RiscOS 4.02 "Virtually Free" edition

RiscOS is one of those things that has a quite complicated history. Currently the two companies who are releasing versions of RiscOS are Ionix and RiscOS Ltd. The legal battles between the two have been ongoing for a while, but (hopefully) things are calming down a bit, which brings us on to the news.

RiscOS Ltd have announced a "Virtually Free" edition of RiscOS 4.02. What they mean by "Virtually Free" is a low cost release, along the lines of the Amiga Forever packs. And just like with Amiga Forever, there is a cheap (£5) download version, and a more expensive (£10) CD release. Both versions come with instructions on how to get it running in an emulator.

RISCOS Ltd Managing Director Paul Middleton explained that: "We have been looking at ways of making a low cost, or 'Virtually Free' version of RISC OS available for some time. With RISCOS Ltd having now confirmed it's ownership of all versions of RISC OS produced since February 1999 we are now in a position to offer a low cost product that acts as an introduction to RISC OS."

Sadly you may have a little bit of a wait before you can get your hands on it. Although the sales were supposed to have been available from today (Monday, December 8, 2008) at the moment the sales page contains a message to the effect that "We are sorry but due to technical issues the RISCOS Ltd sales website cannot currently process orders online."

You can, however, order via telephone on 0772 044 6921 or by email at sales@riscos.com.

Hopefully this won't dampen the interest in a genuinely unique operating system.

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Death of an Acorn

RiscOS has been on life support for a couple of years now. For those of you who haven't happened across it, RiscOS was an innovative operating system developed for the Acorn Archimedes / RiscPC range of computers.

The Archimedes was the successor to the BBC Micro range of computers, using the RISC based ARM (Archimedes RISC Machine) CPU. They were commonly found in UK schools in the late 1980s / early 1990s.

Often seen as a competitor to the Amiga and Atari ST (although arguably less successful in the home market), the Archimedes morphed into the RiscPC and, in common with the Amiga, has been owned by a number of companies, had arguments over the ownership of the OS and is often seen as yesterdays news.

Currently work is underway to open the source to RiscOS, and the announcement by the current owners Iyonix apparently doesn't change this.

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