PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

Archimedes A productivity suite that willfully rejects common notions on how such software should behave, on an operating system most haven't heard of, running on a processor 30 years ahead of its time. During the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" years of home computing, up to around 1995, a lot was thrown and a lot failed to stick. Sometimes clumps would form that appeared to have the combined friction necessary to maintain wall grip, each holding the other up. But, like Mitch Hedberg's observation of belts and belt loops, it was difficult to discern who was helping who stick to what.Take for example, our focus today. We have a completely novel CPU, built by a tiny team of engineers who had never designed a processor before, running a bespoke operating system squeezed out in a rush to meet the shipping deadline of a computer that wanted to carry on the legacy of a system beloved by British schoolchildren, hosting a productivity suite that completely rethought what the term "productivity suite" even meant.Together, they formed a complete computing dead-end. Yet separately, they each achieved life beyond expectations, given their shaky beginnings.Let's start with the hardware, Acorn Computer Ltd.'s follow-up to the famous 8-bit BBC Micro, the Archimedes. Feeling the 16-bit processors of the day didn't deliver enough bang-for-the-quid, they began an investigation into 32-bit processor options. After reading a U.C. Berkeley paper extolling the virtues of the RISC architecture, and seeing firsthand the ease with which chips could be designed, in 1983 Acorn launched the Acorn RISC Machine project to develop the 32-bit brain of their next system.The fruit of that labor, the ARM processor, defined the Archimedes line. Try as they might, Acorn could never crack the home market the way they did education. Still, those ARM CPUs had longevity well beyond the life of the company that commissioned it. Your smartphone likely has ARM in it right now, and Apple's entire current hardware ecosystem is built on its spec.Apple's first ARM-based mobile device. Apple won't let us dual-boot, but there is a way to get this running.

By Felix Winkelnkemper - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0That powerful hardware needed a preemptive multitasking operating system that befit its computing prowess. That was to be ARX, whose troubled development missed the product launch window. In the meantime, so the computer could have something driving it at launch, a stop-gap operating system called Arthur was shipped. It was similar to Acorn's previous BBC Micro MOS (Machine Operating System), with a graphical layer grafted on top; hit F12 and that text interface will peek out from behind the curtain. Over time it was decided that Arthur was doing a bang-up job and ARX was cancelled.Thus was born RISC OS, a cooperative multitasking WIMP (windows, icons, menu, pointer) with possibly the first application "dock" on a home computer. Its mandatory three-button mouse summons an application's current context menu at the pointer location; there are no menu bars whatsoever. Drag-and-drop is embraced as a central file management metaphor, even to save documents. On top of all that, it was the first to offer scalable, anti-aliased font rendering, even if its fonts were a little "off brand."No, we don't have... what did you call it?... HELL. VEET. EEE. KA??On top of this unique foundation, we have PipeDream. Developer Mark Colton was convinced that the boundaries between word processor, spreadsheet, and database were artificial and could be eliminated. A document should be able to do any of those functions at any time, anywhere on the page, he posited. One might think, "Oh, like Google Sheets." but PipeDream handles word processing more elegantly. Another might think, "Oh, like Apple Pages" but the spreadsheet and database functions are more robust in PipeDream. This particular balance of the three productivity functions feels unique amongst even its modern peers.Does a productivity suite work better when it's just a single app? Did Colton successfully execute his vision? And where is the Homerton documentary we deserve?Crowdfunding my groundbreaking doc which explores only Helvetica knock-offs.Historical Context(I didn't know Ghost blogging platform forces images to 2000px max; I've revised my design workflow to mitigate this in the future.

