Quote:
Originally Posted by Akira
The OS, RiscOS, was quite great as well.
|
RISC OS (yes, it's two seperate acronyms) had some amazing GUI features that it's taken until Vista/Win7 for Microsoft to catch up (and not on all, either). The underlying mess of hooks and SWIs was quite nasty, but from an end-user point of view it was generally a nice OS to use. As far as limitations, the major factor limiting the performance of RISC OS was the lack of a floating point engine, until the A7xxx series (the next machine after the RiscPC). The Iyonix and beyond brought the hardware more up-to-date, but the infighting in the developer community (notably, Castle Ltd vs ROL, RISC OS Ltd) more or less dealt the finishing blow. It is still being developed (in the form of ROOL, RISC OS Open Ltd) for newer ARM SoCs, such as the BeagleBoard.