PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

The "Icon Tray" here is actually the "Icon Bar" and discussed so widely it's the name of the main Risc OS forum to this day.

Pipedream always was spectacularly odd, even at the time.

I used PipeDream on the Cambridge Z88, and only briefly tried it on other platforms under the PipeDream (Archimedes, MS-DOS) and Fireworkz (Windows) names. I think it was a great moonshot of an idea, ahead of its time when you consider Affinity has done the same thing with Illustration/Layout/Photos.

The success of ARM vs other RISC CPUs (as was asked in the article)

As to why ARM succeeded so greatly and is still among us as (originally) a RISC CPU, unlike SPARC, MIPS (the list goes on), it was because of its extremely low power requirements - something which wasn't even in the minds of the two designers at the time. However, when they first wired up the first chip and tested it, they noticed after a while that even though it worked, power had not been applied to the power pin.. it ran purely off parasitic power from the data lines.

So, it started to be used in portable, battery-powered devices, like first the Newton, and later all kinds of PDAs and then phones. After a while the yearly number of ARM CPUs sold numbered in the billions, more than any other particular CPU.

"Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.

As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."

Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt."

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2012/05/03/arm-creators-...

I had an Archimedes back in the day, they were incredible machines. I remember hearing about Pipedream but never got to try it, it sounded wild:

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.

I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was 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.

The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though

"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."

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.

I find current UIs weird and stupid and extremely dull - which is why I think the CLI is still used so much by at least developers like me.

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... :/

Brings back good memories of playing fun games with my siblings.

Our first computer was an Acorn BBC B Microcomputer.

When I look at current software, I can only see bloat.

In contrast of what we used to have.

My browser had this down as a phising site? The actual content seems fine though.

Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself.

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 last used RISC OS regularly around 1996, and occasionally for a few more years, at school and at home. Roughly age 3 to 13.

> I still can't figure out what problem the "Adjust" button solves. It's semi-analogous to CTRL + Left-click on modern systems

Yes, that sort of thing. I think I most often used Adjust to open directories/files while closing the previous one, rather than leaving a trail of open windows.

Or, Adjust-clicking entries in menus and keeping the menu open.

Or, selecting multiple files/directories in the Filer to move/copy/open multiple files at once.

> Double-click "Select" on an application icon to launch it and... nothing. Its icon displays in the Icon Bar, and that's it.

This is the procedure described by the RISC OS Style Guide [1], the UX guide for programmers. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why.

I think most application developers followed these UX recommendations closely, even games would often launch this way. (A game might have a settings menu accessed from its Icon Bar icon.)

> Drag-and-drop really seems to be the RISC OS idiomatic way to manipulate files.

Yes, that was how people worked. If you were working on an existing file you can just click "OK" to overwrite it with updates, or you can drag it somewhere else to do what we'd call "Save As" nowadays.

Possibly this was to support an OS that originally assumed floppy-disc-only use. Unlike Windows 3 (I think…) you could have Filer windows open for multiple floppy discs. You could drag a file to one of these, and the OS would prompt you to switch discs if it wasn't the one currently in the drive.

> Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file."

Anything you change in the !Configure application should be persisted in CMOS RAM, check your emulator if this is not happening.

Otherwise correct. Users with a hard disk would typically set up a !Boot file. On our family computer we each had one, but not loading on boot. They were in our personal folders, so opening that folder loaded our settings.

(Maybe floppy-only users did something similar, but we had a HDD from when I was about 7 years old so I don't remember.)

> Pipedream.

We had !Fireworkz installed on the family computer, but I think the most I would have done with it was make an army list for Warhammer.

It's nice to see what this software was capable of.

> The emulator itself expects some specific keyboard, with the \ | key situated between LEFT SHIFT and Z.

Keyboards with this key are using the ISO/IEC 9995 Europe physical keyboard layout (this extra key + a tall enter key). It's used by most European keyboards; having \| there is the British version.

You're spot on for the British phrases :-D

[1] https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Software%... / https://www.riscosopen.org/zipfiles/platform/common/StyleGui...

[-] I also found the RISC OS 3 Programmer's Reference Manual: https://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/

In some ways Archimedes' RiscOS was ahead of its time, in some ways it was a disappointment. It never matured due to lack of momentum, market share.

I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.

Why is U-Block telling me stonetools.ghost.io is in the fishing/badware list... If the webmaster is here, you might want to take a look.

I think fireworkz pro was the next evolution of the concept.

PipeDream was a wild piece of software. Even as a young teenager in the early 90s I could tell it was a weird paradigm.