I am the lucky owner (and user) of two rather old computers, brought onto the market in 1987 by Acorn Computers in Cambridge (UK), developers of ARM cpu's -you will find these in the majority of cell- and smartphones. http://www.arm.com/index.php
I often wondered why computermanufacturers did not have a look at the software available for these computers and/or the operating system/GUI. I am talking of the Acorn RISC PC and the Iyonix, both running with RISC OS, an OS in ROM -hence no viral problems!. Although Microsoft and Apple have improved their GUI's through the years, they did not even come close to the userfriendlyness of -multi tasking- RISC OS. Drag 'n' Drop since 1987, consistent use of mousefunctions (3 buttons, yes, and the middle button always activates a pop up menu correlating to the software actually in use. The right button functions as the ctrl/click command in Windows. The FOC supplied software consists of a simple editor, a paint and a very powerful -vector- draw programme, the latter with wonderful Beziercurves. OO's Draw does not even come close. Other available software: a DTP pack (Impression) with better functions than QuarkXpress (bought it for 150 ?). Dear OO developers, have a look here: http://www.riscosopen.org/content/ http://www.riscos.com/ http://www.john-ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers/ http://www.mw-software.com/index.html RISC OS systems are fully file-compatible (GIF, TIFF, RTF, JPEG, PostScript, PDF etc.) and have had anti-aliased screenfonts since 1987 . I use my two RISC P's in a Win LAN, producing work like brochures and adverts, printing PostScript files which are converted to PDF with Acrobat 9 Pro. The Win PC's are merely used for e-mail and internet. If you want a demo, just mail me. By the way, Apple once claimed that they produced the first computer based on a RISC CPU. Not true, it was Acorn. Especially with our environmental concerns, RISC should be the way. Power consumption is less than a tenth of that of a standard PC CPU..... http://www.iyonix.com/index.html Kind regards, André van den Berg, Holland.
