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.