Chris Hall brings a little speed to the next Wakefield meeting

Wait, officer, no, that’s definitely not what I meant!

Computer technology in general tends to improve in a number of areas, with newer machines sporting any or all of more memory, greater storage, and faster processing speeds – although equal developments in the software that runs on them, to make use of those improvements, can sometimes mean the end user doesn’t necessarily notice the gains that have been made.

With RISC OS, which sadly suffers from a limited number of developers both of the operating system itself, and the software to run on it, we don’t benefit from the hardware improvements that often, but when we do – largely because of the same lack of developers – the gains can often be more pronounced, unless the hardware has improved in areas where the operating system itself isn’t as efficient as it could be.

With all of that in mind, Chris Hall will be talking to the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) at their next meeting about performance improvements since 1994 in general, and focusing in particular on RISC OS FAST, launched by RISCOSbits at the recent Southwest Show. This is a ROM that utilises the PCIe connection on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 to provide fast access to SATA storage devices.

The meeting will take place on Wednesday, 5th April, starting at 7:45pm, and will take place online using the Zoom video conferencing system, the software for which is available for most mainstream platforms. Anyone can attend, member or not – all you need are the meeting credentials, which are the same as other recent WROCC meetings (except December). If you haven’t attended one, they can be obtained by contacting WROCC.

WROCC is funded by memberships, the cost of which has very recently been reduced to just £7.50 per year – and which represents very good value. As well as supporting one of the largest RISC OS user groups in the UK, money gets you free access to the (physical) meetings if you’re able to get to them (non-members are expected to pay a small entry fee) (update: as of this year, the group will no longer be holding physical meetings – except perhaps the occasional social get together – due to low turnout, sticking primarily to Zoom from this point on), access to their online discussion list, and you’ll become a recipient of the self-titled monthly WROCC newsletter, delivered to your email inbox as a PDF file.

The group is currently running a competition to find a new logo – so if you’re feeling a little artistic, why not give that a go?

Wakefield Show 2023 banner

WROCC also organises the annual Wakefield Show, which will next take place on Saturday, 22nd April, 2023, at:

The Cedar Court Hotel,Mayo Avenue,
Rooley Lane,
Bradford,
BD5 8HW.

Note: As with the 2022 show, that’s the Cedar Court Hotel in Bradford, not Wakefield – set your calendars and satnavs accordingly!

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