Cambridge Computer Club Meeting Notes 12th October, 2025

Location

Centre for Computing History, Cambridge

In the room

• Will Sheldrake (arcadesy) (host)
• Rob Crowther
• Maria Gloyne
• Oliver Gloyne
• Lee (MFFI)
• Other Lee
• BinaryDinosaurs
• Adrian (CCH)
• Kat (CCH)
• Andy Mc (CCH volunteer)
• At least one other person?

On the tables

• Brandvance Galactic Invaders
• Wren Executive System
• Acorn R140 (RISC iX Unix)
• Acorn Electron (with expansions)

Meeting summary

The meeting started with a literal bang, even before everyone had arrived, turning the Wren Executive System on resulted in a pop and a bad smell. This was a shame as the luggable system looked very neat. It could be used on a desktop with a built-in monitor (or an external display according to the available ports on the back), then it could be folded back into itself and a faux leather cover attached for portability. I say portable, but it was very, very heavy.

The two Lee’s had fun getting the expanded Electron to play a reasonable game of GORF, followed by fiddling with the display to get a colour image. 

Lee also tested out the Galactic Invaders and managed to make it look easy clearing the first screen but the game itself wasn’t as interesting as contemplating a game console that was apparently built into an orange ZX80 case.

Meanwhile we set about getting RISC iX started up on the Archimedes R140. The setup was a bit weird as it booted into RISCOS, from there you started up the RISC iX ‘App’ which gave you a button on the toolbar. Finally clicking on the button would bring up a full screen console and start booting into Unix. This was a bit of a slow process as full disk checks were performed on each boot up. Our hacking skills were then tested as we didn’t know the user or the password, fortunately we didn’t have to rely on our skills for long – some documentation was found and we were able to log in and have a look around.

The main highlight of the system was a bunch of classic text only games. We played the weird version of snake, then struggled to make a version of Conway’s Life work. More success was had with a version of the 1970s Star Trek game, Maria and Will spent quite some time trying to figure out how it worked and nearly succeeded! After they’d had enough of that they switched to playing Battlestar, a text adventure from 1979.

As the meeting wound up (and two people struggled to carry the Wren back into storage) we agreed the next meeting would probably be in January.