The Icon Bar: General: After 10 years - back to RISC OS
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After 10 years - back to RISC OS |
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monkeytennis (17:50 12/1/2012)
filecore (20:31 12/1/2012)
trevj (21:57 12/1/2012)
swirlythingy (22:52 12/1/2012)
apacketofsweets (23:03 12/1/2012)
filecore (08:30 13/1/2012)
microbits (09:36 13/1/2012)
trevj (10:58 13/1/2012)
flibble (14:27 13/1/2012)
trevj (14:51 13/1/2012)
qUE (14:57 13/1/2012)
trevj (15:36 13/1/2012)
helpful (19:48 13/1/2012)
andypoole (22:28 13/1/2012)
monkeytennis (23:00 13/1/2012)
Bonez (23:09 13/1/2012)
Stoppers (08:53 14/1/2012)
monkeytennis (10:01 14/1/2012)
Stoppers (10:24 14/1/2012)
qUE (01:59 14/1/2012)
monkeytennis (23:15 13/1/2012)
helpful (03:58 14/1/2012)
trevj (12:50 16/1/2012)
qUE (14:51 13/1/2012)
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Simon Ayers |
Message #119469, posted by monkeytennis at 17:50, 12/1/2012 |
Member
Posts: 8
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Hello everyone,
I've decided to come back to the platform I once loved after a 10 year hiatus. I was 17 when I reluctantly gave up my ancient A3010 and moved over to a Windows PC.
I used to do a fair bit of coding in BASIC (often with Dr Wimp) and the odd spot of assembly.
The imminent release of the Raspberry Pi has re-inspired me to get back into RISC OS so I currently have a ROOL RPCEmu stick installed on my laptop running RISC OS 5 and am eagerly awaiting my copy the Acorn C/C++ DDE to arrive in the post.
I was wondering whether anyone could give me a quick round up of the state of the RISC OS world as it seems to be difficult as an outsider to get a handle on what's going on?
Also, how likely is it that RO5 will have a working Raspberry Pi build in place when the product launches?
Thanks
Simon |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #119470, posted by filecore at 20:31, 12/1/2012, in reply to message #119469 |
Posts: 3867
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Acorn broke up just before RiscPC 2. Different companies (CTL and ROL) independently developed RO4 (which later became RO Select, RO Adjust and finally RO6) and RO5, which are parallel branches, not sequential releases. ROL released its code to the tree-hugging leftist hippie types, and some stuff has been released by the RISC OS Open project (ROOL) just to muddy the waters further. The whole lot pretty much died with the Iyonix back in the mid 2000s, and got a bit of life with the Beagleboard, which is probably the most active segment until the Pi comes out. Oh, unless you count piracy, which has been interesting in fits and starts - it apparently took until RISC OS had been effectively dead for a decade before RO torrents really took off. Then the nice chappie from APDL announced that he had preemptively spiked his own files with garbage viruses just to foil the pirates, which had the legitimate downloaders all in a tizzy about APDL's software. Ummm that pretty much sums up the current RISC OS scene: it's like a bunch of 30-somethings who never really developed beyond the age of 15, and are now just spiteful, argumentative teenagers with long beards and thick glasses. Welcome back!  |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #119471, posted by trevj at 21:57, 12/1/2012, in reply to message #119469 |
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Posts: 660
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Also, how likely is it that RO5 will have a working Raspberry Pi build in place when the product launches? It's possible but far from guaranteed. |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #119472, posted by swirlythingy at 22:52, 12/1/2012, in reply to message #119469 |
Posts: 460
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I was wondering whether anyone could give me a quick round up of the state of the RISC OS world as it seems to be difficult as an outsider to get a handle on what's going on? Tip number one: you may need reminding after ten years away from RISC OS fora, but asking that sort of question in public hardly ever ends well... 
I'll try to give a quick, unresearched, and probably mostly incorrect (especially since I was too young to pay attention to a lot of it) layman's potted history:
After Black Thursday, the half-developed RISC OS 4 was sold to Pace Micro Technologies, who subsequently granted a startup called RISCOS Ltd (tip number two: no space in the company name between the RISC and the OS, and yes, to some people that's very important) the right to develop it further, and ultimately sell the finished product.
I must insert a legal disclaimer at this point: the precise terms of the license under which ROL developed the OS are the subject of extremely strongly worded dispute. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever both seen the document in question and told the tale on the record. We do know bits and pieces, which include the fact that an 'exclusive licence to develop and sell' was mentioned, and that ROL were placed under an obligation to 'feed back' any alterations made to Pace's copy of the source. Pay attention, this is going to be important later.
