Trying RISC OS on an old Raspberry Pi

The new version of RISC OS, the original native Arm OS, runs on eight or nine Arm-based platforms, including the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and on that last two, this release supports wireless networking.

RISC OS 5.30 is the latest release of Acorn’s original native operating system for its Arm processors.

This is a fairly modernized and refurbished late-1980s single-user GUI-based OS, and that implies some limitations. It was first released the same year as OS/2 1.0, long before Apple System 7 or Windows 3.0. In fact, it’ll remind you of Windows 3 on MS-DOS: it’s a single-tasking text-mode OS, with networking, on top of which is a graphical desktop that does cooperative multitasking.

But saying that, it’s an admirably complete OS, in this vulture’s opinion, with quite a rich portfolio of applications. RISC OS 5.30 comes with a selection of productivity apps, plus development tools, including a choice of editors, Python, Lua, and a C compiler – and of course with a 32-bit version of BBC BASIC V, a fully structured interpreter which also supports inline Arm assembly language.

Read more here.