This Monday will see an incredibly rare event take place – so rare, in fact, that there are more dentists for hens than occurences like this: The RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) will hold a December meeting, with Rob Napier taking the virtual podium to talk about his current work-in-progress, an Acorn biography.
Beaming himself from Nicholson, a small hamlet 300km from Melbourne, Australia, the meeting will be held online only, via Zoom – details below.
Serving in the Air Force until four decades ago, Rob resigned his commission and joined a company called Barson Computers (who at the time were importing Acorn Atoms) and through them introduced Australia to the BBC Micro. Amongst other things, he wrote the definitive guide to Econet: Networking with the BBC Microcomputer.
Rob is currently working on another tome – Voices from a Future Passed, the official biography of Acorn Computers. His aim with the book is to tell the full story of the company from its origins as Cambridge Processor Unit, through to Acorn itself, covering development of ARM and the foundations Acorn laid with it, and he hopes to see it published next year.
An important part of the writing process for a volume of this nature is research, and Rob has been putting in the hours on that. He has been speaking to many old colleagues, such as Hermann Hauser, Chris Curry, Andy Hopper, Steve Furber, Sophie Wilson… the list goes on. The result of his efforts is that he has a wealth of behind the scenes gossip, not to mention hundreds of pages of information that was previously considered confidential – and will be able to share some of it with the group.
Rob’s plan is to keep the formal talk quite short, and open the floor to questions and discussions quite early, allowing the audience to guide direction of the meeting to those areas of Acorn’s history (and inside information) they want to hear more about.
If you want to come prepared with questions, you can get some idea of what the book will contain via this post on the Stardot forums, which breaks the book down into a broad outline of sections, and includes a list of chapter headings.
As noted above, the meeting will be held online only via Zoom – there is no in-person gathering in the pub. It will take place on Monday, 15th December, with an official start time of 7:45pm (with a fifteen minute window to join before that).
If you’ve attended an online ROUGOL meeting before, you should already have the meeting credentials to allow you to join, but if not you can get them by getting in touch with the group.
