Listing at the Ram and Buffer

Dear Trev,

My apologies for not writing before but things have been rather hectic recently and it’s all Clive’s fault.

Every year the Rogues hold the ZX81 Memorial Meeting, an excuse for a drunken evening that ends with everyone agreeing that it was much more fun when we only had 1k. (I suspect that’s all some of us have anyway.) It’s great fun, or it was until this year.

As a result of lengthy negotiations involving barrels of beer I’d managed to get the whole of the Beeb team to attend the meeting. It was my job to write the words for the poster and Clive’s (who understands GCOL3) to do the actual art work.

The trouble was that where I put “Dress Optional” Clive decided to put “Fancy Dress Only,” on the grounds that he fancied seeing people in dresses. (He was in one of his more liquid states at the time.) Sometimes I wonder if he’s got the full RAM.

Of course everything would have been all right if Andrea hadn’t heard of it and decided to help with the organisation.

“What can I go as?” I wailed.

“How about a bug?” she retorted nastily.

“No”, interrupted Clive, “He’s got to dress up like the rest of us. And he can’t let the side down. The Beeb team are coming down and we don’t want to be shown up”.

“What are they coming as?”

“Listings”.

“Listings?” I queried.

“Well, that’s what they say. Just take them to the bar and soon they’ll be listing”.

I spent weeks worrying about it all. What if a bug meets a debugger? I needn’t have bothered. It was all much worse than I imagined. The sight of people arriving at the Ram and Buffer was enough to drive a man to drink.

Especially when I was the back end of a double disc drive, with A at the front I had a pretty bad time explaining to a very nice young man that his his idea of 40/80 switchable was a misconception.

The crowd was amazing. There was one guy in a flying helmet and wings claiming to be Baron Von Ribboncable, squirting everyone with a water pistol.

Mind you, he was fairly sane compared to what came to be known as the communications section. These consisted of a pair of modems vainly trying to make contact. Telephone Bill – who’d come as a wrong number and had an arm around a delectable RS232 interface he insisted on calling his “parity bit” – said they needed hardwiring. I’m not sure what this meant but at the mention of packet switching I left them to their baudy games.

By this stage I’d separated myself from A (who’d just intimated that I needed a separate power supply) and mingled. I would have gone for a dance but at my age you’ve got to be careful of disc problems. In the event I made a BBC line straight for the pretty young thing from the Nice Byte who’d come dressed as a User Port.

Unsurprisingly she was surrounded by all sorts of peripherals all wanting an acknowledgement. Before I could get to her, however, I was intercepted by the Beeb Team (listing to a man) who showed me Mike Cook’s latest invention. It’s a device that not only unfailingly points in the direction of the nearest bar, but also helps you track down the bottles people have hidden away at parties.

Before we could test it out Clive, dressed up as a mouse, announced the party games. The first was a bit of a failure. You had to think of an advert for the BBC Master that was even more boring than the ones in the papers. No one could.

The second was much more of a success. It was a variant of one of those maze games where you rush round gathering up energy pills. Only in this case it was alcohol, and through the screens, getting caught didn’t sound as bad as it might be.

About the last thing I can remember was when someone wanted to play Hopper on the bypass. And after that a vague memory of seven dwarfs, each with an interface lead over one shoulder, marching in singing “I/O, I/O, it’s off to work we go”. It was then I suffered a disc fault and was taken home.

Cheers,

Bob.