RISC OS

From the early days when I used RISC OS, after having a BBC for a few years, I wanted to work with it. I found it to be far more flexible than its contemporaries, and enjoyed working with it. Beginning with simple programs in BASIC and patches for existing components, I moved on to full assembler modules, and applications. I learnt a lot, and eventually - when Acorn finally shut up shop - joined RISCOS Ltd, along with Matthew Bullock, Paul Middleton and Andrew Rawnsley.

There we completed the development of RISC OS 4 and began work on the future developments. For a variety of reasons, things didn't work out, and we left to go in different directions. I returned later, and for the next 6 years I was the sole developer of the bulk of the OS. Long days of some quite significant developments, doing everything from the hardware initialisation all the way up to applications, and all the development testing and documentation was very liberating. Lots of things were learnt about the right way to do things, and lots of interesting components were developed.

This eventually took its toll, and I couldn't really continue. The people I had to deal with, and certain companies made things unsustainable. Money, which had never really been much of a concern for me, just wasn't coming in and I was emotionally drained. It was a very hard decision, but I got rid of the bulk of my RISC OS hardware and moved on to other things.

My Rambles

Partly to put the whole thing behind me, and partly to say 'this is what I did for so many years', I wanted to write something. Something that at least gave a vague idea of the way that those years were spent. I am pretty bitter about some of it, and there are some things that I won't talk about with people even still. But it has been 5 years since I left RISC OS behind as a developer, and I think that is time enough to let some of the wounds heal.

So... these are my rambles about the stuff I did. It was quite a few years, and I do a lot in that time, so they are a bit longer than I originally intended. The rambles were published each weekday from the first week of December 2012.

It has been hard going sometimes, and it has took over a year to get to a point where I was happy with them. I hope you enjoy reading them.