On the Road: A Visit to SEAL
by Robert Bernardo, Fresno Commodore User Group,
http://videocam.net.au/fcugThe East Anglia train sped past the various English towns – Shenfield, Billericay, and then onto Wickford, my destination for the South Essex Amiga Link meeting. Over three hours earlier, I had left Haywards Heath, south of London Gatwick Airport. From the train to the Tube to the train, I had lugged my SLR/videocamera case and a 25-30 pound, large box which held an AmigaOne computer, a computer I had bought two years earlier, a computer which was stored by a British friend for all this time until now when I could pick it up. Now I had the computer, unopened by me. The only assurance that it was not a box of bricks was that my British friend had tested it out two years earlier before it was put into storage. It was to have its premiere unwrapping at the June 13 SEAL meeting.
I arrived at the Wickford Community Center at about 6:45 p.m. on a typical English evening – cool, cloudy, and breezy. The Wickford Library next door closed at 7, and I was alone in front of the center. After several minutes, I noticed music coming from the back of the building. Walking back there, I found two men guarding the front door; they knew of no SEAL meeting.
Having received no satisfactory answer from them, I wandered down the road a bit and looked in the window of the Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant. 9.85 pounds for a Friday night – nearly $20 US – I was hungry but not that hungry. I wandered back to the front of the community center and sat on the steps. About 7:10 an old man inside the center unlocked the front doors.
“Are you here for the computer club meeting?”
“Yes,” I replied as I walked in.
“Second door on the right.”
I walked in, turned on the lights, and waited some more. About 10 minutes later, a blonde-haired woman entered. We conversed; I found out her name was Liz.
“Have you been to our meetings before?”
“Once before... in 2005.”
“Why is that?”
“It's hard to come all the way from America to here.”
We laughed. She said that Robert Williams and Nigel Derbyshire had never been so late before. More people arrived. Finally, just a minute or two before 7:30, Robert finally popped in.
“Good seeing you, Robert,” as he shook my hand.
“Good seeing you, Robert,” I repeated.
Some talk about my flight (turbulence the first hour into it) and some talk about music in back; it was a bar, and I could buy liquid refreshments from there and bring them into the meeting. Robert told me that Nigel would be absent tonight. More SEAL members entered. We moved the AmigaOne box from the side table to a back table, and then Robert set up the video projector in front. He soon returned to the back, and we unwrapped the AmigaOne.
What a sight to behold! A cream-colored mid-tower, half-done with well-worn cherry-red paint and finished with blue metallic flake in back. Several of the rear access plates were gone, but that was o.k. since the power supply had no obvious exterior vents. On the left side was a transparent window that revealed the entire A1 motherboard. The 800-MHz PPC chip itself was covered by the standard heatsink and fan which came with the motherboard.
Robert connected his Sony VGA LCD flatscreen to the A1, and I pressed the front button to power it on. The system roared to life, the noise coming from a top-mounted fan that lit up in blue and red and from two fans cooling off the hard drive. The case interior lit up in a neon blue, controlled by a knob (which made no difference to the intensity of the light) and a 3-position slide switch – left position: flashing (Robert said that it was very bad to have flashing neon/florescents around computer electricals), center position: light off, and right position: continual light on.
The VGA screen did not light up! Robert checked its settings and checked its connections. I switched the A1 off and on. Still nothing showed up on the screen. Stumped and not without fear that something had broken, I urged Robert to tend to the rest of the 15 or so gathered members.
He finally began the meeting and with good humor all around from the members, he introduced me and the machine in back, talked about club elections, went on with news, and got to a lively members' discussion of software and hardware problems.
Meanwhile, I was taking photos and video of the roaring A1 box. As soon as the meeting winded down to members chatting among themselves, Robert returned to the back and the A1. This time he and member Mick Sutton tried their hands at getting the A1 to boot up. Robert took off the transparent side panel, and we found it was very homemade with 1/2 inch thick, heavy plexiglass. I joked that it was a scaled-down version of bulletproof glass used in American banks and convenience stores; this one would stop a 22-caliber bullet!
Robert first changed the A1 clock battery for another; a non-working battery would mean a non-working computer. No success. Then he re-seated the 256k PC2700 memory board. Success! The A1 fired up into the standard 800 x 600 screen – a beautiful sight to see. Immediately, Mick started investigating how old the operating system was, because I had bought it before final version of OS 4.0 was released. He determined the OS was from 2006 – kernal 51.32 of January 23 and asl.library 51.33 of January 18. He tweaked a few items in the start-up, and he and Robert tried to test the SoundBlaster soundboard. Whether it was due to the older beta OS not having the sound fully functioning or whether they just could not find the right settings, they could not get the A1 to make any sound, apart from its
roaring fans.
As an A1 newbie, I asked Robert and Mick plenty of newbie questions. Did I need more than 256k? Not really... no application required that much. Was there an application/utility that was left out that the A1 really needed in order for it to run well, an app/utility to be found at OSDepot4.0? No. Did Opus Magellan work with it? The older version 4.0 would work with it. Did I have to replace the fan on top of the PPC chip? Your house has air-conditioning?... then you don't need to replace it. This and other questions they answered, and if I had any other questions, I could always contact OS 4.0 experts, Bill “Tekmage” Bosari of The Other Group of Amigoids or Steven Solie of the Calgary Amiga Group.
It was getting late. Most of the SEAL members had already left. We dismantled the set-ups, and I repacked the A1 in its shipping box. We
piled into Robert's car and drove off into the night. Robert dropped off Mick and then another member, and then we headed to his parents' house in Benfleet where I would spend the night. When we got to the house, I was introduced to his parents and even got a full English breakfast from them, even though it was past 11 p.m.! Most unexpected!
In the morning they gave toast, yogurt, and muesli for breakfast. Most unexpected! Then Robert rushed me to the train station, and with heavy A1 in tow, I caught the train for the long trip back to Haywards Heath.
