Acorn Arcade forums: Rougol March meeting report -30 years of GAG News

Rougol March meeting report -30 years of GAG News

Posted by Mark Stephens on 21:17, 21/3/2022 | talk

The March Rougol was the usual hybrid in person / Zoom event with the speaker (Herbert zur Nedden) and most of the audience remote.

Herbert discovered RISC OS in 1992. First machine was an A5000. As the best way to meet people is to start a user group! GAG chosen as a nice easy name. Some issues had a circulation of over 550 issues. Quite often articles come from interesting questions.

Magazine has evolved over the years. Booklet from Issue 12. Thickest issue was 58 pages of A4. Currently 32-36 pages every other month. Produced on Impression Publisher, despite playing with Ovation and TechWriter over the years. Inside is 3 column layout. You can read some issues online here and there is a full list of all 180 issues. You can get a DVD with all the back issues.

Issue 87 was first produced totally at home. Only 1 issue late (2 days late due to embargo on advert).

PostScript3 printer driver allowed for decent colour files.

Selected Timeline of interesting events
1992 First issue (also bought a Laser Direct).
1994 Updated to RISC PC.
1996 StrongARM and second public demo at club session
1998 Acorn closed down
1999 ROL and RISC OS 4
2001 RISC OS Select and Omega. Important as prospect of new machine kept people in market
2002 Iyonix arrived
2003 Castle took over RISC OS.
2005 A9
2006 Shared Source licence
2007 RISC OS 6
2008 Issue 100 started with A as name on disc would have been too long
2009 RISC OS virtually free and PostScript3. Uses Artworks as wrapper for JPEG.
2010 Beagleboard
2011 ARMini
2012 Raspberry Pi
2015 ARMX6 and Zero Pain
2016 Titanium
2017 25 years GAG
2018 TLS1 (more important in Germany than UK)
2018 Open Source licence
2019 Covid
2021 Python3 and IP6 stack
2024 Herbert will have published GAG for half his life.

Covid has encouraged the growth of online events and shows which have made it easier to attend from Germany.

GAG is still very much alive and running and highly recommend to any RISC OS users who speak German.

After the 'formal bit', there was plenty of chatter and conversation.

Next month's speaker will be announced nearer the date.

Rougol website

Rougol March meeting report -30 years of GAG News

hzn (09:30 22/3/2022)

Herbert zur Nedden

Message #125290, posted by hzn at 09:30, 22/3/2022

Member
Posts: 11

Thanks for the invitation and especially for postponing it a few months so that was able to say that I publish GAG-News since 30 years (i.a. didn't have to include the word "nearly" every so often).

It was a very nice evening that did once again show that if things go bad like in this case Corona happening by you never know what benefits you can get like in this case online meetings that we can join at ease despite living far away. I would really appreciate the odd RISC OS show in UK as online event since it allows more users to participate - UK residents as those abroad.

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