Twenty Years of RISC OS Open

RISC OS Open 二十周年

Safeguarding the past, present and future of RISC OS for everyone. 守护 RISC OS 的过去、现在与未来，造福每一个人。

On 20 June 2006 we incorporated RISC OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the RISC OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited. 2006 年 6 月 20 日，我们成立了 RISC OS Open Ltd，怀揣着一个近乎疯狂的抱负：将一个专有操作系统开放给所有愿意提供帮助的人。二十年过去了，这一目标已基本实现，如今的 RISC OS 比我们接手时健康得多。

To mark the occasion, here is the story so far, with one highlight for each of our first twenty years. Our thanks go to everyone who has written code, filed a bug, funded a bounty, contributed in our forums and wiki, tested a nightly build, or simply cheered from the sidelines. None of it would exist without you. 为了纪念这一时刻，我们回顾了这段历程，并为前二十年的每一年挑选了一个亮点。我们要感谢每一位编写代码、提交错误报告、资助赏金项目、在论坛和维基中做出贡献、测试每日构建版本，或仅仅是在场边加油助威的人。没有你们，这一切都不会存在。

Twenty years, a year at a time

二十年，逐年回顾

Year 1 (2006-07): it started with a plan to do the unthinkable. Castle and ROOL announced a shared source initiative that autumn, and by the Wakefield Show the following May the very first RISC OS sources were in public hands. 第 1 年 (2006-07)： 一切始于一个“不可思议”的计划。那年秋天，Castle 和 ROOL 宣布了一项共享源代码计划；到了次年 5 月的 Wakefield 展会，首批 RISC OS 源代码正式公之于众。

Year 2 (2007-08): batch by batch, more of the OS went out to the community, and the early momentum earned ROOL its second Drobe award, this one for “Best show of initiative”. 第 2 年 (2007-08)： 操作系统代码分批次向社区开放。凭借早期的发展势头，ROOL 获得了第二个 Drobe 奖项，即“最佳主动性奖”。

Year 3 (2008-09): a first for the platform. A build of RISC OS 5 ran on an IYONIX carrying a great deal of community-contributed code, shown off to a warm reception at the Midlands Show. 第 3 年 (2008-09)： 平台史上的第一次。一个运行在 IYONIX 上的 RISC OS 5 构建版本包含了大量社区贡献的代码，并在 Midlands 展会上获得了热烈反响。

Year 4 (2009-10): the plumbing grew up. Nightly autobuilds began rebuilding and testing the sources automatically, while Jeffrey Lee’s port to the BeagleBoard, our first step towards cheap RISC OS hardware, took an Icon Bar award. 第 4 年 (2009-10)： 基础设施趋于成熟。每日自动构建系统开始自动重构和测试源代码；同时，Jeffrey Lee 将系统移植到 BeagleBoard（我们迈向廉价 RISC OS 硬件的第一步），并荣获了 Icon Bar 奖。

Year 5 (2010-11): a neat idea took shape. The Bounty Scheme let the community pool donations and vote with their wallets for the features they most wanted to see from the roadmap. It is still going strong today. 第 5 年 (2010-11)： 一个巧妙的构想成型了。“赏金计划”（Bounty Scheme）让社区能够汇集捐款，并用钱包为他们最希望在路线图中看到的功能投票。该计划至今仍在稳步运行。

Year 6 (2011-12): working with Piccolo Systems, ROOL published an open source SD and MMC filing system, giving the BeagleBoard machines native memory-card support and laying important groundwork for the stable release ahead. 第 6 年 (2011-12)： 通过与 Piccolo Systems 合作，ROOL 发布了一个开源的 SD 和 MMC 文件系统，使 BeagleBoard 设备获得了原生的存储卡支持，并为后续的稳定版发布奠定了重要基础。

