Rob Sprowson at the Coprocabana – 17th February

VinceH

AKA The Duke of Sussex in London

The guest speaker at the next RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) meeting will be Rob Sprowson, who may or may not have yellow feathers in his hair1.

RISC OS users who have been around since the 8-bit era will remember that it was possible with the BBC computer to attach an external device containing a different CPU, turning the computer itself into little more than an input/output system for that device – and one such unit produced by Acorn was the ARM1 Evaluation System; a co-processor unit containing an ARM1 CPU, designed to allow developers to test the new processor that Acorn had developed.

Whizzing back to erm… a few years ago, Rob designed a more modern co-processor for the BBC Micro, using an ARM7TDMI processor. Rob will be talking about this co-processor, and how and why he came to design it.

There will be a BBC Master set up in the pub, with the device installed, linked up to the big screen to show it in use, and Rob will also have a collection of other devices from back in the day, including 6502, Z80, Turbo, and 80186 co-processors.

The meeting will, as usual, be a hybrid one, with a presence both in the pub, and on Zoom – but because of the hands-on nature of the demonstration, it’s highly recommended that if you can make it to the venue, you’ll benefit far more than joining online.

That venue is:

The Duke of Sussex,
(upstairs in either the Chichester or Petworth Room),
23 Baylis Road,
London,
SE1 7AY.

The talk will kick off at 7:45pm, but there should be ROUGOL-types lurking from around 6:30pm, and you can find directions on the ROUGOL website.

If you aren’t able to make it there, the Zoom meeting will be open from around 7:30pm. All you need for that is a working internet connection, a device that can run the Zoom software, and the meeting credentials – which remain the same as previous meetings, but if you don’t already have them they are available on request.

!ReadMe

  1. ROUGOL beat me to the punch with the references to the Barry Manilow song, so I’m not going to bother adding more.

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