1 Introduction
RISC OS was born in 1987 and was originally developed and designed by Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England. The system is mainly aimed at the ARM platform, and the naming is also taken from the supported reduced instruction set RISC architecture. RISC OS is neither Linux nor Windows based, but a desktop system with a unique design architecture. Its characteristics are fast, compact and efficient. It is mainly suitable for running on single board computers such as raspberry pie and beaglebone.
From its inception to 2018, RISC OS has been a commercial closed source operating system. After 2018, the operating system will be fully open sourced on gitlab for more developers to use and maintain. So this is an open source operating system maintained by a company, and its reliability and stability are still very guaranteed.
You can find relevant information on the official website.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
2. Historical background
Tracing the history of RISC OS back to 1970, British entrepreneurs Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry founded Cambridge Science (later renamed Sinclair Research) Company Sinclair Research) to sell electronic products.
In the early days, the company's products were computer accessories, but Curry hoped to develop a complete computer, but was unable to convince Sinclair. As a result, Curry left Sinclair Research and established a new company with Hermann Hauser. The company is Acorn Computer (the name is before Apple Computer in the phone book).
Over the next decade, Sinclair and Acorn competed for the growing UK PC market. In the early 1980s, Acorn started a project to create a new computer system based on RISC technology. They have seen the popularity of IBM PC in enterprises, and they hope to occupy some of these markets. At the same time, Acorn’s engineers are developing operating systems for the new series of computers. RISC OS was first introduced in 1987 as Arthur 1.20 on the new Acorn Archimedes.
Acorn suffered economic losses in the 1980s and late 1990s. In 1999, the company changed its name to Element 14, and shifted its focus to designing silicon chips. The development of RISC OS was stopped at version 3.60. In the following years, RISC OS licenses were repeated between companies. This leads to a very confusing ownership of RISC OS. RISC OS Developments Ltd tried to solve this problem by purchasing the latest owner of License Castle Technology Ltd..
3. RISC OS operating model
For the business model of an open source operating system, RISC OS mainly has two organizations. RISC OS Open Limited and RISC OS Developments Ltd.
The RISC OS Open Limitedwebsite https://www.riscosopen.org/content/mainly manages the source code of the project, and also provides technical support services to those who are interested in developing projects around RISC OS in business.
RISC OS Developments LtdThe organization’s website https://www.riscosdev.com/owns the operating system and is mainly responsible for business and investment in the operating system.
4. Advantages of RISC OS
As a non-Linux or non-windows operating system, it is also a unique operating system that is meaningful in the history of computer operating systems. Later Apple systems, IBM and Microsoft, and Linux systems, although RISC OS has a small market share, its contribution cannot be denied.
In addition, RISC OS is aimed at the ARM operating system, other operating systems will not specifically optimize the ARM platform, and the specificity of the system provides the possibility for it to play the best performance of ARM. At the same time, it occupies very low resources and can be installed on a small 16MB SD card. And continue to use the world famous BBC BASIC language for programming. Of course, C language programming is also supported.
RISC OS currently supports many arm platforms, such as Raspberry Pi, Texas Instruments (TI), Intel, Broadcom, Freescale, NXP, etc. Supported project applications can range from smart homes to industrial automation, medical care, databases, etc.
RISC OS starts fast and is very suitable for single-board computers. The system starts fast and can enter a complete graphical interface in almost a few seconds.
RISC OS also supports software developed by many well-known software vendors, such as industry-leading products such as the Sibelius music processing family and the Xara series of graphics products. It also provided famous projects for the graphics and production of many TV shows, including household names such as "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", "The National Lottery" and "A Question of Sport", as well as many other BBC iconic works.
5. RISC OS installation and experience on Raspberry Pi 4
As a specific system on arm, it supports Raspberry Pi well, so let's do some effect experience for now.
Download first Raspberry Pi Imager.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/
Choose the corresponding system platform by yourself
Then insert the SD card, select the system image
Choose OS first
Choose the corresponding system
You can see that the size of the system is about 100MB, which is relatively small compared to Linux.
Finally, click Burn.
6. Effect display
The effect can be seen even more when running on the actual development board.
7. Operating system thinking
For the current desktop operating systems, windows, Linux, and macos each have their own characteristics and occupy the market of major systems. RISC OS is not amazing. Although it looks ordinary, it is also not surprising for the current era of single board computers. Can have a place. Computer operating systems have been in development for almost 60 years, and many operating systems have disappeared in the long river of history. It is by no means meaningless. These have laid a solid foundation for the prosperity of today's operating systems. Perhaps more operating systems will appear later, and an excellent operating system must be accompanied by a complete software ecology and practical production and entertainment software.
In my opinion, although the topic of domestic operating system has been raised one after another, and the trend of a hundred flowers blooming, many software companies want to take a break, but the bottom layer of the operating system is not a technical threshold. The real difficulty is the operating system. Ecology and applications, as well as chip technology closely related to operating systems. No operating system has an absolute advantage, whether it is Linux, windows or macOS, it is not designed to be able to eat the world with one move. Perhaps the emergence of the next generation of cloud desktop computers, the emergence of the next generation of quantum computers, and the existing market can see that all operating systems will be overthrown and annihilated in the long river of history.
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