PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

5/9/2026 at 10:44:42 PM

"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.

by ajb

5/9/2026 at 11:25:18 PM

Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?

by ChristopherDrum

5/10/2026 at 1:02:14 PM

They distinguish between running the application and opening a document or view. Not all applications want or need to have a document or view (onto a document or otherwise) open at all times. Some of the demo programs actually demonstrate this. Eg, iirc !maestro can keep playing with window open or closed.

Mac OS X has a variant. There's a little dot below the icons that indicate that the program is currently active in ram versus just visible in the dock.

Ps: wrt the demo programs. Did you notice you can eg. 'Save' files from !Edit and !Paint directly into !Draw (and IIRC also back into itself) ?

by Kim_Bruning

5/10/2026 at 1:35:04 PM

pps

Note that RISC OS had to contend with running off floppy disks too. So you might start one application off one floppy disk, and the next off another, and you'd have them both in ram, but neither had any data in them yet, because that might come of a third floppy disk.

That's at least one concrete scenario where "application loaded" need not be the same thing as "having data open in a window".

It's been a while though. I just know they were extremely consistent in keeping the distinction between "application loaded" on one hand and opening a window on the other (or taking over the screen, in games) . This does help with your mental model of where your RAM is going, since you have a limited amount of it. Closing applications might free up ram you need for something, but now you might need to juggle floppies again. And so it went.

ppps

Also, windows (and some of mac os) seems to confuse opening a file with opening an application. It's not the same thing. An application can have 0, 1, or infinity files open in memory at any one time. "Why the heck does eg ms windows always open nonsensical empty windows when there's nothing to show?" I'm not sure it's a hill I'd die on today, but I used to have Opinions on this! "The window is not the application, an application can have lots of windows!" (Ha, you're reminding me of old rants back from decades ago ;-) )

by Kim_Bruning

5/10/2026 at 10:56:47 PM

I think the part I keep forgetting is the "Menu" mouse button. In the RISC OS case, having the application icon in the Icon Bar is, effectively, like having the application "foreground and running." A "Menu"-click on the icon parallels having, say, a MacOS 7.5 application running with its menu visible at the top of the screen. The Mac puts it more "in your face" but either way the ability to open the application menu and start a new document is essentially equivalent in both cases.

by ChristopherDrum

5/11/2026 at 11:08:42 PM

I'm reminded of the utility !Menon that I used to keep track of all my important files across many floppies, once upon a time. No window at all IIRC. Just drag and drop, and the Menu button.

by Kim_Bruning

5/10/2026 at 8:10:21 AM

If you double clicked on a file it would load the associated application and open the file.

The only reason I can think of is to not disrupt the user's flow by opening a window on top of the Filer windows. Maybe they intend to open multiple applications to use together.

There was a carefully written programmer's guide for UX. That might have an explanation.

by Symbiote

5/9/2026 at 4:46:51 PM

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.

by fidotron

5/9/2026 at 10:27:28 PM

Author here, thank you for pointing that out. I don't know why "Tray" was so stuck in my mind; the vernacular of the OS never quite embedded itself in my brain. I've updated the article to "Bar."

by ChristopherDrum

5/9/2026 at 4:59:23 PM

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.

by msephton

5/9/2026 at 7:37:06 PM

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... :/

by t43562

5/9/2026 at 9:13:40 PM

> Why * * do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?

At least for me, when I tried RiscOS, it was annoying and more work to have to switch to the file manager and then open more window(s) just to save a file. That could also be with RiscOS not having(?) Alt-Tab. I do sometimes use the macOS "proxy-icon" (which I think was disabled by default a few versions ago) to save/move files into finder windows if I already have them open.

by sillywalk

5/10/2026 at 11:23:43 AM

I used RISC OS as my main platform in the nineties and still play with it now. With small screens, I agree with you on how saving works on RISC OS, but it really comes into its own on larger screens (say QHD or above) where you can easily have your application and filer on screen at the same time.

It has its annoyances, but I still like that style of saving.

by gt0

5/10/2026 at 8:34:41 AM

I'd probably just open a file manager window to the foreground rather than open a dialog box.

Or possibly I would make the whole thing document centric - you create a document in the folder you want it in and that opens the app. Then you can move it around like you would move any file.

by t43562

5/10/2026 at 9:31:05 AM

To save a file, I think (and this is over 25 years ago) I would typically open the Filer window to where I wanted to save the file. Remember this might involve swapping floppy discs.

That would leave me with the Filer window open over the top of the application/document. Middle clicking anywhere on the document wouldn't raise the application's windows over the Filer windows, so dragging the file to the destination was easy.

At the time I preferred it to the Windows 3.1 alternative, which gave you a completely different UI to the general file-browsing tool.

The button on the top left (next to close) on all the application windows is "Send window to back" (of the stack), which would be useful for showing any Filer windows opened earlier.

by Symbiote

5/9/2026 at 4:47:36 PM

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

by tomduncalf

5/9/2026 at 9:41:18 PM

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.

by codeulike

5/10/2026 at 12:32:47 PM

But most spreadsheet software today is closer to PipeDream than VisiCalc.

by msephton

5/10/2026 at 5:36:02 AM

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-...

by Tor3

5/9/2026 at 9:21:09 PM

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.

by LennyHenrysNuts

5/10/2026 at 8:13:30 AM

Set up a saved search on eBay so you get emails if one is listed.

