The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though
I used PipeDream on the Cambridge Z88, and only briefly tried it on other platforms under the PipeDream (Archimedes, MS-DOS) and Fireworkz (Windows) names. I think it was a great moonshot of an idea, ahead of its time when you consider Affinity has done the same thing with Illustration/Layout/Photos.
It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
Pipedream always was spectacularly odd, even at the time.
Our first computer was an Acorn BBC B Microcomputer.
I suppose that most of all, it reminds me of time when actual, genuine real innovation in UI design was still on the menu.
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)