The Icon Bar: Wakefield 2002 show report

Well, it was a ten hour round journey on Saturday (not counting the detour via a gridlocked Nottingham to pick up a broken computer), and Sunday was spent kicking the servers at the office back into working condition, so apologies for the lateness of this report. Thanks to Jason Tribbeck for ferrying your non-driving roving reporter around.

We arrived at exactly 11a.m., and as before the place wasn't exactly heaving - but I've since heard from one stall holder that he doubled last year's takings just on Saturday so either he's really improved his sales technique and stock, or I turned up at a slack time. I kind of like being able to walk around, breath etc. at a show though, so no complaints. New hardware was hard to see - the RiscStation portable spent a "fleeting" hour at the show (just not while I was there), and no Omega, but I did get the next best thing - to talk to Dave Holden, the only outsider to have seen the Omega with his own eyes.

This was intresting not because of what he did there - which was documented on MicroDigital's news page - but rather the reaction to his visit. Apart from the "it's all gone quiet over there" part with some detractors not really knowing how to keep calling the Omega vapourware in light of his news, there was also talk of a certain rival manufacturer (which, let's face it, is a short list of suspects) calling him up and saying that he must have somehow been duped, and that there must have been a RiscPC hiding under the desk somewhere. As Dave put it, it would have been very hard to fake a bare motherboard with wires hanging off it, with the main way of resetting it was to disconnect the wires and with people still working on it as he was using it; and he assured me that the only thing under the desk was his legs.

Now I've also heard that the Simtec flash (sideways ROM) card for RiscStations uses the same flash chips that RISCOS Ltd. said weren't available for RISC OS 4, and when the designer said that he'd also been using them in his customised versions of RISC OS for a couple of years he was told that he must be mistaken because they didn't exist. I think a hardware designer should be able to read a component number, so there seems to be a lot of this head in sand attitude going around.

The Solo was of course present, with a lot of work being done on this cool project - Internet access for remote third world villages, with satellite access and the like. Plus there was some recased stuff on the RISCOS Ltd. stand, including a black MP3 player with LCD display - sadly not working properly, but the LCARS-alike monitor display more than let you know what was going on.

The charity stall was back in effect; I was tempted by a number of stills and movie digitisers, but without software it'd be taking a chance as to whether I got them working or not. What I did pick up from a nearby stand cheap was an A440/1 to add to my hardware collection. Etc. (I thought they were just using a spare stand, but that's the name on the receipt also) sold me this puppy for a fiver - base unit and keyboard. I was actually looking for a RISC OS 2 machine to screenshot and use the keyboard as a spare, but sadly when I got this home it was RISC OS 3, with a working 40MB ST506 hard drive and a network podule! So now instead of a fiver's worth of junk just screenshotted and then left in the bottom of the wardrobe, I've got a working, usable machine to find a use for . With no monitor or mouse I'm thinking that adding my Watford digitiser and a cheap second hand security camera will make an excellent cheap webcam. If anyone has their RISC OS 2 ROMs or a screenshot of a RISC OS 2 desktop kicking around, all contributions are gratefully recieved...

I also tried picking up a second hand RiscPC motherboard and StrongARM for my MP3 server project, and couldn't quite find what I needed on the ITC-UK stand - they again had some excellent spares and complete systems, but no model 3 motherboards on their own. A quick visit to the CJE stand for a chat resulted in the usual "we've got that in stock!" mantra, and I parted with my readies. Sadly the RiscPC motherboard turned out to be an A7000 one when I unwrapped it at home (which we're sorting out), but the StrongARM was a prototype Acorn one - it won't fit in a regular RiscPC because of a header card, but seeing as I'm intending to build my own case I went for the bit of history rather than total practicality (current case thoughts: instead of messing with the Phoebe case, just go for a Lego structure with large perspex cutouts. And blue LEDs.).

There were a number of ancient PCs kicking around which seemed a little odd, but closer examination of the CTA stand showed at least one reason why - they were the right size (and the PCI slots the correct orientation) for fitting into a Phoebe case, no modifications required. They were Celeron 333Mhz machines, which are not cutting edge but fine for server type usage. It was also interesting to see the number of PC laptops in use on the stands - if the RiscStation portable had come out sooner, or MicroDigital's laptop concept hadn't received such a rough welcome, perhaps the preponderance of PCs wouldn't have been so noticeable. Let's hope that RS get things running for the next RISC OS show, and that the Omega gets finished and the modular design lends itself to, hmm, to take a random notion let's say a large PDA format with wireless networking.

Now R-Comp don't get a mention until right down here because not only were they not showing The Icon Bar in full prominance when I first turned up, when it did make an appearance it was a cached version from last year! Nah, only joking, it's just that a lot of the stuff has already been covered in previous news postings. Grapevine was much on display, WebsterXL with decent CSS support was there, TEK was being sold and in the games arcade and so on. As usual though the stand was pretty busy even at the time I was there, so I didn't get much chance to dawdle.

The show was a bit of a whistlestop tour, so I'll end with a few random thoughts: NTK T-shirts are the in geekware for this season; Chris "Spacetech" Hornby to a customer: "Have you worked out how to use the zoom on that camera? Yes? Can you show me then?"; RiscStation: "You can't learn cool. You can't learn trendy. But you can buy it." - really? I only saw the PC-o-vision portable (I think!); it was off the docking station so we took a picture to Photodesk the dock into a "what is missing from this picture?" joke, but thought the better of it. And I won't let the Playpen crowd suggest what the hell that blue thing in the RS posters is supposed to be.

Again, many thanks to Jason for his driving skills; the classic 1960 Beetle was a little noisy but the original interior was extremely cool, but had a cunningly hidden MP3 CD player so that the "All Transistor!" MW/LW radio didn't have to be called into play.

P5180029
May 2002