RISC OS is the best Operating System you’ve never heard of.
RISC OS, is in a sense, the Operating System of my childhood. I’d used computers before it, 8 bit micros, even Macs, my school had many Mac Plus and Mac Classic models to play with, which were too expensive for most home users.
It was RISC OS on the Acorn Archimedes that really clicked for me though, when I first used an Acorn A5000, it just blew me away. It had a colour screen, a big one, nothing like the tiny black and white display in a Mac Classic. It had a hard disk and serious software installed, our Amiga at home had no hard disk, and we really only had games for it.
While the Amiga Workbench was quirky and charming, it just felt like it was about to fall apart any second, but the RISC OS desktop felt stable, coherent, and booted impossibly fast off ROM.
I had to have my own.
Savings were made, begging was done and in a few months an Acorn A3010 was sitting on a desk in our home.
This was a cheaper, slower alternative to the A5000, and I loved it. Over the months we saved for a hard disk, RAM upgrades (1MB to 4MB!), my brother and I used to write software and sell mail…
