Cambridge Computer Club

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

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.

Cambridge Computer Club Meeting Notes
31st August, 2025

Location

Centre for Computing History, Cambridge

In the room

  • Will Sheldrake (arcdesey) (host)
  • Henry (with Emma & Alexander)
  • Rob Crowther
  • Maria Gloyne
  • Other people
  • Please add your names
  • If you want

On the tables

Meeting summary

Henry demonstrated his two PC-compatible devices using a mixture of floppy disks and more modern storage. We enjoyed the title music of Planet X3 playing on the 5140, then switched over to the Olivetti to see if it could be persuaded to display in anything better than four-colour CGA (without success). Prince of Persia was then loaded up on the Olivetti and we were treated to an exceedingly pink title screen.

Will attempted to get several games loaded off tape on the Memotech most of which failed, leaving us looking at some sort of debug screen. None of us knew Z80 assembly well enough to make any sense of that so the machine was reset and the next game on the tape was tried. Eventually a shooty game was successfully loaded and we left it at that. A young museum visitor later sat down and attempted to play and was heard to remark in shocked tones: “It doesn’t even have a mouse!”

The SuperPET was booted up into ‘Waterloo’ mode and we were able to select several of the menu options, each of them equally mystifying. Eventually we decided to have a crack at writing some FORTRAN. What followed was multiple people furiously searching the internet for clues into:

  1. First, how to get into edit mode in order to type in a program (the command is ‘I’ for insert)
  2. Then how to get out of edit mode in order to run the program (5 on the numeric keypad did the trick)
  3. Once we’d run the program and seen a syntax error there was much more searching of the internet to determine what constitutes valid FORTRAN anyway – handy note here, pressing RUN STOP will syntax check the program in the editor
  4. Steps 2 & 3 were repeated multiple times as we learned how to do loops (while…endwhile was the winner) and how to print strings (a comma is required between the PRINT and the string)
  5. Finally a working FORTRAN program was written!

The meeting wound up and we agreed we’d try to have another one before Xmas.