After RISC OS 4 (which was actually released as RISC OS 4.02, for reasons which remain unclear) came out on ROM, ROL switched their business model. It was announced that all further releases of RISC OS would be distributed as softloadable ROM images, rather than shipping physical ROMs, under a new scheme called "RISC OS Select". Paying an annual subscription charge to ROL would entitle you to download all new versions of RISC OS released in that year, thus allowing for a more rapid release schedule. (Two Select versions have, in fact, been made available as ROMs, called "RISC OS Adjust", of which the most recent is RISC OS 4.39.)
At about the same time, RISC OS enjoyed something of a hardware boom, at least in the sense usually applied to niche platforms, which is to say that hardly anything of what was promised was ever manufactured (see the notorious RiscStation portable) or lived up to hype (see the notorious MicroDigital Omega), not that this stopped a lot of people putting down eye-watering deposits. A few half-decent computers did make it out of the door, but RISC OS Select has been overwhelmingly installed on ageing RiscPCs. (Matters were not helped by the inconvenient tendency of Select to be incompatible with new hardware, effectively forcing people back onto the old.)
Just as the hardware bubble fizzled to an embarrassing close and users nursed their financial wounds, round about 2002, along came Castle Technology Ltd. Castle had taken over production of the RiscPC at Acorn's death, but now they had something new to announce - a RISC OS computer called the 'Iyonix' (nope, me neither), with an Intel XScale CPU running at what was then - in the RISC OS world, at least - a blisteringly fast 500MHz. As an added bonus, this promised beast actually existed, and some users managed to buy one.
There was, of course, a catch. The XScale was built on ARM architecture version 5, as opposed to the previous StrongARM, which was ARMv4. The rather important main difference between the two was that, as of v5, ARM dropped support for the (already long-deprecated) 26-bit PC mode, in which only code in the lower 64MB of logical address space may be executed, and the top six and lower two bits of the PC contained arithmetic flags, processor mode, and interrupt state. Unfortunately, all of RISC OS and all of its software had been relying on precisely this behaviour.
This necessarily precluded using RISC OS Select on the Iyonix, since it was tailored to StrongARMs and earlier - and here's where it gets really dirty. When released, the Iyonix ran something called "RISC OS 5", which, it emerged, had been forked off Pace's copy of the source tree some time ago. It appeared to be roughly in the same state as RISC OS 3.8/Ursula was on Black Thursday, apart from the little thing of having been mostly rewritten, and a whole lot of extra hardware support which had been added. In particular, it was the first version of RISC OS to include a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), and came with built-in USB 1 support (USB 2 was added later). However, little or no influence of RISCOS Ltd was evident, with the desktop experience feeling very retrograde compared to the truckloads of features and enhancements rapidly acquired by Select in its early days. The first Iyonixes were definitely something one bought if one wanted speed and little else.
The transition was smoothed somewhat by the release of a 32-bit, but backwards-compatible, SharedCLibrary, and the fact that BASIC programs worked just as well as they ever did. All the same, there was some major recompiling and reassembling to do, and soon advertising one's software as '32-bit' was the new 'StrongARM compatible'. There was also an in-desktop emulator, Aemulor, by Adrian Lees (remember that name), which enabled running of 26-bit code, and became a standard accessory while a marketplace full of hobbyists and abandonware slowly struggled to effect massive changes. As ever, some software fell by the wayside, just as there were casualties from the transition to RISC OS 4, and the StrongARM, and the RiscPC before that - and as the market inexorably dwindled, requiring new versions to be released of almost everything became a bigger and bigger ask.
But what of ROL in all this? Well, they were, perhaps understandably, livid. As far as they were concerned, Castle were brazenly infringing their 'exclusive licence' to sell RISC OS. Castle responded that, by their interpretation of that same licence, they were not. Matters were not helped when Castle announced that they had completed the purchase of the rights to RISC OS from Pace, meaning they effectively inherited the other end of the agreement. The debate escalated into increasingly hysterical and ridiculous terms - including a claim that the licence technically only granted ROL exclusive rights to 'Acorn-branded machines', and that the Iyonix was not Acorn-branded - finally culminating in Castle thundering (via press release) that they had 'withdrawn ROL's licence' to develop RISC OS.
