On 20 June 2006 we incorporated
RISC
OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the
RISC
OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited.
To mark the occasion, here is the story so far, with one highlight for each of our first twenty years. Our thanks go to everyone who has written code, filed a bug, funded a bounty, contributed in our forums and wiki, tested a nightly build, or simply cheered from the sidelines. None of it would exist without you.
Twenty years, a year at a time
Year 1 (2006-07)
: it started with a plan to do the unthinkable. Castle and
ROOL
announced a shared source initiative
that autumn, and by the Wakefield Show the following May the
very first
RISC
OS sources were in public hands
.
Year 2 (2007-08)
: batch by batch, more of the OS went out to the community, and the early momentum earned
ROOL
its
second Drobe award
, this one for “Best show of initiative”.
Year 3 (2008-09)
: a first for the platform. A build of
RISC
OS 5 ran on an
IYONIX
carrying a great deal of community-contributed code, shown off to a warm reception at the Midlands Show.
Year 4 (2009-10)
: the plumbing grew up.
Nightly autobuilds
began rebuilding and testing the sources automatically, while Jeffrey Lee’s port to the BeagleBoard, our first step towards cheap
RISC
OS hardware,
took an Icon Bar award
.
Year 5 (2010-11)
: a neat idea took shape. The
Bounty Scheme
let the community pool donations and vote with their wallets for the features they most wanted to see from the
roadmap
. It is still going strong today.
Year 6 (2011-12)
: working with Piccolo Systems,
ROOL
published an open source
SD and
MMC
filing system
, giving the BeagleBoard machines native memory-card support and laying important groundwork for the stable release ahead.
Year 7 (2012-13)
: the watershed.
RISC
OS Pi
brought the OS to the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card computer with
BBC
BASIC
only a keystroke away, and put
RISC
OS in front of a whole new generation. Our
website traffic records
did not survive the week.
Year 8 (2013-14)
:
RISC
OS 5.20
landed as the first stable
ROM
release in years, with the classic Risc PC and A7000 family included for the first time. To mark fifty years of
BASIC
we also released
Pico
, a cut-down
RISC
OS that boots straight to a prompt, just like the Beeb.
Year 9 (2014-15)
: support for the quad-core
Raspberry Pi 2
arrived in February, followed swiftly by
RISC
OS 5.22
, the next stable release and the first to bundle the OMAP4 (PandaBoard) port.
Year 10 (2015-16)
: a glimpse of the future turned up at the London Show in the shape of
Titanium
, a dual-core Cortex-A15 board built with
RISC
OS in mind. Then, in June 2016,
ROOL
reached double figures
: ten years old, with most of the original goals met.
Year 11 (2016-17)
: monitors learned to introduce themselves. A bounty delivered
EDID
support
, so
RISC
OS could read a display’s capabilities directly and spare users the old ritual of hand-tuned monitor definition files.
Year 12 (2017-18)
: the
definitive
BBC
BASIC
Reference Manual
came back into print, fully revised across 520 pages, and
RISC
OS 5.24
went stable, this time with the Raspberry Pi and Titanium ports earning their badge, accompanied by a first edition
RISC
OS 5 User Guide
put together with community contributions.
Year 13 (2018-19)
: the goal we set out to reach back in 2006. With Castle acquired by
RISC
OS Developments,
RISC
OS was
re-licensed under Apache 2.0
, free for anyone to use, share and build upon, commercially or otherwise, for the first time in its history.
Year 14 (2019-20)
: work began on a port to the new
Raspberry Pi 4
, and
ROOL
threw open the doors to its lab
, moving the entire code base (every component and all 106,000-odd commits of history) onto a public GitLab for anyone to browse and improve.
Year 15 (2020-21)
:
RISC
OS 5.28
shipped with official Raspberry Pi 4 support and some 700 improvements, and just in time for Christmas the all-in-one
Pi 400
got its own ready-to-run edition. The Acorn Electron would have approved.
Year 16 (2021-22)
: the community had its say at the
RISC
OS Awards, where 5.28
took Best New Development
and the
ROOL
forums won Best Website, both by a comfortable margin.
Year 17 (2022-23)
: the Archimedes
BASIC
Compiler
learned to use the hardware floating point unit
, drawing a Mandelbrot some 35 times quicker than the plain interpreter. The next April,
RISC
OS was
chosen by SpaceX for a mission to Mars
, a claim that held up nicely until the 2nd.
Year 18 (2023-24)
: a busy year for modern conveniences. A native
Git client
,
Open source SparkFS
and
NVMe solid-state storage
both arrived in February, and
RISC
OS 5.30
followed in April, a bumper stable release spanning seven hardware platforms.
Year 19 (2024-25)
: the move to Git paid off handsomely, passing
one thousand accepted merge requests
since 2019.
ROOL
then announced its boldest plan yet, the
Moonshots initiative
, a shift to full-time, multi-year engineering to carry
RISC
OS onto 64-bit Arm before the 32-bit chips run dry.
Year 20 (2025-26)
: the
Moonshots rocket began fuelling up
with its first sponsors and volunteers, the full
RAM
of an 8GB Pi was
freed from its 32-bit shackles
, and, of all things,
Fortran returned to the toolset
after a long-lost copy surfaced on a decades-old backup tape.
Here’s to the next twenty
None of this was the work of
ROOL
alone.
RISC
OS today is hugely improved from the sorry state it was in back in 2006, and the scene around it is far livelier for everyone who turned up and got stuck in. We’re excited to see what the future will bring, from the next
RISC
OS stable releases to our next steps towards the moon.
Thank you, all of you. Here’s to the next twenty years!
– Steve Revill and everyone at
RISC
OS Open
