RISCOS

RISCOS Ltd was founded in 1998 by various Acorn dealers and developers. RISCOS Ltd's purpose was to take over development of RISC OS and, initially, fix the faults with Acorn's unreleased RISC OS 3.8, which had been designed for the ill fated 'Phoebe' Risc PC replacement. RISC OS 3.8 needed considerable work before it could be released, in the end so much work had been done that the new version of RISC OS was called RISC OS 4. The new RISC OS 4.02 was released in 1999 and proved very popular. It's was released as a pair of drop in ROM chips for the main operating system and an upgrade CD to install the new Boot sequence and apps. RISCOS Ltd continued development of RISC OS for a number of years, releasing new versions every few months as part of it's 'Select' subscription service. These 'Select' releases were designed to be softloaded on top of RISC OS 4.02. Some 3 years after RISC OS 4.02 had been released RISCOS Ltd released RISC OS 4.39 (named 'Adjust') as a pair of ROMS and an upgrade CD. There were over 1000 improvements over the earlier RISC OS 4.02. RISCOS Ltd also developed a 32 bit version of RISC OS (4.4x) which was released for use with the Advantage 6 'A9' computer. The final operating system series released by RISCOS Ltd was 'RISC OS 6'. Inititally this was available as a free demonstration which could be softloaded on top of either RISC OS 4.02 or 4.39. This demo version included many improvements and over the next few years there were several new releases finally culminating in RISC OS 6.20 which was also supplied as a softload as, by now, RISC OS had grown too large to fit on 2 x 2Mb ROMS.