The official acronym for ARM/Acorn Developers Artists : A worldwide organization that promotes RiscOS solutions.
ARMada/ARM Acorn Developers Artists
The following story was originally published in Archimedes World, Volume 15, issue 4 : April 1998..
It is my personal work and I am authorized to publish it on Everything2.
1- The story so far...
ARMada (ARM/Acorn Developers Artists) was created on Friday April 14th 1995.
It was on the RiscPC's birthday.
When I bought my RiscPC, we weren't many Acorn users in Lyon, and we wanted to gather all the French "Acornists" in order to become as significant as other British clubs : it was a question of credibility.
I personnally wanted the other people not to always look for contacts in order to get new knowledge and information about their computers. It was hard and we had few to share with the other. We had to become a LINK between the French Acorn users.
In fact, people wondered why joining us : the possible answers were contacts, software, news.
As we weren't connected to the Internet, we had many difficulties finding lot of shareware and freeware programs. We needed those in order to gain our members'interest. It has now changed a lot...
We involved ourselves in a small magazine which grew bigger (30 pages). We spent our money in order to copy and send our magazine to the other people who had left their address in various French shops where we had contacts. One of them, Redwood Computer Shop (Lyon) helped us in paying the postage.
It was a big success, many people sent us money in order to subscribe to our magazine and 2 months later, we had enough money to go on our own. But there were more problems to get through : most of us had not enough time to contribute regularly to our magazine and during 6 months, only 2 of us filled the columns with articles, (tests, mood, news - thanks to most English Acorn related magazines and to the newsgroups in which we found most of our articles...).
It was easy for me as I was unemployed but... I finally found a new job as a web worker. I had to ask the others to write enough articles.
I moved to Paris where I really quickly found a new job as an
Internet consultant and now finish our 20th magazine. Due to the lack of of contributions, during the last 3 months, we even thought about changing our subscription mode : after consisting in a big magazine each month, we'd now make it twice as less frequent but we'd send a 4-page ?letter? every 2 weeks.
In fact that's what we might do if we don't have enough articles but if we
do, we'd better send a normal magazine.
2- Who we are
a- The main crew
ARMada was created by Guy DESSARD (President), Augustin VIDOVIC (my brother, Secretary), Vincent LEFEVRE (Vice-president) and me (Treasurer). We are between 25 and 30 years old and most of us have begun living this adventure as students.
Guy is the kind of self-made-guy who happened one day and forever to fall in love for computing. He's been a very precious element during our installation as he knows many people among whom printers (who could help us with our magazine), resellers (Redwood, of course) and many people in Hôpital Lyon-Sud where we freely gather our members once a year...
Augustin is well known amongst the Atari Family because of many of his programs, including the excellent YMTracker, a soundtracker program that compiled very compact and optimized music playing programs. Pity, it won't be possible to port it on our platform as VIDC doesn't treat sound like the 'good old' ST's YM sound chip.
Vincent Lefevre is also well known as a regular csa-newsgroups writer. That friendly small dude has managed many time to get through international mathematics contests. He's also known for being able to synthetize a complete computer documentation in a few days, in order to comment any of its weaknesses. A BRAIN... He disputed many mathematics championships and even
won them several times ! You can visit his personnal pages on
http://www.vinc17.org.
Both Augustin and I have discovered computing in the early 80?s, as our school invested in brand new Sinclair ZX81... 5 years later, we convinced our father to buy an Atari ST computer. Augustin's pages are on http://www.vido.ldh.org and mine are on
http://www.vidovic.org/mirko.
b- Our 'special guests'
We were quickly joined by some interesting people (including ARM?s Tech crew and ARMOric - ?Xtreme?, ?Revolutif?...) and recently by Bernard Jungen (Bass members, creator of the fantastic 'Digital Symphony'). Our members also
include Ashiv (Acorn representatives in France), Rush (France biggest
public-oriented Acorn dealer) and some journalists at 'Le Virus
Informatique', 'Les Puces Informatique' (French satyrical computer
magazines), "STraTOS" and "Dream" (Alernative computing). Ashiv and Rush allow our members to benefit of many special offers.
