Last Saturday was Wakefield Acorn Computer Show, run by Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club.

There’s not much really to report as I don’t use RISC OS, but the highlights for me were an O2 Joggler running Netsurf and the current (maturing) status of RISC OS Open on Beagleboard hardware (photo).

I took along the Domesday Project of course as well as a couple of other machines. It was quite good having the Domesday running on a large 32″ flatpanel (photo) given the small crowds which would occasionally gather. I am also very pleased to report that the gentleman from Archive magazine brought along some more correspondence from the 1984 ‘Domesday Submission Kit’ with letters acknowledging difficulty in surveys and other things. I’ll get them scanned in as soon as I can.

Alongside the ‘normal’ BBC Master 128, I’d got my ultra-pimped Beeb running: a Master 128 with ARM7TDMI coprocessor, USB interface, CF card storage, 100baseTx Ethernet, and switchable 3.2/3.5 MOS.

There was also a Chuckie Egg incident – I thought I’d hit the high-score for the show (and indeed had red mist while playing it) but then got thoroughly beaten later on with a score of over 200,000. Boo! Need more practice!

Nice to see some of the 8-bit enthusiast crowd there again including Dave Moore from Retro Software and Ian Wolstenholme (I wonder if Ian made it home in one piece on the train, carrying an A7000, an A3000 and three Technomatic Winchester hard disks?).

Finally, I was a good boy and didn’t spend piles of cash on the charity stall (not that there was much of interest), coming away with a replacement monitor for the Domesday system for the princely sum of £2.

My full set of photos from the event are here.

Next Acorn ‘presence’ will be at Bletchley on 19th and 20th June as part of the Vintage Computer Festival. Mind, I won’t be there for most of the Saturday (as OP have a gig in Wakefield) but I believe on the Sunday there is a major ‘project day’ effort to try and get the Domesday Community Disc properly archived. Maybe see you there!