To make amends for this timeline's illegibility at 2000px, please accept this PDF version)Testing RigRPCEmu v371 on Windows 11RISC OS v3.71024 x 768 15-bit color64MB RAMPipeDream v4.13Let's Get to WorkMy process when first examining unfamiliar systems is as follows:boot the systemlaunch my application of interestmake a dummy documentsave itquit the emulator entirely and rebootload my saved documentI do that across a variety of emulators to see which gives me the least grief; I need to be sure I can trust a basic productivity loop. I usually try to give it a go without research, to see how far I can get on pure skillz (with a Z).It's unusual to sit down at what appears to be a computer I understand and be baffled every step of the way. I've heard this system described as "elegant" and "easy to learn." This has me questioning if maybe I'm actually a very dumb person because my impression is "uncomfortable."You know that modern horror story, aka "creepypasta", The Backrooms? It's a hidden world that co-exists with our own, which can be entered only by clipping through a seam of reality which separates the two. In there, buzzing fluorescents light an infinite maze of featureless, yellow-wallpapered office-style floor layouts.If one were to find a running computer there, I suspect RISC OS would drive it.Oddly fitting desktop image. What is with yellow wallpaper and mental distress?It's just common enough in its GUI metaphors to feel familiar, and just off-kilter enough to turn that familiarity against you. Liam Proven wrote in The Register, "You will find it very disorienting, especially if all you know is post-1990s OSes." My dude, I've been computing since the 1970s and I find it disorienting.Nothing is unlearnable (I'm dumb, not incompetent), but I genuinely had to work through its manual to acclimate myself. To be clear, I enjoyed the thrill of venturing into the unknown. After all, one of the goals of this blog is to investigate the less-trodden paths in software history.

Still, there are times when I feel RISC OS is "having me on." (trying to ingratiate myself with British readers in today's post)I'll start with the three-button mouse. From left to right the buttons are "Select", "Menu", and "Adjust." After weeks working with the system, I still can't figure out what problem the "Adjust" button solves. It's semi-analogous to CTRL + Left-click on modern systems, as when clicking to add/remove elements to/from a set of selected items. Then, sometimes it does something unexpected like, "drag a window by its title bar without bringing that window to the front."Other times it is baffling. Select-dragging a file icon to a new folder location doesn't move the file to the new location. It copies the file. If you want to move the file, you must SHIFT + Select-drag. Why are we "SHIFT" dragging anything when we have a perfectly good "Adjust" button?Sometimes the "Adjust" button does "opposite" actions. Click a "down" scroll arrow with "Adjust" and it will to scroll up instead. Is that an "adjustment?" What does it even mean, to "Adjust" a mouse click? It seems like it could mean anything, and that's kind of my point. It's unguessable and unintuitive.Maybe you'll like it, but I find the window clutter confusing. Here, the paint tools, palettes, and drawing surface are all intermingled with the OS desktop folder windows. RISC User, April 1996, chastised MacOS for not doing what you see.An interesting UI element (which predates NeXT and Windows 95) is the Icon Tray, an important tool inexplicably not described at all in the RISC OS 3 manual. Situated along the bottom of the screen, currently running applications and directory icons sit on a little shelf. Double-click "Select" on an application icon to launch it and... nothing.Its icon displays in the Icon Tray, and that's it. We must now Single-click "Select" on that icon to actually bring the application to the forefront and activate it. I don't know what that's all about, but that's how it works.Menus are fascinating in both the positive and negative meanings of the word.

There are no menus on screen whatsoever, they are only made visible by the middle "Menu" mouse button. "Menu" clicking opens a given menu at the current mouse pointer location. Icons in the Icon Tray can be "Menu" clicked to get application-level menus, like "Make a new document." Within a document, "Menu" click will give us document-level options. Conceptually, I like the "Menu" button a lot.Within a menu, any choices which open dialog boxes or control panels tend to open in-menu. It's kind of cool, being able to type, or flip switches and radio buttons, directly inside the menu itself, rather than popping up a modal window. However, it is jarring to have large panels suddenly lunge out like a xenomorph's inner jaws when scrolling through menus. These can obscure the root menu, depending on screen position. 0:00 /0:08 The last point to get our collective heads around is file saving. When saving a new document, simply typing in a file name is not sufficient. Save dialog boxes expect and require the full path to your save destination; no assumptions or default folder locations are provided.You can manually type in the full path to your desired save location like this:HostFS::HostFS.$.Apps.Documents.Examples.Tutorial.StoneDoc While you type, the system will not assist you in navigating the directory structure; no autocompletion here. You must know the path by heart.The other option, as described in manuals, is to drag-and-drop your document to its save location. Drag-and-drop really seems to be the RISC OS idiomatic way to manipulate files. In a Save dialog box there is a little icon for the application. It looks like decoration, but it physically represents your document. Type a name into the text field, then drag that icon to your desired save folder. 0:00 /0:13 I don't want to get bogged down enumerating RISC OS's idiosyncrasies, but a few more things need mentioning. There is a kind of "programmer's art" ugliness to the user interface; those folder icons are terrible. There are graphical glitches, as when scrolling a window too quickly (though moving windows around shows full contents, which wasn't typical during that period).