Shortly afterwards, both parties looked around, abashed, as they realised everyone was staring at them. They hastily promised to kiss and make up, and ROL got its licence back (if indeed it had ever lost it), but in reality they only attained an uneasy ceasefire, as slowly but surely the RISC OS world schismed, like so many alternative OSes before it, into two bitterly resentful factions.
As a footnote, which is all it'll ever be, I should note that, in the middle of the decade, Stuart Tyrell Developments released the A9home. This was a tiny computer in a blue case, more portable than a laptop but not one-tenth as useful owing to the monitor, keyboard and mouse being supplied very much separately. It was powered by a 32-bit ARM9, and ran a custom version of RISC OS Adjust numbered 4.42. It went on sale when still in beta, which should probably have been a warning, and sure enough, in beta it stuck.
RISC OS 4.42 itself was a beta of what was eventually released by ROL (now very firmly identified as one distinct fork of a two-headed OS) as, in a rather obvious one-upmanship stunt (and scourge of writers of RMEnsure statements everywhere), RISC OS 6. This leapfrog version was billed as the first 26/32-bit neutral version of RISC OS, which was quite some claim considering it was 26-bit only. It has never come out on ROM, and the softload is only compatible with RiscPC-grade hardware. A version of Select was once promised for the Iyonix, but that went off to wherever it is that RISC OS promises go after the quoted timescale/fundraising target has slipped by. All this fuelled speculation that ROL had simply lost interest in running RISC OS on real hardware.
It has to be said that, circa 2006, that was the opinion of a lot of other people too. Cynics might suspect that ROL's sudden swerve in direction happened suspiciously soon after Aaron Timbrell, of Virtual Acorn, joined their board of directors, and subsequently released VirtualRPC, compatible with RO6, to replace VirtualA5000, but the gloom was infectious. The only newly manufactured computers were the Iyonix (which was still having its OS fork enhanced at a fairly glacial rate) and the A9home (which was not having any work done on its OS fork at all), leaving an RO6-shaped void to be filled solely by emulation - the bubble a distant memory, and RiscStation and MicroDigital liquidated in disgrace. R-Comp developed a fondness for flogging Windows XP boxes and laptops with VirtualRPC preinstalled, on the basis that that was the closest thing anybody was ever going to get to a RISC OS computer again, but in spite of their protestations that it was 'just the same', developers and users continued to trickle away.
Then Castle called a halt to the Iyonix. The quoted reason was changes in EU rules outlawing some chemical or other used in its manufacture, and at the same time confirmed that the long hoped-for Iyonix 2 was just as likely to appear as the RiscPC 2. With ROL now the only game in town, and visibly losing enthusiasm (and funds) for development, the end seemed nigh. Castle slank off into the shadows, and were never heard from again...
...Which was mainly because press releases about RISC OS 5 were now being delivered through a very different source. RISC OS Open Ltd, (conventionally abbreviated to ROOL, with two O's - and yes, that's a distinction it's really very important to make) was founded in 2006, with the stated intention of making the source code to RISC OS available to the general public.
To everybody's immense surprise, they actually did it.
The fork chosen was RISC OS 5, which, as it was then developed by the same company as owned it, probably made negotiations a bit simpler, but it did threaten to reignite the gently simmering row over ROL's licence. The stated position of both parties is that they believe they are fully within their legal rights to take their current course of action, and equally that the other party is not. As neither can actually afford to prove it in court, the contents of the document at the centre of all this have remained secret - which, given just how much of both cases rests upon technicalities and loopholes, is far from helpful.
The process of publishing the source has been slow indeed, and many have been frustrated at Castle's insistence on a 'shared source' licence, under which redistribution of the source is forbidden (everything must come out of ROOL's CVS repository) and commercial applications are almost impossible (due to the iffiness of the ROL/Castle situation). This made it incompatible with most software licences commonly thought of as 'free', restricting the amount of open source code which can be incorporated into RISC OS. There are also still some parts which cannot be distributed (notably ShareFS), although it is possible to build a complete ROM with the currently downloadable bits, and every now and again some new treats do get their sources published (FPEmulator, NetTime and SharedSound are all recent additions). Finally, there's the rather hefty financial barrier of needing to purchase the Norcroft toolset (of which Castle has allowed ROOL to administrate the supply, and also to develop new versions) before you can get anywhere - RISC OS 5 is only free to end users.
