GoKawiilA productivity suite that willfully rejects common notions on how such software should behave, on an operating system most haven't heard of, running on a processor 30 years ahead of its time.
During the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" years of home computing, up to around 1995, a lot was thrown and a lot failed to stick. Sometimes clumps would form that appeared to have the combined friction necessary to maintain wall grip, each holding the other up. But, like Mitch Hedberg's observation of belts and belt loops, it was difficult to discern who was helping who stick to what.
Take for example, our focus today. We have a completely novel CPU, built by a tiny team of engineers who had never designed a processor before, running a bespoke operating system squeezed out in a rush to meet the shipping deadline of a computer that wanted to carry on the legacy of a system beloved by British schoolchildren, hosting a productivity suite that completely rethought what the term "productivity suite" even meant.
Together, they formed a complete computing dead-end. Yet separately, they each achieved life beyond expectations, given their shaky beginnings.
Let's start with the hardware, Acorn Computer Ltd.'s follow-up to the famous 8-bit BBC Micro, the Archimedes. Feeling the 16-bit processors of the day didn't deliver enough bang-for-the-quid, they began an investigation into 32-bit processor options. After reading a U.C. Berkeley paper extolling the virtues of the RISC architecture, and seeing firsthand the ease with which chips could be designed, in 1983 Acorn launched the Acorn RISC Machine project to develop the 32-bit brain of their next system.
The fruit of that labor, the ARM processor, defined the Archimedes line. Try as they might, Acorn could never crack the home market the way they did education. Still, those ARM CPUs had longevity well beyond the life of the company that commissioned it. Your smartphone likely has ARM in it right now, and Apple's entire current hardware ecosystem is built on its spec.
That powerful hardware needed a preemptive multitasking operating system that befit its computing prowess. That was to be ARX, whose troubled development missed the product launch window. In the meantime, so the computer could have something driving it at launch, a stop-gap operating system called Arthur was shipped. It was similar to Acorn's previous BBC Micro MOS (Machine Operating System), with a graphical layer grafted on top; hit F12 and that text interface will peek out from behind the curtain. Over time it was decided that Arthur was doing a bang-up job and ARX was cancelled.
Thus was born RISC OS, a cooperative multitasking WIMP (windows, icons, menu, pointer) with possibly the first application "dock" on a home computer. Its mandatory three-button mouse summons an application's current context menu at the pointer location; there are no menu bars whatsoever. Drag-and-drop is embraced as a central file management metaphor, even to save documents. On top of all that, it was the first to offer scalable, anti-aliased font rendering, even if its fonts were a little "off brand."
No, we don't have... what did you call it?... HELL. VEET. EEE. KA??
On top of this unique foundation, we have PipeDream. Developer Mark Colton was convinced that the boundaries between word processor, spreadsheet, and database were artificial and could be eliminated. A document should be able to do any of those functions at any time, anywhere on the page, he posited. One might think, "Oh, like Google Sheets." but PipeDream handles word processing more elegantly. Another might think, "Oh, like Apple Pages" but the spreadsheet and database functions are more robust in PipeDream. This particular balance of the three productivity functions feels unique amongst even its modern peers.
... continue reading