Wakefield 2009

 
Martin Hansen
 

Saturday 25th April was 'showtime' for RISC OS. Under clear blue skies, the RISC OS thinking was taking place 'up north' in Wakefield, near Leeds. A plethora of News group announcements heralded the event along with a tease campaign from Advantage Six concerning a mysterious new hardware device codenamed 'V-Pod'.

Exhibitors arrived to find a complimentary copy of the April edition of Archive magazine on their stands. A relaxed editor, Jim Nagel, was making the point that for this show, he was early. But this was no time to be reading. There were stalls to be readied for a show opening in two hours time.
 
As the setting up proceeded, the conversation mostly seemed to revolve around the recent lack of sleep that getting ready for the show had entailed. Many had been getting by on three or four hours shut-eye for days, as new software was perfected, burnt to CD-ROMs, and packaged. Paul Middleton looked worn out. The RISC OS Ltd boss had had two hours sleep and a long, long drive up from Cardiff.
 
There was some talk, wondering if this show would be the last. Would this be the one when the supporters decided that RISC OS had had its day, and simply not turn up. Queues forming outside suggested otherwise. At 10am sharp, organiser Chris Hughes, ordered that the show begin. As per the schedule.
 
Advantage Six, however, didn't seem ready to reveal the 'V-pod'. Not only were they dressed in the company colour, black, but all their monitors were black too, in the sense that they had still to connect them up and turn them on. "All part of the tease" they quipped. "No panic here", said one of the team as the remainder buried their heads in a couple of Risc PCs. Worryingly, in their hands were screwdrivers.
 
The hall quickly became a lively, buzzing place. There was a lot of new software on offer, much of it very reasonably priced. ROOL had secured permission from Castle to release a new version of RISC OS 5 for the Iyonix, v5.14. This included the parts of RISC OS 5, previously sold for £60, along with many recent additions and enhancements. For £5 it was yours. I was particularly interested in the fact that it included the upgrade to USB 2. The CD-ROM also featured an experimental build of RISC OS 5.15, again just for the Iyonix.
 

 
The NetSurf team showed off version 2 of the RISC OS web browser, also for £5 on a CD-ROM. The lack of a world class web browser for RISC OS has been a festering sore for the platform's credibility for so long now, it's pathetic. If anyone can rescue the situation, it's the NetSurf team. The crucial step is to get Javascript implemented. With version 2 comes the message "Not yet, but we're working on it."
 
An updated ArtWorks from Martin Wuerthner seemed to be selling well right from the word 'go'. This premier vector art graphics package is a product that people buy as soon as they arrive.
 
R-Comp have a similar winner on their hands in the form of SafeStore. This makes backing up your computer data so easy and hassle free that you will actually use it. Human nature seems to be to think about backing up important data but, in practice, not to do so. SafeStore removes the need to think. It does the data back up without bothering you in any way. R-Comp had sold out of SafeStore by lunchtime, but continued to take orders, promising to supply it by post within a few days.
 

 
Dr Graham Shaw, famous for his 'RISC OS packaging project' had a stand at the show. His current passion is 'computing and natural language translation' which he was able to demonstrate working with numbers. His ambitious ideas reminded me of Douglas Adams' Babel fish from The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This you placed it your ear. You then heard any language of the universe as English. Graham is working on the software that could result in an electronic Babel fish. 
 
The delightful Matthew & Hilary Phillips clearly enjoyed being at the show, and had sold out of their various puzzles and card game software by the end of the day. Virtual Acorn continuously did brisk trade, and the CJE Micros and APDL stalls were popular, as you'd expect.
 

 
Amusingly, John Cartmell had brought the family along and given them a stall each. He was, of course, selling Qercus magazine subscriptions. His wife was selling board games, and his daughter her charming 'Scrapbooking and Cardmaking' software.
 

 
I enjoyed meeting Steve Fryatt, who writes regularly on the RISC OS Public Domian scene in Archive magazine. Part of the fun in attending the show is in putting faces to names. As well as being one of the show organisers, Steve had a stand to make people aware of CashBook, his home accounts package. Any money raised from sales of this go to charity which, presumably makes Steve's accounts more straight forward. Unless, of course, 15.5% goes to charity A, the remainder to charity B, with 24.3% and 37.8% of each claiming gift-aid, this being split 4:5 between the current financial year and the next.
 

The most amusing moment of the day for me was being interviewed in front of my MathMagical stand by the Centre of Computing History. This was rather unexpected, but fun. By this stage we all knew that the V-Pod was a graphics card for the Risc PC, so I commented upon how amazing it was to have a new hardware add-on for a 16 year old computer. The camera panned from me, and swept around the hall. What a great scene. Lots of people, lively and interesting looking stands, and an excited, noisy chatter filling the air. I can just imagine the entry in the history archives:

History Update from Wakefield, April 2009
Anomaly first detected : RISC OS still going strong.

 
I'll finish this report by saying 'thank you' to Chris Hughes and his team for organising the show. Chris is famous for being so stressed out by the pressure of it all that he can't eat anything on show day. This year I spotted him eating a sandwich. Confirmation that this had been a good day for RISC OS.
 

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The Big Ben Club presents
The Annual RISC OS computer show is in the Netherlands
May 16th 2009