At first it was far from clear exactly what ROOL intended to do with the source after they had published it, apart from vague promises of 'getting the community involved in development' and that sort of thing. An early candidate was the development of a 100% free emulator (RPCemu, in lieu of the pricey VirtualRPC) running a 100% free ROM image (which ROL attempted, far too late, to compete with by making RISC OS 4.02 "Virtually Free", meaning a fiver). However, the singular combination of circumstances which we find ourselves in today were more the result of a sheer fluke of ROOL's being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
Not long after RO5 became buildable at home, ARM became a fashionable chip to put in consumer electronics. Well, OK, it had had a monopoly for quite some time, but it wasn't until the first smartphones that ARM processors really began to go back to their home computing roots - except, with Intel seemingly immovable from the desktop PC market, the only realistic strategy was to launch a major offensive against the very existence of that market. Mobile computing, it was said, was the way forward, and battery efficiency, not raw grunt, would be paramount - and that just so happened to be ARM's major strength.
All this led to the manufacture of a small red development board, powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor, with its entire hardware specification opened to all comers. It was relatively cheap, it was modern, it was an ARM processor instead of a silly emulation, and it ran at a blisteringly fast, erm, 600MHz.
There was, of course, a catch. The OMAP3 was built on ARMv7 - yes, there had now been such a long time since the last up-to-date native RISC OS hardware was brought out that we'd completely almost completely skipped ARMv6 (more on that later). In that adorable way they have, ARM had broken backwards compatibility yet again. This time it invalidated the use of code loading 32-bit quantities from non-word-aligned addresses, or 16-bit quantities from non-halfword-aligned ones. Now, you're probably thinking what I'm thinking - why on earth would anyone do that, except by accident? Apparently, this was frequently used as a shortcut for loading two or three bytes at a time, and this was exploited with surprising enthusiasm by C compilers, as well as by assembler programmers (naturally, in that case, sometimes by mistake). Yes, it was time to go recompiling the entire RISC OS marketplace yet again, now with even fewer maintainers of still-used software around than last time.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves - first of all, RISC OS needed to run on the BeagleBoard. This project was spearheaded by Jeffrey Lee, and the very first tentative screenshots of Supervisor mode emanating from this palm-sized, crimson, undeniably foreign yet comfortingly familiar, board caused quite a stir. Soon it was booting into the desktop, and applications were shown running on it. It wasn't just architecture problems which stood in the way - although the HAL had made porting easier, it hadn't eliminated the need to write hardware drivers, and there was a lot of new stuff to support.
Slowly, the problems were ironed out, and equally slowly, existing software began to creep in. There were a few high-profile ports - Star Fighter 3000, of course, generated the inevitable flurry of screenshots of four games multitasking on the desktop at once when first made to work - as well as a trickle of still-maintained software receiving 'Made ARMv7 compatible' entries in their change logs. MW Software's stable (EasiWriter, ArtWorks) made the jump, as did some of David Pilling's (Ovation Pro, SparkFS) and most of R-Comp's (Messenger Pro).
But what was really remarkable about the BeagleBoard port was not what it managed to preserve, but what it managed to create. For possibly the first time ever, RISC OS's userbase slightly expanded. A modest, but steady, trickle of intrigued folk, some simply curious, but others nostalgic veterans of Acorn days, have, quite suddenly, stopped writing off the platform as dead, and come back to see what it's up to, and maybe help out a bit. ROL's policy of emulation being 'good enough' never achieved TBA Software making a high-profile comeback, nor a marked upswing in mentions of RISC OS in the technology press (from non-existent to extremely rare).
The past three years have been littered with more 'firsts' that the preceding ten. A startup called Always Innovating took the BeagleBoard, put it in a netbook chassis, called it a TouchBook, and hey presto - RISC OS natively ran on the first portable since the Acorn A4, for a reasonably modest amount of porting effort!
Courtesy of R-Comp, who, until not so long ago, were dismissing RISC OS as only being suitable for emulation while you used Windows to do your real work, there is a new, purpose-built RISC OS computer available. OK, so the ARMini is a BeagleBoard and a hard drive in an off-the-shelf case, but what matters is that you put money in one end and get a computer out the other. A4com in Germany offer the BIK (loosely translated, "BeagleBoard in a box"), which does something similar.
But, as ever, there was still the software problem, and this time there was no in-desktop emulator to hold the hand of the software which hadn't yet, or would never be, converted. Where was Adrian Lees?
