On 20 June 2006 we incorporated RISC OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the RISC OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited.
To mark the occasion, here is the story so far, with one highlight for each of our first twenty years. Our thanks go to everyone who has written code, filed a bug, funded a bounty, contributed in our forums and wiki, tested a nightly build, or simply cheered from the sidelines. None of it would exist without you.
Twenty years, a year at a time
Year 1 (2006-07): it started with a plan to do the unthinkable. Castle and ROOL announced a shared source initiative that autumn, and by the Wakefield Show the following May the very first RISC OS sources were in public hands.
Year 2 (2007-08): batch by batch, more of the OS went out to the community, and the early momentum earned ROOL its second Drobe award, this one for “Best show of initiative”.
Year 3 (2008-09): a first for the platform. A build of RISC OS 5 ran on an IYONIX carrying a great deal of community-contributed code, shown off to a warm reception at the Midlands Show.
Year 4 (2009-10): the plumbing grew up. Nightly autobuilds began rebuilding and testing the sources automatically, while Jeffrey Lee’s port to the BeagleBoard, our first step towards cheap RISC OS hardware, took an Icon Bar award.
Year 5 (2010-11): a neat idea took shape. The Bounty Scheme let the community pool donations and vote with their wallets for the features they most wanted to see from the roadmap. It is still going strong today.
Year 6 (2011-12): working with Piccolo Systems, ROOL published an open source SD and MMC filing system, giving the BeagleBoard machines native memory-card support and laying important groundwork for the stable release ahead.
Year 7 (2012-13): the watershed. RISC OS Pi brought the OS to the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card computer with BBC BASIC only a keystroke away, and put RISC OS in front of a whole new generation. Our website traffic records did not survive the week.
Year 8 (2013-14): RISC OS 5.20 landed as the first stable ROM release in years, with the classic Risc PC and A7000 family included for the first time. To mark fifty years of BASIC we also released Pico, a cut-down RISC OS that boots straight to a prompt, just like the Beeb.
Year 9 (2014-15): support for the quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 arrived in February, followed swiftly by RISC OS 5.22, the next stable release and the first to bundle the OMAP4 (PandaBoard) port.
Year 10 (2015-16): a glimpse of the future turned up at the London Show in the shape of Titanium, a dual-core Cortex-A15 board built with RISC OS in mind. Then, in June 2016, ROOL reached double figures: ten years old, with most of the original goals met.
Year 11 (2016-17): monitors learned to introduce themselves. A bounty delivered EDID support, so RISC OS could read a display’s capabilities directly and spare users the old ritual of hand-tuned monitor definition files.
Year 12 (2017-18): the definitive BBC BASIC Reference Manual came back into print, fully revised across 520 pages, and RISC OS 5.24 went stable, this time with the Raspberry Pi and Titanium ports earning their badge, accompanied by a first edition RISC OS 5 User Guide put together with community contributions.
Year 13 (2018-19): the goal we set out to reach back in 2006. With Castle acquired by RISC OS Developments, RISC OS was re-licensed under Apache 2.0, free for anyone to use, share and build upon, commercially or otherwise, for the first time in its history.
Year 14 (2019-20): work began on a port to the new Raspberry Pi 4, and ROOL threw open the doors to its lab, moving the entire code base (every component and all 106,000-odd commits of history) onto a public GitLab for anyone to browse and improve.
Year 15 (2020-21): RISC OS 5.28 shipped with official Raspberry Pi 4 support and some 700 improvements, and just in time for Christmas the all-in-one Pi 400 got its own ready-to-run edition. The Acorn Electron would have approved.
Year 16 (2021-22): the community had its say at the RISC OS Awards, where 5.28 took Best New Development and the ROOL forums won Best Website, both by a comfortable margin.
Year 17 (2022-23): the Archimedes BASIC Compiler learned to use the hardware floating point unit, drawing a Mandelbrot some 35 times quicker than the plain interpreter. The next April, RISC OS was chosen by SpaceX for a mission to Mars, a claim that held up nicely until the 2nd.
Year 18 (2023-24): a busy year for modern conveniences. A native Git client, Open source SparkFS and NVMe solid-state storage both arrived in February, and RISC OS 5.30 followed in April, a bumper stable release spanning seven hardware platforms.
Year 19 (2024-25): the move to Git paid off handsomely, passing one thousand accepted merge requests since 2019. ROOL then announced its boldest plan yet, the Moonshots initiative, a shift to full-time, multi-year engineering to carry RISC OS onto 64-bit Arm before the 32-bit chips run dry.
Year 20 (2025-26): the Moonshots rocket began fuelling up with its first sponsors and volunteers, the full RAM of an 8GB Pi was freed from its 32-bit shackles, and, of all things, Fortran returned to the toolset after a long-lost copy surfaced on a decades-old backup tape.
Here’s to the next twenty
None of this was the work of ROOL alone. RISC OS today is hugely improved from the sorry state it was in back in 2006, and the scene around it is far livelier for everyone who turned up and got stuck in. We’re excited to see what the future will bring, from the next RISC OS stable releases to our next steps towards the moon.
Thank you, all of you. Here’s to the next twenty years!
- Steve Revill and everyone at RISC OS Open
