Clan Members Only

There was a Clan Members-only area at Acorn World again this year, with plenty of room reserved upstairs for those who'd remembered to bring their membership card.

The Clan area was at the top of some stairs:

Being a Clan member brought two main advantages. The first was the ability to get free tea and coffee, which I thought was pretty good, actually, since food and drink are always horrendously expensive at places like Wembley. These were available from the Clan-only Caernarvon cafe:

The second was the provision of a free CD of Acorn beta-test software, with toys such as Java on - see the Acorn Stand report for more details. If you weren't a Clan member you had the option of copying the image onto 32 (yes, thirty two!) floppy discs instead - but you had to provide the floppy discs. It's just about cheaper to join the Clan than buy the floppy discs, so anyone who opted for the one-hour-or-so floppy disc option was quite mad, in my opinion!

^{Beta-test floppy-disc copying area}

^{Translation: Join the Clan if you want this stuff}

There were also a few Risc PCs hanging around in the Clan area, so you could play Exodus and test out the effect of coffee on the keyboard:

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