That question was, of course, answered at last year's RISC OS London Show, when the real fruit of the effort to make RO5 compatible with new ARM chips was seen in public for the first time. RISC OS, thanks to the time put in by Adrian, building upon Jeffrey's work before him, now runs on the £25 Raspberry Pi - making RO5 not only free to download, but also pretty much the cheapest system to purchase anywhere. The Pi has an ARMv6 chip, the first architecture in which the alignment problem was introduced, so it would have been vastly more difficult without the BeagleBoard work - OS and third party - to start from.
The beauty of all this is that, with the Pi's focus aimed squarely at the education market, and computer science coming back into favour twenty years after it was assumed 'Microsoft Studies' was more 'relevant', and RISC OS being one of the last operating systems standing which really encourages you to get close to the nuts and bolts, rather than obfuscate the actual science of programming behind layers and layers of 'safe' abstraction, it does look rather as if it's all about to come full circle. Maybe the Archimedes will have its revenge after all?
PS: As for what RISC OS Ltd is up to these days, does anybody even care any more?
Also, how likely is it that RO5 will have a working Raspberry Pi build in place when the product launches? Answers to that question, as ever, vary from the wildly pessimistic to the wildly optimistic depending on the sort of person you ask. All are equally unreliable. |
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Sion |
Message #119473, posted by apacketofsweets at 23:03, 12/1/2012, in reply to message #119472 |
 RISC OS, too cool for Javascript.
Posts: 110
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Couldn't have said it better myself Martin.
Welcome back to RISC OS Simon, it's an exciting time to be a RISC OS user at the moment.
it's like a bunch of 30-somethings who never really developed beyond the age of 15, and are now just spiteful, argumentative teenagers with long beards and thick glasses. ...unless your Jason Togneri of course. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #119474, posted by filecore at 08:30, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119473 |
Posts: 3867
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...unless you're Jason Togneri of course. Nah, I was mostly referring to the old users. The young, enthusiastic Beagleboarders and Pi activists are a different type altogether. |
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rob andrews |
Message #119475, posted by microbits at 09:36, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119474 |
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Posts: 24
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You talk for yourself I am old and proud to be call an old Acorn user. i still run Risc OS on an xM & Iyonix, working on a port for tegra 2 on trim-slice, Very hard going!! still reading the hardware TRM's took a long time to get them.
It's hard when you only have two brain cells knocking around in your head.
Anyway i digress welcome back and I hope you to can help because we need all the help we can get. |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #119476, posted by trevj at 10:58, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119474 |
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Posts: 660
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The young, enthusiastic Beagleboarders and Pi activists are a different type altogether. Enthusiastic, yes... but some of us will be turning 40 this year! 
working on a port for tegra 2 on trim-slice, Very hard going!! Rob, I tried to contact you recently via your website about this - if you've not seen it, would you mind please getting in touch via the forum's messaging service? Thanks. |
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Peter Howkins |
Message #119477, posted by flibble at 14:27, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119476 |
Posts: 891
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The young, enthusiastic Beagleboarders and Pi activists are a different type altogether. Enthusiastic, yes... but some of us will be turning 40 this year!
By riscos user standards that's practically a child ... |
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qUE |
Message #119478, posted by qUE at 14:51, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119469 |
Posts: 187
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Everything after the A3010 was Acorn trying to redeem itself back into a market it tried to leave so hastily (excluding the STB stuff). Since Acorn's demise the products being released since then are pretty much hobbyist projects.
[Edited by qUE at 14:52, 13/1/2012] |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #119479, posted by trevj at 14:51, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119477 |
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Posts: 660
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Thanks - I must remember to quote you on that! |
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qUE |
Message #119480, posted by qUE at 14:57, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119479 |
Posts: 187
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Thanks - I must remember to quote you on that! Ha!, you can flame me at the next meeting ;) |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #119481, posted by trevj at 15:36, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119480 |
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Posts: 660
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I shouldn't have used the Preview, Mr Quick-Draw!
[Edit: Ah, cross-purposes... you're probably right!]
[Edited by trevj at 15:40, 13/1/2012] |
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Bryan Hogan |
Message #119483, posted by helpful at 19:48, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119476 |
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Posts: 249
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Welcome Simon, I hope Martin's excellent summary hasn't freaked you out!
Where are you located? You could find your nearest user group and drop into a meeting to catch up with more news.