Year 7 (2012-13): the watershed. RISC OS Pi brought the OS to the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card computer with BBC BASIC only a keystroke away, and put RISC OS in front of a whole new generation. Our website traffic records did not survive the week. 第 7 年 (2012-13)： 分水岭。RISC OS Pi 将系统带到了树莓派（Raspberry Pi）上——这是一款只需按键即可进入 BBC BASIC 的信用卡大小电脑，它让新一代用户接触到了 RISC OS。我们的网站流量记录在那一周被彻底刷新。

Year 8 (2013-14): RISC OS 5.20 landed as the first stable ROM release in years, with the classic Risc PC and A7000 family included for the first time. To mark fifty years of BASIC we also released Pico, a cut-down RISC OS that boots straight to a prompt, just like the Beeb. 第 8 年 (2013-14)： RISC OS 5.20 作为多年来首个稳定 ROM 版本发布，首次包含了经典的 Risc PC 和 A7000 系列。为纪念 BASIC 语言诞生五十周年，我们还发布了 Pico，这是一个精简版的 RISC OS，启动后直接进入命令行提示符，就像当年的 BBC Micro 一样。

Year 9 (2014-15): support for the quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 arrived in February, followed swiftly by RISC OS 5.22, the next stable release and the first to bundle the OMAP4 (PandaBoard) port. 第 9 年 (2014-15)： 2 月份实现了对四核树莓派 2 的支持，随后迅速发布了 RISC OS 5.22，这是下一个稳定版本，也是首个捆绑 OMAP4 (PandaBoard) 移植版的版本。

Year 10 (2015-16): a glimpse of the future turned up at the London Show in the shape of Titanium, a dual-core Cortex-A15 board built with RISC OS in mind. Then, in June 2016, ROOL reached double figures: ten years old, with most of the original goals met. 第 10 年 (2015-16)： 在伦敦展会上，未来初现端倪——Titanium 亮相了，这是一块专为 RISC OS 设计的双核 Cortex-A15 开发板。2016 年 6 月，ROOL 迎来了十周年纪念，最初的大部分目标均已实现。

Year 11 (2016-17): monitors learned to introduce themselves. A bounty delivered EDID support, so RISC OS could read a display’s capabilities directly and spare users the old ritual of hand-tuned monitor definition files. 第 11 年 (2016-17)： 显示器学会了“自我介绍”。通过赏金计划实现的 EDID 支持，让 RISC OS 能够直接读取显示器的规格参数，免去了用户手动调整显示器定义文件的繁琐过程。

Year 12 (2017-18): the definitive BBC BASIC Reference Manual came back into print, fully revised across 520 pages, and RISC OS 5.24 went stable, this time with the Raspberry Pi and Titanium ports earning their badge, accompanied by a first edition RISC OS 5 User Guide put together with community contributions. 第 12 年 (2017-18)： 权威的《BBC BASIC 参考手册》再版，全书修订至 520 页。RISC OS 5.24 进入稳定版，树莓派和 Titanium 移植版正式获得认证，同时还发布了由社区共同编写的首版《RISC OS 5 用户指南》。

Year 13 (2018-19): the goal we set out to reach back in 2006. With Castle acquired by RISC OS Developments, RISC OS was re-licensed under Apache 2.0, free for anyone to use, share and build upon, commercially or otherwise, for the first time in its history. 第 13 年 (2018-19)： 我们在 2006 年设定的目标终于达成。随着 Castle 被 RISC OS Developments 收购，RISC OS 采用了 Apache 2.0 协议重新授权，历史上首次允许任何人免费使用、分享和基于此进行开发，无论是商业用途还是其他用途。

Year 14 (2019-20): work began on a port to the new Raspberry Pi 4, and ROOL threw open the doors to its lab, moving the entire code base (every component and all 106,000-odd commits of history) onto a public GitLab for anyone to browse and improve. 第 14 年 (2019-20)： 针对新款树莓派 4 的移植工作启动。ROOL 向公众敞开了实验室大门，将整个代码库（所有组件以及 10.6 万次左右的历史提交记录）迁移至公开的 GitLab，供任何人浏览和改进。

