July 2009 Issue

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A Potted History of the Club - Part 1

I have been going through old issues of the newsletter to see if I can find anything that may be of interest to members.

Quite a few Amstrad 1512 and 1640 computers were offered for sale by members. I have found Amstrad 1640's with colour monitors on offer for around £650 and 1512's with mono monitors for around £399 and with colour monitors for around £450.

We had a very extensive range of programs available from a club library available on 5.25" discs and later on 3.5" discs. We still have the programs available, all now on a CD, most of them are for DOS but some are for Windows. If anyone likes playing around with old programs this CD is available from Bryan Coleman or from me, Ken Miles. There are dozens of programs on the CD, many on specialised subjects and they are very good.

It would seem that clip art programs were very popular and dozens of these were available. We thought them great at the time but they look very crude by today's standards. Xtree was a very popular file management program before Windows and was used by most members.

In February 1992 Amstrad UK sent a representative to give us a talk. The talk was to have taken about 20 minutes followed by questions. We had to call a halt after 2 hours.

In August 1992 we published a program of talks for the next twelve months. The talks were given mostly by members but some were given by a representative of the publishers of programs. One member could, and in fact once did, talk all evening about the 5.25" disc.

I found it very nostalgic to go through the list of members over the years. Sadly, many have now passed away.

No August 2009 Meeting

There will be no August meeting as the school has said that they will probably be carrying out maintenance work to their computer system at that time. They cannot even guarantee access to the room as new computers are to be installed.