What that was about was that all gui apps on riscos only ran one process, no matter how many files you had open. These machines had very little memory, so managing it was very important - there was actually a system panel you could open (I forget it's name) where you could drag sliders to change how much various things were allowed to allocate.
The downside, of course, was that if some app crashed, it would take out every file you had open with it. But then, it didn't really have very good isolation, so often a crashing app would take down the whole OS.
Pipedream always was spectacularly odd, even at the time.
I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it.
I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.
PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.
I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.
Drag and drop is one thing we just don't really use more than, say, once every 1/2 hour.
There's no composability really. We have the stupid metaphor of an "App" and it's a little world in itself. You can't really plug things into each other - e.g. use the gimp brush tool in a facebook post.
It's a dead end.
Why ** ** do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?
I used to use the ROX window manager and ROX Desktop - they were a great export of RiscOS features to Linux. I liked the way I could customise a menu option with a hotkey so easily. It's no longer maintained and I wasn't smart enough to be able to do it myself then. Perhaps now... :/
Our first computer was an Acorn BBC B Microcomputer.
It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