They come up fairly regularly.

Be cautious of any that aren't shown to be working, especially if they don't include photographs of the area around the CMOS battery. These could leak after 15+ years and damage the board.

by Symbiote

5/9/2026 at 9:42:31 PM

It looks like there's an fpga implementation as part of the mister project. It could scratch the itch if the real hardware is out of reach.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Archie_MiSTer

by dfxm12

5/10/2026 at 12:19:32 AM

You could get any Raspberry Pi (even a Zero) and run RISC-OS on it.

by forinti

5/10/2026 at 12:33:38 PM

Even emulation is worthwhile (I use RPCEmu)

by msephton

5/9/2026 at 4:03:37 PM

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

Our first computer was an Acorn BBC B Microcomputer.

by junto

5/9/2026 at 3:27:12 PM

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

by Kim_Bruning

5/9/2026 at 9:59:01 PM

Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.

Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!

by ChristopherDrum

5/10/2026 at 2:46:29 PM

The SSL error is likely from visitors on networks that use network-level blocking of domains that have been flagged as malicious. When visiting such a site over unencrypted HTTP you get redirected to an error page that explains the problem, but of course the network can't do this over HTTPS (by design), so you instead just get an opaque protocol error. (The specifics of the error message actually lead me to suspect that they might just be shoving the HTTP error-page response into the HTTPS connection, never mind that it's the wrong protocol.)

It's possible that putting your site behind Cloudflare and enabling Encrypted Client Hello might fix this, though I haven't tested it.

by ameliaquining

5/9/2026 at 4:29:56 PM

The site is fine. Doesn't show up as anything bad on Firefox on Mac. I've been reading the site for months, never had a problem.

by themadturk

5/9/2026 at 4:25:15 PM

Same here (Firefox on Windows). But when I opened it in Firefox on my Android phone, it seems fine.

by ochrist

5/9/2026 at 3:38:40 PM

Confirm via uBo. Didn't bother with content because of that.

by LargoLasskhyfv

5/9/2026 at 3:40:23 PM

Actually parts of the content aren't loading, probably also due to it being listed? Strange though! I wonder what happened?

by Kim_Bruning

5/9/2026 at 4:23:12 PM

Looks like the source is on PhishTank: https://www.phishtank.net/phish_detail.php?phish_id=9419370

by nateb2022

5/9/2026 at 4:54:55 PM

Interesting, the source is (a subdomain on) the Ghost blogging platform.

by msephton

5/9/2026 at 10:01:20 PM

Author here. Yes, I don't self-host exactly because I was hoping to avoid stuff like this by relying on a more robust back-end than I could provide.

by ChristopherDrum

5/10/2026 at 2:42:46 PM

Unfortunately even a managed host like Ghost doesn't have much ability to help you with this particular problem; your particular site is treated as its own separate thing in malicious-site databases. (Since, after all, there's nothing stopping a bad guy from hosting a phishing site on a ghost.io subdomain.)

by ameliaquining

5/9/2026 at 10:08:42 PM

Author here and... what the heck?!

by ChristopherDrum

5/9/2026 at 8:01:19 PM

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

by Marazan

5/9/2026 at 4:47:02 PM

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.

by repelsteeltje

5/9/2026 at 6:04:49 PM

It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".

The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.

Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.

Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)

by iamcalledrob

5/9/2026 at 8:59:13 PM

Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.

by mattkevan

5/9/2026 at 6:33:35 PM

Quote from the article we are commenting on...

"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.""

OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.

Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.

by 2b3a51

5/9/2026 at 7:19:54 PM

Most of the hardware had rom with its drivers in it. Meant just about everything was a plug and play experience.

And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.

by kybernetikos

5/9/2026 at 10:32:06 PM

Archimedes computers had CMOS RAM for persistent settings, so I imagine the author's emulator was not set up correctly, as many settings including almost all the ones they describe do persist on a real computer.

by LeoPanthera

5/9/2026 at 9:35:06 PM

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.

by mattkevan

5/9/2026 at 10:12:02 PM

Author here. Working on getting better takes, sorry. (in my defense, I called out my own "bad takes" in the Captain Planet image)

by ChristopherDrum

5/9/2026 at 5:32:54 PM

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.

by pona-a

5/9/2026 at 10:02:56 PM

Author here. Technically the webmaster is Ghost blogging platform itself, because I just rent a subdomain on their servers. This is frustrating and I'm checking it out now.

by ChristopherDrum

5/10/2026 at 3:08:37 PM

Is it still doing that? It's not for me.

by ameliaquining

5/10/2026 at 10:27:02 AM

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

In contrast of what we used to have.

by snvzz

5/10/2026 at 9:15:56 AM

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/

by Symbiote

5/10/2026 at 1:04:43 PM

I still miss both proper context menus and adjust-clicking in them to get things done without needing to thread the same hierarchy umpteen times. I've had arguments with people over this! My comeback: "You just haven't seen it done right!" :-P

by Kim_Bruning

5/9/2026 at 5:14:57 PM

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

by kybernetikos

5/9/2026 at 10:01:53 PM

Author here. Fireworkz was next, then Fireworkz Pro, both of which are discussed in the article.

by ChristopherDrum