Cambridge Computer Club

Meeting Summary

We had quite a few new faces, and some of those new faces brought their own stuff to show off. By the time we were an hour in we'd used up all the tables.

Meeting Summary

The first of these meets to be fully advertised, this was the busiest one so far — many people brought interesting things to show, and there was lots of free stuff being given away!

Meeting Summary

The meeting started with a literal bang — even before everyone had arrived, turning the Wren Executive System on resulted in a pop and a bad smell. A shame, as the luggable looked very neat: usable on a desktop with a built-in monitor, then foldable into itself with a faux leather cover for portability. Portable, but very, very heavy.

The two Lees had fun getting the expanded Electron to play a reasonable game of GORF, followed by fiddling with the display to get a colour image. Lee also tested the Galactic Invaders and made it look easy clearing the first screen — though the game itself wasn't as interesting as contemplating a console apparently built into an orange ZX80 case.

Getting RISC iX started on the Archimedes R140 was quite a process: boot into RISCOS, start the RISC iX app to get a button on the toolbar, click it for a full-screen console, then wait through Unix booting with full disk checks on every startup. Hacking skills were tested as nobody knew the username or password — fortunately documentation was found and they were able to log in and have a look around.

The main highlight was a collection of classic text-only games. The weird version of snake, a tricky Conway's Life, and then the 1970s Star Trek game — Maria and Will spent quite some time nearly figuring it out before switching to Battlestar, a text adventure from 1979.

As the meeting wound up (and two people struggled to carry the Wren back into storage), everyone agreed the next meeting would probably be in January.

Meeting Summary

Henry demonstrated his two PC-compatible devices using a mixture of floppy disks and modern storage. Attendees enjoyed music from Planet X3 on the IBM 5140, then tested the Olivetti's display capabilities — Prince of Persia was loaded, displaying an exceedingly pink title screen.

Will worked with the Memotech tape games with mixed results. One visitor remarked: "It doesn't even have a mouse!"

The SuperPET session involved learning FORTRAN on the fly, including discovering that "I" enters edit mode, numeric keypad 5 exits it, and RUN STOP performs syntax checking.

The meeting wound up and everyone agreed they'd try to have another one before Christmas.