As of today, the 2024 Southwest Show – the first main event of the year for the RISC OS community – is just two weeks away. It will take place on Saturday, 24th February, at the same Bristol venue that has been used for the show for the last few years:
If you’ve been pondering a new RISC OS computer, there are quite a range available, but most new hardware is based on the operating system having been ported to an ARM-based platform that exists for other reasons (or other operating systems). Similarly, if you’d like a new keyboard, there are plenty to choose from, but almost none with a RISC OS connection.
No London Show again? Read about the last Wakefield one instead! Due to circumstances beyond the control of the organisers, last year’s Wakefield Show morphed into the Wradfold show – Wakefield, but in Bradford – and this year, the show carried on in the same location, for much the same reason. It took place on 22nd April at the Cedar Court Hotel in – well, yes – Bradford.
Last October, RISC OS users were introduced to Andrew Oyston by way of that month’s Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) meeting. Andrew is a retro hardware and games enthusiast who has covered RISC OS (and other topics) in Pixel Addict magazine1 – and he has been in touch to highlight another article he has written in another publication.
Over the last couple of weeks, there have been a small handful of announcements arrive at the RISCOSitory bunker that I’ve been unable to deal with immediately, instead putting them on hold. As such you’ll see a small clutch of posts appearing shortly – and this one is actually a combination of two announcements, both from the same source and covering the same subject matter in two parts.
With no London Show today, it’s a perfect time to remember Wakefield! This year’s Wakefield show was a slightly unusual one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the show was held around a month later than usual, on 21st May, rather than its traditional April slot – although you could also argue that it had returned to its original traditional month; the show started out in May back in 1996.
A final round up of 2020 news that hasn’t found its way to RISCOSitory before I was aiming to get this final round up of news posted on the last day of 2020, but as ever other things got in the way, so what was intended as the last post of 2020 has become the first post of 2021. Still, never mind, better late than never – which should probably be the official motto here in the RISCOSitory bunker!
While RISC OS may now be regarded as a small, niche operating system, with only a tiny fraction of the number of users that more mainstream platforms attract, it does still have a surprisingly vibrant community – so with that in mind, every once in a while I look through a selection of news groups, mailing lists, and forums, looking for announcements that haven’t found their way to me via the RISCOSitory news inbox, and from those compile a ‘snippets’ post. Here, then, is the latest selection of news items…
I don’t think anyone can possibly disagree with me when I say that 2020, so far, has been an unusual year. Most of the world is in some form of lockdown due to the SARS-CoV-2 (novel coronavirus) pandemic, with movements beyond our homes and interactions with people beyond our own households at a minimum – which means (in a RISC OS context) shows and user group meetings aren’t taking place.
At the 2019 London Show, news broke of something to be called RISC OS Direct – a new distribution (distro) of the operating system, and an accompanying video series. The actual launch of RISC OS Direct happened in February, at the Southwest Show, so should be covered in the show report – but that report is currently still a work-in-progress, and is very late, so it seems eminently sensible to write a little something about RISC OS Direct separately.