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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

In many ways Acorn was more important to computing than Apple. The hardware was super elegant and each successive machine improved on the previous generation tremendously and the software was absolutely world class. Just studying the firmware of the BBC Micro made me a far better programmer.

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I completely agree.

I remember, despite being a BBC user mostly, Back in '87 I got told off by my parents for swearing in disbelief at this thing that turned up at the Beebug shop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrj-EEnsacQ

At the time it was faster than a lot of the minicomputers out there.

I still think a middle mouse button (actual button, not a wheel) that brings up a context-sensitive menu wherever you are in the window, as used in RISC OS, is much better than the other currently popular ways to implement menus.

Isn't that what the right mouse button does?

Compared to other OSes? Partially. If my memory serves me right, on RISC OS, the middle button menu is the only menu; there is no menu at the top of a window or screen, so it also includes the File, Edit, Help, etc., submenus. So as a concept it is much cleaner. And the right button extends a selection (so you don't have to drag to select, saves your wrist and is more precise), and often has an alternate meaning when clicking on an item, but never gives a menu.

Also good to note that RISC OS had these context-sensitive menus before the Mac or Windows did.

The buttons were Select, Menu, and Adjust! Adjust did different things in different contexts, and i never had a good mental model of why it did what it did.

The other nice thing about the RISC OS menus was that the 'Save As' option (whatever it was called) would pop out a submenu which had an icon of the file in it - you would then drag that icon to wherever you wanted to save it. That struck me as a lovely implementation of the "spatial file manager" idea, and immediately raised the possibility of having other kinds of terminal menus that would do special things.

This screenshot shows both features. The middle button can be pressed on every icon (!Alarm, :0 being the floppy disc drive, the pen and ink, clock etc) plus the editor window.

The icon above "TextFile" would be dragged to a file window. The only file window shows the ROM applications, so it's actually read-only and there's nowhere useful to drag this icon.

Clicking !Alarm etc with the left mouse button selects one at a time, right clicking extends the selection. There are few other things to usefully right click on. The scroll arrows / bar scroll in the opposite direction with a right click. Selecting a menu option from the pop-up menu with a right click keeps the menu open.

The other really nice thing was the anti-aliasing, which was wonderful.

http://www.linuxvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Risc_OS...

You've described why Acorn may have had better technology than Apple but not why they are more important.

I guess Acorn inventing the ARM chip might give some credence to the GPs point. Acorn were definitely more important in the UK because of the impact of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project - I sit here as a CTO of a software company because of that project. I suspect a large number of the UK's software companies can trace their routes back to that. For the rest of the world I guess the question is open

Because they upped the standard of what a home computer could be. In fact, in many ways that standard has yet to be surpassed.

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