Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "RISC iX" in English language version.
Selecting BBC mode gives you access to a very useful mechanism called cursor copy action. This was originally developed for the BBC Microcomputer, which is why it is termed BBC mode.
A gateway can be set up using either a UNIX workstation, such as an R140 or R260, or an Archimedes computer such as the 440.
In essence, the machine is identical to the R260 Unix workstation, but comes without Unix and without the built-in Ethernet of the latter machine.
Some variants of the computer (Archimedes 400/1, 540, A5000 and R-Series) have extra logic on the backplane PCB, for expansion card interrupt management. The default/power on state of the logic leaves expansion card interrupts enabled, i.e. the logic can be ignored and the system will behave identically to the A300 and early A440 models. Two functions are added by the extra logic, a mask register and a status register. The logic is fitted to support RISC iX.
A current flaw is that the 32k page size is really too big. Once paging gets going, the decline in performance is less than graceful.
On switching the machine on you are booted almost instantly into RISC OS. [...] Clicking on the Unix icon activates a dialogue box asking if you really want to go into Unix or not. By clicking on the middle of this box a number of parameters can be set up. For example, you can disable RISC OS completely so that next time you switch the machine on it boots straight into Unix, or you can specify a slow boot which performs all the disk and file checking.
The R140, which is connected between the Ethernet and Econet networks, provides an internet routing service between the two.
An Acorn Universal Network can consist of a number of Econet and Ethernet networks linked together via a backbone Ethernet network using RISC OS computers as Gateway stations. These computers can act at the same time as local fileservers.
EconetA is a driver module that allows Econet and Nexus client computers to act as full TCP/IP clients as well as enabling gatewaying between the above systems and standard Ethernet installations.
{{cite tech report}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)There is no separate DMA hardware for any other data traffic. The built-in ST506 controller in the A4x0/R140 has its own buffering, and the processor is required to transfer the data under interrupt on each 256-byte sector boundary, or once every 500 microseconds or so during a multi-sector transfer.
As normally delivered to customers, though, the R260 boots straight into RISCiX multi-user mode; you never see RISC OS. To enter RISC OS, you must log out of Unix by typing halt -RISCOS.