The June Rougol meeting was a slightly different format to usual. The theme was celebrating 35 years of RISC OS (where has the time gone).

It was a very hybrid event with Liam Proven, the host, being in Prague and a selection of people in the pub and on Zoom.
 
Liam had 3 of the original development team Paul Fellows, Tim Dobson, Richard Manby and Stuart Swales on the call. They all introduced themselves and told us how they became involved in RISC OS and Acorn Computers. There were lots of little nuggets like the local Turtle demo for the Chinese....
 
Paul was involved with updating RISC OS to update with the new VFP instructions so it runs much faster. Stuart is still updating Pipedream/Fireworkz.
 
The was an interesting talk about the demo of RISC OS against ARX with RISC OS running on only 500k and not struggling like ARX running on 4meg of memory and a hard drive. ARX struggled running 3 clock app instances in the demo while RISC OS ran 19. ARX was rapidly dumped.
 
Paul came up with the original idea for the Icon Bar on RISC OS. It was at the bottom with pictures not words to avoid being sued by Apple.
 
Like all great software projects it was a close knit team and no meetings!
 
It took 9 months to write RISC OS to a point where it was reasonably stable. Arthur allegedly stood for ARM on thursday as they needed to write it quickly.
 
When they started writing, there was only BASIC, Assembler and BCPL (part way through) to develop with. There was no C compiler.
 
The source control was an inflatable dinosaur and flamingo to control who edited which shared file.
 
It was a really interesting discussion, and well worth watching the video if you missed it.
 
New month we have Desktop Modernisation Engine with Paolo Fabio Zaino on 18th July.
 
Rougol website