> At that stage it shipped with Arthur because, or so we were told, the "actual" OS was still in development.
I think this was ARX[0], which was overambitious. Arthur apparently stands for A Risc by THURsday[1]
EDIT: a detailed article[2], linked from lproven's article[3], about the history of ARX / Arthur / RiscOS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARX_(operating_system)
[1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/23/how-risc-os-...
[2] https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/
Oh, thank you!
I could come back to the "modernising RISC OS" piece and update, as things are now actually happening. Although I was pessimistic for its prospects, it's becoming reality.
I know of 2 main efforts...
* Merlin, an all-new OS in Rust, aiming for a very simplified modern design and backwards compatibility.
* The RISC OS Open team is rewriting it in C.
I also know of an effort involving running an Arm64 hypervisor and then running the current 32-bit RISC OS kernel in a whole-machine VM. I lack any tech details about it so far, though.