Date   : Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:39:04 +0000
From   : robert@... (Rob)
Subject: Back from Byte-Back!

2009/3/8 Ian Wolstenholme <bbcmailinglist@...>:
> Just back from Byte-Back. ?It was my first show or meeting of any
> kind and it was great to see so many of the Beeb community.

I've been back long enough to get a couple of cups of coffee and
debreif the boss :-)  It was my first computer show since an (Acorn
user?) show over at UMIST back in the '80s ... bought my 10MB hard
disc there, cost several hunderd quid..

It was great to see so many faces for the names.. and so much
interesting to see.  There were lots of things I've never seen for
real, particularly the domesday system (those discs are HUGE) and MDFS
so was great to see it all.  Glad I didn't miss a buggy at the end,
too..

>
> The second room (Executive Suite) must have been about 75% Acorn,
> probably the biggest gathering of Beebs and Acorn hardware for years.
>
> The highlight for me was the 9-station Econet we had going with Joel's
> MDFS and BBC Master, 2 more Masters, my issue 2 BBC B all on the
> main table, a second table with Rob's BBC B and A5000, and a third table
> with a BBC B and Master from Retroclinic, each with compact flash hard
> drives.

I  had another B and a RISC PC with me that could have joined in, but
had no room..  Even so, it was possibly the largest running econet
still about..

I also have a German, sheilded, Model B that would make an interesting
exhibit in itself, but when I dug it out last night it failed to power
on at all, so I'll have to sort that before next time.

>
> There were three servers running: the MDFS, Rob's A5000 running Level
> 4, and the Retroclinic Master running Level 3 FS off a 64MB partition
> on a compact flash card!
>
> We even had Cave going for a while!
>

I've never seen such a variety of machines on *STATIONS ... :-)

> Anyone for Wakefield?
>

When and where is it?  I'll have to plan it better than I did this one
if I'm going..

Rob