RISC OS


RISC OS

(operating system)(Reduced Instruction Set Computer OperatingSystem) The operating system originally developed by Acorn Computers for their Archimedes family of personal computers.

RISC OS replaced the Arthur operating system used on thefirst Archimedeses.

It is written in ARM assembly code and distributed onROM so it takes up no disk space and takes no time to load.It supports cooperative multitasking with memory managementand includes a graphical user interface or "WIMP". It iswritten in a highly modular style and makes extensive use ofvectors so it is easy to modify and extend by loading newmodules in RAM. Many system calls (called "SWIs" -software interrupts) are available to application programmersand some of these are available as user comands via a built-incommand-line interpreter. RISC OS also supported outline fonts when only bitmap fonts were available on most otherplatforms.

Following the virtual demise of Acorn, development of RISC OS4 was taken over by RISCOS Ltd on 1999-03-05 and released on1999-07-01.

Latest version: 4.39, as of 2004-09-21.