Details will be sent out individually via email.
This was well attended and quite a few old memories were awakened when each device appeared or technical discussion was started and one thing led to another and I think everyone enjoyed the evening.
Steve showed his HP 200LX running MSDos5 which had an IR port with Lotus 123 and has a compact flash card. He could not get it to use the extended memory. He liked MS works for a small office app.
Whilst we were on small handheld computers Peter produced his HP iPAQ Pocket PC and he has a spare battery and it uses an SD card for extra memory he and mentioned that he also had a Zaurus SL5500 at home which he had not brought with him, which prompted Paul to produce his Zaurus SL5500.
Psion 5 MX also got a mention.
Smart phones had more or less taken over from all these handheld computers now. Peter's first introduction to Unix was using SCO Unix involving loading it from 30 + floppy disks.
Steve showed NEXT Step with an emulator designed by Steve Jobs, with a dock at the side instead of underneath to avoid any Apple legal issues. It also had the Oxford Dictionary of quotations with it.
There was quite a lot of discussion triggered by Sue talking about her favourite BSD Unix and brought along several books on BSD Unix and the different shells which had been popular in the past. e.g.. C, Bourne, BASH (Bourne Again Shell) also some of the history of systems like NEXT Step.
Sadly no-one had brought along a Beeb although we did discuss BBC screen modes and BBC Basic, alongside Fortran and APL, which Peter had found useful for solving complex equations.
You can do anything you like in C but it was not designed for writing applications where a higher level language would be better.
We also mentioned 6502 assembly code. Several of us had used Basic in the past on various systems. Peter had used lots of Commodore PETs which was amazingly versatile especially with the IEE488 (HP-IB) interface. People wrote books on cracking the BASIC command memory map (designed by Bill Gates). We had all had experience of loading programs from tape cassettes.
Also using BASICODE a clever implementation which would run on several different computers transmitted after the shipping forecast on long wave at 1500m by the BBC.
Peter's Beeb is still buried in the loft, but he is still writing this Newsletter on his trusty RISC PC.
Michael ran his vintage machine with the original 80MB HDD and 4GB memory to play several games. We also tried Autoroute to plan a route with some amusing results. We also played with the calendar and date setting and were surprised it set to 2019, Of course your editor had to play Patience.
Michael had brought his P1 - 232 machine Sony Vaio laptop with Win 98.
Also an Apricot 286.
I'm afraid that the noise level during this meeting made it quite difficult to write up so apologies if I have left out your favourite piece or made some wrong assumptions on what was said.
We all paid our membership fees too.
Quite a lively meeting. Thanks to everyone who brought something along.
We have now had a Committee meeting and the following programme has been generated, but as usual, if anyone would like to introduce a new topic instead we would be delighted to accommodate them.
| ICENI Future programme 2019/2020 | ||
| 2019 | ||
| August 14th | N.B. Date: Social Evening - Crown Manningtree | All |
| September 18th | Home Automation - NEST | All |
| October 16th | Programming - XML Web Technologies and Go | All |
| November 20th | Slide and Video Evening | All |
| December 18th | Gadgets and Party Evening | All |
| 2020 | ||
| January 15th | Winter Social Evening: Suggestions welcome. | All |
| February 19th | Chrome OS and Linux Apps. | All |
| March 18th | AI - Pattern recognition etc. | All |
| April 15th | Accounting Software | All |
| May 20th | AGM - Cloud Computing | All |
The Social evenings dates and venues are just suggestions at this stage.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road,
Ipswich IP2 8RE ,
for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Membership fee currently £15, visitors free.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website. If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.