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 lets look at it again. If you wish to tryArthur out yourself without downloading an emulator you can try it in a web brower here.
Arthur review: The less cooler RISC OS? - Screenshots
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.
