news [3]

Several of us from the RISC OS [4] User Group of London (ROUGOL) made the long journey to the South West show yesterday, and were pleased to see that it seemed to be a big success.

Although the show quietened down quite dramatically from about 2:30pm onwards, earlier in the day it had been quite busy. Many exhibitors said that attendance seemed similar to the previous year, with some saying that sales had been better - so much for the doom and gloom merchants.

Items of interest included:
The first viewing of the 100MBit network cards for Risc PC and A7000(+) from Castle, simultaneously with the announcement of similar cards that are slightly cheaper from RiscStation Ltd.

A working RISC OS [5] version of RiscStation's laptop still wasn't in evidence, but Roy Heslop was in upbeat mood, saying that the end of April was still the planned date for the start of shipments, and answering a whole host of other questions.

Castle accompanied their network card launch with a home networking pack which includes not just network cards and cables, but also a router to provide connectivity from your machines to either ISDN or ASDL.

Castle also confirmed that the Neuron 200 (whose predecessor Neuron 100 was on view in Cumana's Slym at the show) would use a StrongARM and would eventually appear in Castle's desktop line up.

MicroDigital weren't at the show - admittedly they would've had to travel even further than RiscStation!

Reporters from a host of RISC OS and RISC OS related magazines were very much in evidence with their cameras and notebooks, so check out their next issues for more details.