Windows, macOS and Linux today monopolize all consumer PCs, but there were times when other operating systems had their time in history. RISC OS is part of this group of “alternatives” and could have become much more important than what he thought ruled the original computer with an ARM chip.

RISC OS is 35 years old Registration They commemorated the anniversary. Originally published as the “Arthur” system, it was developed by Acorn Computer for its Archimedes desktop line released in June 1987 and was specifically designed to run on 32-bit ARM chip they used They said these machines were radical and very fast, “Loading large programs in the time required for flashing”.

Its business history has been short since Acorn Computer withdrew from the computer market in 2000 and separated its ARM chips department. But the system is still alive, and one of its forks, the one designed for 32-bit ARM chips, is now owned by RISC OS Developments, which released it several years ago as an open source license and can be used by anyone to modify it today.

RISC OS Developments maintains and develops it and offers downloads for a wide range of current ARM hardware, such as Titanium computers or special versions of so-called Direct RISC OS which runs on almost all versions of a single board computer raspberry pi.

If you are curious but do not have this type of hardware, there is a FOSS emulator called RPCem that can run modern versions of the RISC OS. Of course, don’t ask it to work like the current ones, because as a system developed in the 80’s, it doesn’t support SMP and only works with one CPU core.

Risks in ARM

It’s hard to guess what would happen to this RISC OS if its a developer The acorn computer wouldn’t be torn off Advanced RISC machines which we know as ARM and which eventually became a vital company for the entire industry. Just remember, NVIDIA was willing to pay $ 40 billion for it.

Today, ARM has licensing agreements with hundreds of manufacturers, and its architecture designs are present in billions of devices, 100% of smartphones sold on the planet, but also in other mobile devices such as tablets and wearable devices, embedded and data center servers. NVIDIA’s biggest interest in buying it.

ARM is also present in personal computers Windows, Linux or Chrome OS. And of course, in the most important group, the Apple Mac, once those of Cupertino decided to replace the Intel x86. Apple isn’t just anyone here, and in quoting how well Macs work with ARM, it’s worth noting that in addition to experience with mobile devices, he was involved with Acorn Computer in the initial development of the architecture.

More specifically, Acorn feared that the involvement of a hardware manufacturer such as Apple would push back other manufacturers to take advantage of their development and thus the creation of ARM. Otherwise, history could change. Like the RISC OS tour, whose 35th anniversary we commemorate.