I got back from the VCF show last night.
Thought I'd give you guys my quick opinion of the show.
Due to a lack of interweb at our end of the tent and in my hotel I haven't read much of the VCF/X1000 posts so far so sorry I repeat what has already been said.
My user group tends to bridge all camps, but mainly is about classics, the machines we brought down were A3000, A2000, and a CD32 which were for the history of amiga display, On the LAG table we had A500, A1200, A4000, CD32, Pegasos 2 running Morphos 2.5, and a Atom box running Icaros. Unfortunately we didn't have any of the OS4 machine in the club but there were lots of others in tent.
ClusterUK's iMica (aros) machines display complete with 32" display and Acer One netbook both which looked very impressive running the latest Icaros (1.22) with native Intel GMA drivers. I had a good chat with ClusterUK and found him a enthusiastic and pleasant, and the future for Icaros looks fantastic. Based on what I saw I am going to either buy a machine from him or build atom based one in the very near future.
The history of the Amiga display also looked great especially thanks to the info sheets provided by ANT. There was A1000, A500, A2000, A3000, A600, A1200, A4000, and CD32 All laid out in chronological order. The only notable commission from the line-up was the CDTV, thought there was one else where in the marquee. It would have been nice to have some of the rarer machines in the line-up such as 3000t and 4000t. As there was some very rare machines on display in other areas of the festival including 3 of the only know 5 and a half to still exist Dragon Professionals (I spent quite a while talking to the owner and learning the history behind it).
Trevor Dickinson seemed a genuine, interested and very nice guy, and I personally wish him all the luck with the X1000. But unfortunately due to my unawareness of the timing of the announcement, It took place when I left the tent to grab lunch and do some geeking round the rest of the fair, but I did see it on YouTube today. I'm not going to discuss the contents of the announcement here.
There was the usual great turnout from Amiga Kit with a good assortment of goodies to buy.
Also there thanks to the Amibay guys was a 330Mhz ppc blizzard running in customised 1200 desktop case.
The rest of the fair had some great displays from user groups, other museums and private collections. I could of lost hours reliving my youth on the BBC Doomsday Project machine, or talking to the owner of a great display of early digital workstations.
The museum itself is fantastic if you have any interest in the computer pioneers or the progression of IT technology with lot of excellent displays and very knowledgeable and interesting staff. I didn't get the time I wanted to spend in the museum but enjoyed what I experienced and will be going back for a full day soon.
Gaz
