30 Oct
2012
30 Oct
'12
3:42 p.m.
On 30 October 2012 22:16, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Liam Proven
<lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, it is - fair comparison.
Both work usably in 512KB, too - or did in their 2.x versions, anyway.
Both can be used off a single floppy if you're a bit masochistic and
very patient. (RO is better as the core OS is in ROM.)
Compared to Linux on low-end modern ARM hardware,
RISC OS looks pretty
amazing. OK, so, no true memory protection, no multiuser support, no
pre-emptive multitasking (although there is a patch for this out
there, but it breaks a lot of compatibility), no virtual memory, etc.,
but it's fast as hell and does a surprisingly large amount of all you
might want.
Sounds like AmigaDOS minus (working) pre-emptive multitasking. I say
this not to start a flame war (really), but because it sounds like the
closest point of reference amongst the machines I know well. On one other point, there's no true multi-user
support in AmigaDOS
(UIDs, logins, filesystem permissions/ownership, etc), but I have hung
a VT220 off the serial port and fired off a CLI to it and had two
people using the same Amiga (my college flatmate was playing a game
and I was editing and compiling console-based (stdin/stdout) C
programs).
Nifty!
Don't know of a way to do that in RO but there is one very odd little exception.
It's a bit like Windows 3 in standard mode. Not in the trivial sense
that you can quit back to the CLI, although you can - in the weird
sense that GUI apps are cooperatively multitasked, but the CLI and CLI
apps /can/ be preemptively multitasked.
Bizarrely the RO standard GUI text editor, !Edit, includes a
pre-emptively 'tasked shell. Just it, nothing else anywhere, and it's
not in the core OS, it's a feature of the editor.
When I was told, I thought it was a joke or someone was fooling with
me, but it's real. In RO 4.x (possibly earlier), "task window" is an
option off the main OS memory-management/tasks/shutdown menu - but
when you call it, it sneakily loads !Edit and gets /it/ to open the
window.
If it does what you need to get done, then there's
nothing wrong with
that (though connecting to an Exchange server and running Outlook
seems to be the second favorite thing for folks to do outside of
running a web browser - that alone gives me more grief than anything
else in modern computing expectations except maybe OS-specific VPN
clients, my hassle of the week).
Yup. No Javascript is the big lack for Web 2; no Flash, Java or
Quicktime are things one can live with.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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