Once made by Acorn Computers (now known as Element14), RISC OS® computers are seeing a rebirth, and are being manufactured and marketed by Castle Technology Ltd, Advantage Six, and RiscStation. They are not PCs or Macs, and have their own particular operating system and user interface. Those who take the trouble to learn to use them recognise their ease of use, simplicity, and speed. They are a different sort of computer, free from the Micro$oft mould which has encased and suffocated the development of computers with its all-pervasive operating system.

It is unfortunate that the Acorn badge is, in so many people's minds, synonymous with the BBC B microcomputer of their, or their children's, schooldays. The succession of technological innovations which culminated in the StrongARM Kinetic 300 RiscPC were never able to achieve market penetration against the Windows operating system, and Acorn withdrew from the home computer market. Acorn and RISC OS computers continue to be manufactured by Castle Technology, with the RISC OS operating system being actively developed by RISCOS Ltd. The other manufacturers mentioned above continue to develope their own computers based specifically on RISC OS, and there are several PD and commercial emulators that allow RISC OS to be run on a PC. It is, to some, deeply frustrating that Microsoft has achieved global dominance, not by technical superiority over other operating systems, but by clever and ruthless promotion, whereby to so many people computer literacy means literacy in Microsoft products. To a large minority, though, RISC OS remains the thinking persons' platform...

To learn more about the RISC OS world, take a look at RISCOS.org, and follow a few of the links...

This was not intended to be a promotional page, but recognition (and thanks) must be given to all the writers of the RISC OS PD and shareware programs which are being used to write and publish these pages, together with acknowledgement to the commercial companies who still back the platform. It must not be seen as an exhaustive collection; rather, a list of applications which have been proven to work, and work together, to our personal satisfaction and pleasure.

• !HTML³, the HTML macro writer by Richard Goodwin
• !Zap, with its HTML module for editing the pages, originally authored by Darren salt
• !Draw, !Paint, !Edit, and !ChangeFSI; vector, pixel, and text editors, and image manipulator/viewer respectively, built into every Acorn and RISC OS machine
• !InterGif and !IGViewer, by Peter Hartley, for interconverting Acorn sprites and GIF graphics, and viewing them
• !Thump by Rick Hudson is a great help keeping tabs on directories of photographs
• !WebGen2 by D.E.Stratford simplifies the process of putting photo galleries on websites.
• !FTPc by Colin Granville, to upload the pages and manage the site, and
• !SiteMatch to keep a record of site updates, courtesy of Dave Edwards
• Tidy, a port of the DOS HTML validating program, maintained by Alex Macfarlane Smith.

And for connecting to the Web, and using e-mail and newsgroups...

• !Socketeer by Matthew Bloch dials and organises net access
• !PopStar by Tony Houghton and Joseph Heenan transfers e-mail
• !Newshound by Joseph Heenan, deals with newsgroups and mailing lists
• !Messenger, the e-mail and news client written by Mark Sawle
• !Newsbase, e-mail and news manager written by Graham Allan
• !Zap again, with its e-mail module, for message composition and reading
• !Bookmaker, an integrating hotlist manager by Nick Roberts
• !ArcWeb, a browser by Stewart Brodie. Sadly, no longer maintained.
• !NetSurf, an up-and-coming open source browser. Incomplete, but looks promising...

Other handy programs...

• AutoDNS, by Stewart Brodie, to seek out Domain Name Servers
• !Ping, by Tim Howarth, to test a connection
• !WatchPPP, by Richard Sargent, to provide connection information
• !MP3Radio, by Philip Hardy, for access to net radio
• !Flash, by Leo Smiers, a plugin to play Macromedia flash files (if you must...)
• !WebGet, by Joseph Heenan, to collect pages for offline browsing (This uses !RaFS, by Richard Atterer, for unlimited file numbers, pre OS4)
• !Groups, by David Croft, to keep up with the endlessly expanding newsgroup lists
• !Qedit, also by David Croft, for when you change your mind about the wording of an email
• !FreeTime, by Joseph Heeman, to synchronise the computer's time to Net time
• !AntiSpam, an anti-spam program by Dave Higton which deletes the vile things at source,
• or !SpamStamp by Jan-Jaap van de Geer, which approaches the problem in quite a different way.

On the commercial front, browsers include Oregano® and Oregano2® from Castle Technology, and Fresco® from Ant. WebsterXL, Messenger Pro® and Dialup® are browser, e-mail and connection applications respectively from R-Comp. Nutmeg® is a browser cache from Imagesoft. HTMLEdit Studio® is a suite of HTML editing software, also by R-Comp.

JPEG photographs were taken using an Olympus D-490 digital camera, downloading to RISC OS using a Microtech card reader, and the commercial applications !SMediaFS, and !PhotoShow from PhotoDesk Ltd, and adjusted using !DPlngScan from David Pilling.

These pages were written on an OS4.04 Kinetic 300 RiscPC and an OS3.7 RiscPC, and tested using Oregano®, Oregano2®, WebsterXL®, NetSurf, Fresco®, and the port of Firefox under RiscOS, and Internet Explorer® 6, Netscape Navigator® 6.0, and Firefox under Windows 2000® (the last remotely sensible Windows OS).

An Acorn A7000 runs our One-Wire-Weather (OWW) weather station day in, day out, the RISC OS software being written by Simon Melhuish. Another A7000 is used to log soil temperature profiles. We use these rather elderly beasts primarily because they don't object to power cuts in the way that PCs do, and reboot in less than ten seconds without human attention. With a modest 30w ac input power consumption they also don't even get warm even without noisy fans, enabling them to continue to operate through long power failures via a couple of 35ah batteries and an APC UPS.

A very persuasive reason to use a RISC OS computer for internet access, rather than a PC running Microsoft products: with some 90% of all computers using Microsoft (but some 90% of servers not doing so...), the risks from virus attact is vastly less. Yes, RISC OS has its (very small) share of deluded attention seekers, but RISC OS cannot catch a PC virus. That is a great comfort when one's computer becomes networked with millions of others. Remember, Windows was designed with file sharing in mind - TCP/IP and NetBIOS are bound together - and why do you suppose Internet Explorer should need to maintain secret (non-deletable) records of browser activity, available to a server? Just maybe your surfing activities might become part of a grand scheme - Internet Explorer is now an integral part of Windows... Take a look at Shields Up! and Privacy.net; and if you are using a Microsoft or Mac browser, Junkbusters will alarm you...

E.Mark Jolliffe, Cert.Ed Ba BSc(hons) DipPolCon

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