Enthusiastic, yes... but some of us will be turning 40 this year! I'm only &29  |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #119484, posted by andypoole at 22:28, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119483 |
Posts: 5558
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Enthusiastic, yes... but some of us will be turning 40 this year! I'm only &29
If we're going to be like that, I'm &1B, but I haven't touched the RiscPC (which is on a shelf disconnected) in a couple of years now. 
I'll probably have a quick play with RO5 on the Raspberry Pi, but mine'll probably spend most of it's life in Linux (I've got a couple of ideas for a project it might be useful in..) |
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Simon Ayers |
Message #119485, posted by monkeytennis at 23:00, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119484 |
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Thanks guys, and especially Martin for writing possibly the post I have ever read on the internet!
I hope at some point I can add a little to the community.
I've been working in the electronics industry for 9 years now. I'm pretty confident in C and the majority of my software work has been with microcontrollers (PICs, generally, although I am playing around with an STM32F4 ARM develeopment board at the moment).
I'm also just over half way through an OU degree so have been doing a fair bit of Java and object-oriented programming recently, although I don't suppose there is much call for OOD in RISC OS.
So with regards RISC OS programming, as my memory of Wimp programming is pretty rusty right now I would probably be better at lower level programming than the higher-level stuff. Need to brush up.
I'm currently developing a product that will hopefully have RISC OS HID USB drivers (along with Windows), which may mean I'll end up writing the driver myself if I can't find anything suitable.
As far as I'm concerned, a platform is only as good as its software, etc. The Raspberry Pi offer RISC OS a fantastic opportunity for a comeback so I want to be there making a difference when that happens.
I'm quite excited! |
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Bonez |
Message #119486, posted by Bonez at 23:09, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119485 |
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I hope it goes well. Thanks for asking the question Simon. Martins post certainly clears things up a bit for this Risc noob. |
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Simon Ayers |
Message #119487, posted by monkeytennis at 23:15, 13/1/2012, in reply to message #119483 |
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Posts: 8
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Welcome Simon, I hope Martin's excellent summary hasn't freaked you out!
Where are you located? You could find your nearest user group and drop into a meeting to catch up with more news.
Enthusiastic, yes... but some of us will be turning 40 this year! I'm only &29 Hi Bryan,
Well I "live" in Southampton but I spend weekdays staying in Tetbury, Gloucestershire for work.
If anyone runs a group around that region I might pop along if invited.
Oh, and I'm &1B. |
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qUE |
Message #119488, posted by qUE at 01:59, 14/1/2012, in reply to message #119484 |
Posts: 187
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Enthusiastic, yes... but some of us will be turning 40 this year! I'm only &29 :)
If we're going to be like that, I'm &1B, but I haven't touched the RiscPC (which is on a shelf disconnected) in a couple of years now. :P
I'll probably have a quick play with RO5 on the Raspberry Pi, but mine'll probably spend most of it's life in Linux (I've got a couple of ideas for a project it might be useful in..)
Only &1B, maybe we can meet up and have sexy time. |
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Bryan Hogan |
Message #119489, posted by helpful at 03:58, 14/1/2012, in reply to message #119487 |
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Posts: 249
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Well I "live" in Southampton but I spend weekdays staying in Tetbury, Gloucestershire for work.
If anyone runs a group around that region I might pop along if invited. Dave Higton runs the Southampton user group, which meets on the 2nd Tuesday of every month at Itchen College. He writes a lot of USB device drivers for RISC OS so he could be the ideal person for you to get to know!
Oh, and I'm &1B. Youngster - I've got Acorn computers older than that :-( |
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Simon Willcocks |
Message #119491, posted by Stoppers at 08:53, 14/1/2012, in reply to message #119485 |
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Posts: 302
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Thanks guys, and especially Martin for writing possibly the post I have ever read on the internet! I think you accidentally the adjective. |
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Simon Ayers |
Message #119492, posted by monkeytennis at 10:01, 14/1/2012, in reply to message #119491 |
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Whoops - best |
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Simon Willcocks |
Message #119493, posted by Stoppers at 10:24, 14/1/2012, in reply to message #119492 |
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Posts: 302
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Whoops - best That was my guess, but fairest and longest were also contenders. |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #119500, posted by trevj at 12:50, 16/1/2012, in reply to message #119483 |
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Posts: 660
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I'm only &29 I remember bewildering people while living in France some years ago, by explaining on my birthday that I was "deux puissance cinq"! |
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The Icon Bar: General: After 10 years - back to RISC OS |
