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On behalf of Backstage I added a rather artistically drawn advertisement to the Barcamp schedule, inviting attendees to ‘Ask the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ anything…’

The questions that came up were interesting and varied, and asked our intrepid panel of Ian Forrester, Ant Miller and myself about subjects such as , ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Blogs, should ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ staff members have their own blogs aggregated publicly for everyone to read, iplayer and copyright, and what gets up to.

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Later that afternoon, my colleague Ant Miller, gave a talk on ‘³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Micro for the 21st Century’ - he began with a slide that asked...

Question?
Should we do this again?
Should we WHAT again?
What did we do?

This year saw the 25th anniversary of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Micro…
What is the ? It wasn’t a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ machine, it wasn’t for kids, and it wasn’t for schools…

Ant showed a clip from a Horizon programme from the 70s on the silicon chip and how computers of the future will affect everyone’s lives – ‘the micro-electronics revolution’ – he also showed a series of slides which bullet-pointed some of the back story to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Micro. I wasn’t typing fast enough to get all the points on these, but I’m hoping that Ant will follow up with an expanded blog with all his slide notes.

Although the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Micro was quite expensive compared to the and the , 1.5 million Micros were sold and also 400,000 books.

Ant then went on to talk about (advanced risk machines) which sprang out of Acorn. There are billions of Arm chips – they’re in all sorts of things from mobile phones to handheld games consoles, Tom Toms and more. Ant showed us some examples of further education courses of students studying and playing with combinations of platforms and technologies.

How do we get people in the 21st Century to become interested in the fundamentals of computing and hardware rather than just accepting consumer goods and not being curious about how they work? Apparently applications for computer Science courses have gone down recently – how can we encourage the young of today to have the same fascination for computing and fiddling under the hood as we had when we were young?

What’s around for us to play with today? For example there's all sorts of fun and cool stuff to add to your , plus the differences between microprocessors and microcontrollers allows for all sorts of development. Also Rapid Prototyping is fun.

There followed a lively debate on how do we get people interested in coding, electronics and tinkering, and do we actually need to learn all this stuff now? The views of the room were interestingly divided. The was discussed as an example of the West perhaps patronising the Third World by saying they should use our computers – when they could probably do with other items first, such as shoes. The rights and wrongs of the West’s meddling reflect culturally interesting issues.

It was also mooted that the UK is becoming a services nation rather than building products for its consumers - if so is this a threat to anyone? Maybe the threat is about the possibility of being locked into other people’s (country’s, culture’s, company’s) systems – examples given included the iphone being locked down, planes having a switch that can blow it up to stop them being used as flying missiles in the case of hijack (really? *boggle*!). Also, how we can and should handle vast amounts of data if we don’t own, understand or have access to the systems that control it?

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I met some lovely people over the weekend, everyone was friendly and eager to listen to others. It's lovely to hear the stories of new Barcamp peeps who've pushed themselves to come along alone and had a whale of a time.