Long, long ago (in a Galaxy not so far away) the BBC commissioned a small company called Acorn Computers to design and develop a series of machines for education. The original Acorn BBC B was based largely on the Acorn Atom, then being developed, and became widely used in schools. Using the ARM 6502 processor it was a powerful machine at only 32K, in fact many are still in use today as wordprocessors, control units and simple workstations in classrooms. As technology (namely the ARM processor) developed, so the Archimedes was born and RISC OS became the first WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) environment to be widely used on the desktop. Oh, yes, long before Microsoft had even thought it was possible, we British had the WIMP environment. In fact, legend has it that, at the conference where the Archimedes was unveiled, a rather confident American named William, began asking searching questions and offered to buy the technology! In the end he had to settle for a single desktop machine. Rather coincidentally Windows 3x was released shortly afterwards. For many years RISC OS was known as an Operating System that allowed programmers to work happily in the WIMP environment (where many, including Linux, expect you to work from the command prompt). The 'drag and drop' file handling system meant that even children could quickly get to grips with using a computer. The powerful ARM processor optimised the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture - hence the RISC OS name.

ARM processors remain one of the fastest and coolest processors on the market; the StrongARM, as used in the RiscPC, compares to Pentium and it is said that the Pentium processor uses as much power as an entire RiscPC. They are used in most hand held appliances such as mobile phones and palmtop computers as well as being the favourite processors of people working in Rwanda and Australia. They are also beginning to be used in cars to support Safety Systems, including ABS and Power Steering, because of their reliability.

Unfortunately, Acorn, like Sony with Betamax, did not seem to know when it was on to a good thing and failed to develop any sort of marketing strategy, except from the sort that clearly does not work and ultimately results in the demise of the company! In fact, in the mid '90s, after a deal with Apple Macintosh, Acorn handed over the marketing of Acorn computers to Xemplar (Apple's marketing group). There are many rumours, though companies are rather cagey about disclosing evidence, that Xemplar had a hidden agenda to destroy RISC OS entirely. When you consider the similarities in the computers it is easy to believe: Both were based on the ARM core Both RISC based Both used a WIMP environment before DOS (and Microsoft) Both Faster machines than the standard PC Both widely used by the Graphics and Publishing Industry It is easy to believe that Apple wanted to remove its immediate competition before it waged war on its main adversary (Microsoft). Apple bit off more than it could chew with RISC OS though. While Apple started selling itself down the river to Microsoft - producing (virus friendly) software versions of its OS, running MS Windows etc. RISC OS held true to its beliefs. After the widely publicised demise of Acorn at the end of the 1990s, there were enough people wanting to keep it going for several small companies to take over its development. Originally a small company, PACE, who used to sell disk drives and accessories for the BBC B, had grown into a large company and bought the rights to RISC OS from under Apple's nose. RISC OS Ltd now develop the Operating System as a separate company. Castle Technology bought the rights to the original Acorn Computers and now develop the A7000 and RiscPC along with one or two of their own surprises! MicroDigital were, perhaps, the first new company to create their own version of a RISC OS computer and have done some extraordinary things with their motherboards to do with EDOSRAM! Perhaps the best known of the new companies, though, is RiscStation. They have an Australian leg of the company selling the great British OS to Aus! RISC OS has always been a highly versatile Operating System. Instead of following Apple and allowing Acorn computers to run Windows instead of its native OS, RISC OS has a plethera of utilities that read and convert file-types to and from RISC OS format (though a PC card can be added to a RiscPC if you must use Windows); JPEG, MPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF and HTML are all common place with RISC OS users. I know several people who moved across to the PC because Acorn let RISC OS fall behind other Operating Systems in development of Printing and Scanning technologies, but with the release of RISC OS4 the developments in digital camera software and photo imaging packages has been really quite exctitng. Spacetech have devoted themselves to bringing the imaging package to RISC OS and have some quite spectacular things on offer. IconTechnology have my vote for bringing one of the most useful applications to the RISC OS platform. Previously writers of Apple software (such as MacAuthor, as used by Douglas Adams in writing 'Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency'), their new WordProcessor, EasiWriter, looks like a port of MSWord and will even read and write Word files. It seems a great shame that we are seeing less and less RISC OS machines in schools. The Educational Operating System is held in Flash ROMs and as such there are no expensive bills to remove viruses and children cannot accidentally delete the 'guts' of the machine. Also, the nature of this WIMP environment makes learning basic computer skills, such as file sharing and handling, far simpler than with other systems. However, with only 8 people working at RISC OS Ltd many software houses do not see RISC OS as a viable market. This is a good thing, though, in many ways. There is a lot of terrible software available for the PC, because so many people write for it and even more buy for it. Whereas, software has to be outstanding to survive on RISC OS. As an ICT coordinator in a Junior school, I still look to see if Educational Software is available on RISC OS before I buy it for any platform; if it isn't, experience tells me it's generally not worth having anyway, and that keeps the standard high. In the last 12 months, since Acorn closed its doors for the last time, RISC OS has come a great distance. We are now competing with PCs over digital camera, scanning and MPEG technologies and we are eating into Apple's hold over the publishing market. We do still seem to be losing the Eductation market, though the coordinators who really know about computers are holding on to their RiscPCs and A7000s like they are made of gold. There is more and more Office-style software being published for RISC OS and the Graphics and Internet applications are evolving rapidly. Incidentally, if you are a fan of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire', the on screen graphics are supplied by RISC OS (Millipede to be exact). It has been said that the production company needed a reliable solution to their graphics since the filming has to be done in front of a live studio audience. More and more people are turning away from Microsoft's Windows (although many to Linux). People are looking for choice and accessibility in their Operating System. If you want control, stability and speed (my RiscPC starts up from scratch in under 11 seconds), RISC OS and ARM make the perfect desktop partnership.