Stephen Streater and Ross Tierney are employees of Eidos, working on the Optima video editing system. Much of their plans for Optima revolved around the Phoebe platform - if their product is to survive, they need a replacement machine.
Stephen put forward three hardware proposals; the most radical has received the best reception. This envisages a completely new design, based around an eight ARM10 multiprocessor architecture. Aiming for a launch in the third quarter of 1999, the system would use as many standard components as possible.
Both men consider the current RISC OS to be a dead-end, reliant as it is on the 26 bit processor mode. This mode is to be abandoned in the ARM10 and the StrongARM 2, so any future development has to be based upon the 32 bit mode. Ross' solution is to take one of the UNIX ports as a basis - either ARMLinux or RiscBSD. The RISC OS user-interface could be reproduced as a window manager for X, UNIX's windowing environment. He also envisages producing a full set of veneers for RISC OS SWIs, and perhaps porting libraries such as OSlib or DeskLib, to simplify the conversion of applications to run on the new system.
Basing the OS on one of the UNIX variants also has other advantages: it frees the machine from dependency on IOMD and VIDC; it opens up a much wider range of software to the ARM-machine user; it opens up a wider market for developers on the new platform, with potential for much higher sales.
Ross Tierney has made available a suggested specification for the Forbidden Technologies machine.