MHZ bus

Okay, now there’s something that needs better explanation – how’d you get that working?

To me, I started as a kid in the 80s and with 2 computers imported in Italy by Olivetti.

One of them was an Acorn BBC Master Compact, and I learned a lot on it. Growing I always wanted to have a RISC system, back then there was a lot of fuss about RISCs on the magazines of the time (for which I used to write programs for some of them). So, when the Archimedes came out it was just the aboslute perfect machine: A RISC system and that I could use even without a manual (given Arthur, its origianl OS and “first-satge of RISC OS days”, worked very much like Acorn MOS on the Master Compact).

I truly loved my Archie 310 and went from Arthur to RO 2, then RO 3 and when it was really not enough anymore decided (later on with some regret) to get a RiscPC, which I used constantly till 1994. Between 1994 and 95, I had to start to use PCs for work (computer programmer, as we were called at the time), so kept my RISC OS devices, but used them much much less than I used to.

Did follow always with a lot of hope and enthusiasm the work a bunch of folks started as RISC OS Open, which promissed to make the OS Open Source, but it took way too long, so it kinda faded for me. Finally in 2018 it has become a reality and so it was time to undust my RISC OS knowledge and have a good time with it once again. IMHO, at this point, RO can’t be used for anything more than nostalgia and educational purposes, but, within those realms, there is still plenty of things that can be done and have fun with the OS.

I use it mostly for coding and music creation activities. I suck at graphics lol (although if I managed to design a bunch of themes for the RO desktop, I guess desperation can really moves mountains! XD ).

What I enjoy the most is the challenges involved in coding for a cooperative multi-tasking scheduler, where the developer is required to think and control every single minimal detail. I mean, it’s completely improductive for 2023 standards and prone to mistakes and problems compared to any other modern platfrom, however, that is the magic as well, complete control of every single detail. :)

Having grown up with Acorn BBC and Archimedes computers (that’s all we had at school), I’ve left and returned to the platform more than once.

You still find people amusing themselves by proclaiming RISC OS either has no future or is only viable for engaging in a little nostalgia, or both. A bit like people were saying twenty years ago, yet here it is, better, running on cheap and fast hardware, open source, still being developed and STILL with a better GUI than anything else. There is a good range of software, both free and commercial, even though we do undoubtedly need one or two new programs or old ones developing.

Whether it can be your only or main computer depends on your needs. I currently use a Mac as the main computer because I use Lightroom (photo organisation and editing), Dorico (music composition), Logic Pro (multitrack music production) and Affinity Designer (vector graphics). However, I’ve recently come to realise how over-the-top so much of our tech usage is these days, and that even for professional use, we don’t need most of what we pay for (which is expensive and usually subscription based now). This is a mighty fine example of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJZFQHklBg

Looking at what I really need, as opposed to trying to have the latest tech, I’m now in the process of moving tasks onto RISC OS:

• DTP with !OvationPro
• Email with !MessengerPro
• Browsing with !Netsurf and !Iris
• Illustration with !Draw

For music there is a multitrack program to try on RISC OS but if it’s not up to much I’ll move to hardware-based recording. For photography, it’s either film or get it right in camera for me these days. For composing music the notational way, I’m going to look further into !Sibelius7 and !Rhapsody4. There is !ArtWorks2 for vector graphics although it could do with further development. However, I only use vector graphics for diagrams and logos/icons so might be OK. I need to investigate scanning on RISC OS, too.

I’m trying to learn programming and outside of work, that’d be for fun on RISC OS (and if I was half-decent, to contribute software to the cause).

The only real barrier I can see is the music I’ve bought on iTunes. I can export as MP3s but if one day I leave Apple entirely, I’ll be relying solely on not losing those MP3s. I also have a MiniDisc Walkman and iPod Classic and I don’t think there’s a way to access either on RISC OS, although I’d be very happy to be corrected on that.

Overall, then, I’m testing out RISC OS for everything as I’m on a drive to just have what I need, cut down on software costs and with one eye on power consumption, too. If I can overcome the problems mentioned above, then I’ll be fully on RISC OS.

I was late into the party. I was a fulltime Amiga user that at some point started to read c.s.acorn. I was amazed over a lot of things, most importantly that people actually used their computers. Amiga was/is fine but when ibrowse didn’t work with my bank and Yam stopped working with my email provider. I thought, I sell my A1200/ppc and buy a Kinetic 300 RiscPC! Best thing I ever did. I used that RiscPC exclusivly for about four years. At the end of that era I bought a Pegasos2 with MorphOS … and a intel pc. I sold my RiscPC.

It took about 10 years from that until I used RISC OS again. I was given a beagle board as christmas gift from one of my customers. Some years later my current employer bought me a ARMX6. From that time and today RISC OS is my main player at home.

I use it because the fun! I have also been into porting it to new platforms which is very rewarding.

@Michael Grunditz: That’s the thing with RISC OS, I think. It’s fun! When I was at school and we had Acorns, using computers was fun. There’s nothing fun about using PCs at work, though, and the Mac is not really fun – just better than Windows. Despite the RISC OS platform having some deficiencies, it’s a joy to simply turn on my RISC OS box and use it.

You’re in charge of the machine, not the other way around.