c- Other people
We know count a hundred of members which mean age is around 30 years old, which is old. In fact most of us work with computers and most of us can be considered as middle-class or more. Most of us come from France but we have a member in Belgium, 2 members in Swiss and another member in Tunisia. There's also a pilot with us ! ;-)
3- What we do
a- The magazine
As I explained it sooner, we try to realize a magazine as often as possible. I only use Internet to get the articles as it's faster and more reliable than simple sending a floppy by snail mail... I then realize all the required DTP and send the result to our printer. When the work is done, I print the mail labels with my old HP Deskjet 510 and prepair the floppies for our members. A typical magazine contains our "Idiotorial", some mood pages, one or two software-tests, some brief news, system-tricks and tips, a page about RiscBSD, programming tips and some game pages (our games specialists fell in love for ARMed and Dangerous "Rudolf the Rabid Reindeer" after having played it on a SA-RPC)... Speedster Harry (from ARM's Tech crew) often send us his latest experiments with POV... The floppy contains some demo or programs
commented in the issue, if there's enough place left, I fill it with MODfiles, demoes, or utilities...
b- Our meetings
During last school year, we met 3 times : Once in Lyon and twice in Paris. In Paris, we were invited by the FrAUG (Parisian Club) and Ashiv. We are currently planning a meeting in Clermont-Ferrand, at Rush's but nothing has been set at this moment. When we meet, it generally consists in :
- Associative purposes : we meet each other and hear our
representatives commenting the preceeding months.
- Public purposes : lotta "foreign" people usually come in order to know more about Acorn machines...
They go happy but generally find them too expensive or not enough
"politically correct"... Very few of them join us but we don't want it to be
too easy as we need serious member to touch other serious people...
- Technical purposes : We always organize the coding part of our meetings and most of us then take benefit of ARMOric's knowledge of ARM programming.
It has always been a real pleasure to work with him.
- Other purposes :
RiscBSD, software demonstrations (thanks to Rush)... I personnally adore to see "PC-users" amazed by MIDIWorks, ProSound, StudioSound or simply by PCA communication between Ovation Pro, Top Model and Composition. But will someone explain me why I've never met the others members without dismounting a machine ?
c- French computer press
While the magazines we work with often talk about our machines, they gather much interest from their readers. In fact, we recently learnt that when the word Amiga appears in a magazine, they get, say, 3 letters from people interested in these machines. When the word Acorn appears, they have to answer several hundreds of people who want to know more about our computer.
In "STraTOS" and "Dream", we have the possibility to fill a CD with 50 to
100Mb data at a time, I don't know where all our stuff come from but it's
always amazing to see how many PD softwares we have, almost as much as Linux stuff...
d- Our mailing-list
As I was working for an ISP, I could easilly create a mailing-list in order to manage 'live' discussions between the one of us who were conected to the Net. Information came faster and faster and it's become very easy to get more up-to-date news... until my employer's problems made me quit the company. I was back to the beginning. Fortunately, our mailing-list has moved just in time and is now connected to our own domain name.
e- Our web site
Just visit http://www.armada.ldh.org or http://www.armada-fr.net. Those are our main sites which are connected to Acorn Web Ring
(http://www.datawave.demon.nl/website/acorn.html). Our site contains a short presentation (French) of our club, All the table of contents of all our magazines (which we are currently planning to convert to HTML), links to Acorn related web sites and some links to our own web pages and email addresses. It's not finished yet but when can we consider a web site as being finished ?
f- Our ftp site
After tasting the low speed of European ftp sites, we are currently planning to create our own. It'll be fully indexed with HTML pages and will contains the several Gb data we currently hold on Iomega Zip cartridges. We don't miss programs or data files. We just search the best ISP in order to get the most comfortable access for our visitors. If you meet him, just mail us !
g- Translations
That's our key project : We've been working on all the Acorn documentation in order to translate it to French. It represents thousands pages and have to be finished for... hum... just yesterday... Well, we know we'll do it. There'll be the Programer's Reference Manual, the User guides, the TRM, and many many many softwares (Advance, TopModel, MIDIWorks, Organiser etc...)
As a conclusion we can say ARMada is just the best solution for French speaking people who want to get themselves involved in Acorn scenery without having to speak English.