A little while ago in 2021, I was talking to a friend
about RISC OS when I came across "Arthur" because I was
doing research simultaneously. I thought it was just
another OS but it turns out Arthur was before RISC OS but
RISC OS is the simple rename for version 2. The numbering
scheme for it is a bit weird but the first public release
of the OS was Arthur 1.20 in June 1987 but there are also
0.30 and 0.20. The OS was developed using a prototype
ARM-based system connected to a BBC computer, before moving
on to the prototype Acorn Archimedes the A500. Arthur was
not a multitasking operating system either.
I remembered about it years later and tried to see if
there were any pages about Arthur but all I really find are
videos and no reviews. Most reviews are for RISC OS only so
I thought let’s do one for Arthur then, so let's look at it
again. If you wish to try Arthur out yourself without
downloading an emulator you can try it in a web browser
here.
Screenshots and Videos
My emulator of choice for getting Arthur OS to run is
Arculator as it already has Arthur for you when you make a
machine. Arthur seems to boot up pretty fast regardless of
what I make the settings for the emulated computer. This is
emulating the Archimedes 305 and this is using Arthur
0.30.
As you can see when it is done booting you get a desktop
with a dark blue background and a “taskbar” that is light
blue with white icons on the bottom. As for the icons on
the left is a floppy disk icon, and on the right are 5
other icons for a palette, notepad, a diary, a clock, a
calculator, and the exit icon. You may notice the icons are
different sizes too.
Since there’s no floppy disk in the drive clicking on
the floppy icon does nothing and only gives an error saying
the system reported an error because the drive is empty. It
seems once you get the error you can’t move the cursor
which is dark blue with a light blue outline out of the
borders for the message box, which is odd.
Open windows have a beige coloured bar at the top and
for buttons was well. There’s a palette thing in Arthur
which allows you to load and save palettes.
You can also change the colours of the palette so if I
change the dark blue to purple, it changes the background.
The same goes for the light blue for the taskbar so now I
can have a light green taskbar with a lilac background, a
dark pink colour for the button colours, yellow for the
text colours and a different coloured floppy icon. This
reminds me of Windows 1.0
Changing the palette also changes the colours on the
icon for the palette as the icon is designed to look like a
palette board!
The notepad is interesting. You can type in it but you
can’t use backspace to remove words or to remove a space as
you can tell in the screenshot. Not sure if this is an
emulator thing or an actual thing with Arthur. Some of it
turned pink as it is an active window with a different
palette.
You can make it full screen by clicking on the icon at
the top right of the window. Exiting the notepad seems to
keep your changes for when you open the notepad again if
you haven’t turned the machine off.
Arthur has a built-in diary that has the wrong year as
it is 2023 and not 0000. Arthur existed when the universe
began /s.
Clicking on a date opens another window that takes note
of the day you click on along with the month and year but
that seems to be about it. it only lets you pick
one.
There’s also a clock which shows analogue and digital
time under as 24 hour time in which I cannot read well. The
analogue clock only has the hour, minute and second hands
on it.
The calculator is a simple calculator which
works.
As you can tell I suck at using calculators on a PC
where you have to manually do it. Physical ones are better
sometimes.
I put in a LILO boot disk to see how Arthur would react
and it seems it reports “error 10” at :0/00000000 which to
me indicates it at least detected *something* in the drive
but can’t open it. Attempting to make a blank disk and
trying to load it doesn’t do much either as you get the
same error.
Exiting the machine results in this screen for which
shows how long your session went on.
Arthur 1.20 isn’t much different besides changing the
taskbar colour to a beige colour and the icons are better
sized to be equal.
Arculator has the option to run Arthur 1.20 on a A500
prototype but you won’t get much besides be redirected to
ARM BBC BASIC V.
