As reported, yesterday I went up to Stanley Ferry for the Wakefield RISC OS show where I was holding a stand to clear out a lot of the 8-bit stuff in the loft. Our aging Citroen Picasso was bulging with goodies for the 8-bit enthusiasts including some really weird, odd and wonderful items. I arrived around 9am and started to set up, Chris and co from WROCC being good enough to find me a small extra table so hardly anything needed to be on the floor.
Once I’d set up, it was pretty evident that there was a huge amount of interest. The show opened at 10:30am, and by 11am I’d sold five of the Beebs and pretty much all of the cheese wedges. It felt good being the ‘voice of expertise’ there, helping folks with hints on how to get their old 8-bit kit up and running, and for a change being able to say things like ‘it’s probably the 7438 that’s gone in the DFS, here it is on this board – it’ll be that one’ – remembering early copies of The Micro User where they had that cartoon touting the help desk at the Alexandra Palace show.
I was sited next to the charity stall who passed over 8-bit kit as it arrived so we could say ‘yep it’s worth something’ or ‘no that can go in paper collection at the end of the day’: I even managed to acquire an external Master 512 Turbo to have a fiddle with (my only purchase, save for a bacon sarnie and a pint of Coke).
I’d got a full Beeb setup going as a draw for punters – it started out with a demo on there, but the disk was a bit flakey so I shifted to a copy of James Lawson’s random sentence generator. Thankfully about an hour later a copy of Elite surfaced on the charity stall, thus I booted that up and folks were sitting for 5 minutes attempting to dock or battle in space – great fun, and a good draw for the crowds! Even the young lad helping on the charity stall had a go, and got pretty good by the end of the day when we lost power to the stand.
Sadly, it was so busy I didn’t really get a chance to have a proper poke around the show. That said, I was piqued by Virtual RiscPC for the Mac which is unfortunately not available for Intel architecture (or I’d have bought a copy). When quizzed I got the impression I’d caught the gentleman on the stand pretty late on in the day – maybe he’d been asked that question way too many times already!
The show itself was really good – I enjoyed it. Thumbs up to the WROCC chaps who did it and I’m looking forward to next year when I may hold a stand again. By the end of the day I’d got about a third of the stuff left which will end up on eBay, and it all fit in the boot rather than having to put the seats down.
Photos are here.
