Quanta AGM 2008

Quanta's Annual General Meeting for 2008 was held on 12-13/04/08 at the 3rd Davyhulme Scout Headquarters in Davyhulme, Manchester. Here is the briefest of reports on the show, along with a few pictures I took.

The pictures were in low resolution mode on my phone, so not as good as they could have been I suppose (sorry)

The weather was not at its best at times - let's just say I've learned that Manchester can be just as wet as Wales at times! Fortunately, it didn't seem to keep visitors away, and the sun actually came out at times during the event.

George Gwilt, David Buckley and Dilwyn Jones gave talks on various subjects (possibly others too, I didn't count!). George Gwilt has been very active in recent times with QL software, having released the UConfig (Universal Config block generator for C, Assembler and BASIC) software, along with steady updates to other software such as the Turbo Compiler and Cptr systems. George has even got into leisure software, with his Sudoku program, and was active in getting QPC2 to progress from being a 68000/68010 emulator to handling the enhanced instruction set of later 680x0 processors.

As in previous years, David Buckley brought his collection of hand built little robots to the show - it was quite impressive and amusing to see these little mechanical creatures walking around, trying to avoid bumping into things and people. My favourites were the two-wooden-legged robots which walked around the room, looking at times as though they were studying the QLs as they walked up to the tables. The youngsters at the show seemed to love the robots to the extent that you could sometimes even hear them talking to the robots. David uses a special version of basic on a PC to program these beasts (programs are downloaded via serial link to onboard electronics), but their past is strongly linked to the QL, as David started out with a little turtle graphics robot linked to and controlled by a QL back in the 1980s.

Quanta's Annual General Meeting was conducted smoothly and professionally by Chairman John Mason - even Geoff Wicks was full of praise! All those nominated for committee were elected unopposed. John Mason, John Gilpin, Sarah Gilpin and Dan Abbott were re-elected, and I (Dilwyn Jones) was also elected to the committee. I will be taking on the new role of News Editor. Tony Hill has also been co-opted to the committee and will be involved with newsletter editing in the future. There are some exciting plans for projects in the not too distant future, but I'll leave you to read about those in the newsletter as they develop. I'll mention that a special event is planned for next year, when we will be celebrating 25 years of QLing! That event will be held in the Midlands, a central venue to try to make it easy for everyone to attend, following the successful meeting held in that area last year.

Traders at the show included Rich Mellor, Geoff Wicks and Derek Stewart of D & D Systems, who built and supplied the Q60. Ill health prevented Jochen Merz from attending. I launched a new QL CD called The Toolkits CD, for BASIC programmers.

As in previous years, over 20 of us headed off to a social event at the same Chinese restaurant as in previous years. Veronica and her staff at the restaurant did us proud with a multi-course meal. We always enjoy these events after a workshop and of course the conversations always have something to do with QLs as you might expect. We believe Geoff Wicks didn't walk out with any napkins around his waist this time, although we can't confirm that and have no pictures to prove guilt or innocence, and Chairman Mason didn't break any glasses this time as far as we are aware!

Here are some pictures I took at the meal. I apologse for the poor quality as I had set up the camera on my mobile phone incorrectly beforehand.

John Gilpin (foreground) and David Buckley	Geoff Wicks (left) and Rich Mellor	John Gregory (left), John Mason and Keith Mitchell.
Chris Grogan (left) and Alan Horsley (right)	Sarah Gilpin (left), Mary and John Gregory	Rich Mellor of RWAP Software

Some pictures taken at the Quanta Workshop and AGM in Manchester April 2008

Return to Quanta page | Return to home page