Cambridge Computer Club

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.