The RISC OS GUI

> When a program needs to allow the user to choose a file, drag and drop is again used, with the window providing a drop area to collect the file

The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another, without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at all.

I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust". Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.

Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.

Acorn just plain didn't have the manpower. They failed to effectively enter the international market and so other companies with a wider customer base out-invested them.

They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel, Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.

The internals of riscos were creaking by the end; it didn't have a proper library system and only had cooperative multitasking. There was an internal project ('galileo') to replace it, but it suffered from second system effect and NIH and never saw the light of day.

> They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel, Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.

Are you referring to RISC iX? I had no idea there were serious users of that to be honest.

A few years ago some Acorn strategy documents leaked from the early 90s and it showed they basically knew the game was up long pre-Risc PC. I don't think any number of people would have helped them by 1992. There was this odd void where everyone (such as Xara) kind of knew the PC was going to take over everything, but it just wasn't quite there, and then suddenly it was.

Yes, RISC iX. I've no idea how many users it had to be honest .

They kept going for a period by virtue of owning ARM. When the shareholders persuaded them to list it directly, the game was over. Before that they bet on set-top-boxes and the supposed PC replacement, the NC (thin client).

>the NC (thin client).

I was thinking about this the other day. It seems to have come to pass with smart TVs and consoles like the PS5.