Year 15 (2020-21): RISC OS 5.28 shipped with official Raspberry Pi 4 support and some 700 improvements, and just in time for Christmas the all-in-one Pi 400 got its own ready-to-run edition. The Acorn Electron would have approved. 第 15 年 (2020-21)： RISC OS 5.28 发布，正式支持树莓派 4 并包含约 700 项改进。赶在圣诞节前，一体机 Pi 400 也获得了专属的即用版系统。Acorn Electron 如果还在世，一定会为此感到欣慰。

Year 16 (2021-22): the community had its say at the RISC OS Awards, where 5.28 took Best New Development and the ROOL forums won Best Website, both by a comfortable margin. 第 16 年 (2021-22)： 社区在 RISC OS 年度奖项中表达了心声，5.28 版本荣获“最佳新开发成果奖”，ROOL 论坛获得“最佳网站奖”，两者均以显著优势胜出。

Year 17 (2022-23): the Archimedes BASIC Compiler learned to use the hardware floating point unit, drawing a Mandelbrot some 35 times quicker than the plain interpreter. The next April, RISC OS was chosen by SpaceX for a mission to Mars, a claim that held up nicely until the 2nd. 第 17 年 (2022-23)： Archimedes BASIC 编译器学会了使用硬件浮点运算单元，绘制曼德博集合（Mandelbrot）的速度比纯解释器快了约 35 倍。次年 4 月，有传言称 SpaceX 选择了 RISC OS 执行火星任务，该说法一直“成立”到了 4 月 2 日（愚人节玩笑）。

Year 18 (2023-24): a busy year for modern conveniences. A native Git client, Open source SparkFS and NVMe solid-state storage both arrived in February, and RISC OS 5.30 followed in April, a bumper stable release spanning seven hardware platforms. 第 18 年 (2023-24)： 现代便利功能大爆发的一年。原生 Git 客户端、开源 SparkFS 和 NVMe 固态硬盘支持均于 2 月上线；4 月份发布的 RISC OS 5.30 是一个涵盖七个硬件平台的重磅稳定版本。

Year 19 (2024-25): the move to Git paid off handsomely, passing one thousand accepted merge requests since 2019. ROOL then announced its boldest plan yet, the Moonshots initiative, a shift to full-time, multi-year engineering to carry RISC OS onto 64-bit Arm before the 32-bit chips run dry. 第 19 年 (2024-25)： 迁移至 Git 的决策成效显著，自 2019 年以来已处理超过一千个合并请求。随后，ROOL 宣布了迄今为止最大胆的计划——“登月计划”（Moonshots），旨在通过全职、多年的工程投入，在 32 位芯片彻底淘汰前，将 RISC OS 迁移至 64 位 Arm 架构。

Year 20 (2025-26): the Moonshots rocket began fuelling up with its first sponsors and volunteers, the full RAM of an 8GB Pi was freed from its 32-bit shackles, and, of all things, Fortran returned to the toolset after a long-lost copy surfaced on a decades-old backup tape. 第 20 年 (2025-26)： “登月计划”火箭开始注入燃料，迎来了首批赞助商和志愿者；8GB 树莓派的全部内存终于摆脱了 32 位的束缚；最令人惊喜的是，在一段尘封数十年的备份磁带中找回了遗失已久的 Fortran 编译器，它重新回到了我们的工具集中。

Here’s to the next twenty

期待下一个二十年

None of this was the work of ROOL alone. RISC OS today is hugely improved from the sorry state it was in back in 2006, and the scene around it is far livelier for everyone who turned up and got stuck in. We’re excited to see what the future will bring, from the next RISC OS stable releases to our next steps towards the moon. Thank you, all of you. Here’s to the next twenty years! - Steve Revill and everyone at ROOL 这一切并非 ROOL 一己之力。与 2006 年那令人遗憾的状态相比，今天的 RISC OS 已经有了巨大的进步，而正是因为每一位参与者和贡献者的加入，整个生态才变得如此活跃。我们非常期待未来，从下一个 RISC OS 稳定版到我们迈向“月球”的每一步。感谢你们所有人。为下一个二十年干杯！—— Steve Revill 及 ROOL 全体成员