                    The All Formats Computer Fair

                Donnington Park - 19th September 1992

Having arrived a few minutes early at Donnington, I  decided  to  join
the  queue  for  entry  before all the covered queuing space was used.
This was because it was raining heavily and getting wet wasn't at  all
on my list of priorities for the day.

Paying  out  money  always  hurts  me, and four pounds seemed a little
steep for the entry fee - but that's life. When I eventually got  into
the  place,  reluctance  turned rapidly into disappointment when I saw
that the display hall contained only about a dozen stalls - very  poor
value indeed I thought for the money.

There was one benefit of such a small turnout I suppose. Finding Henry
Doyle  and  Caroline Price was easy. These two are great supporters of
Stunn!, but were at the show with their business - New Age PDL. For  a
good  time  now  New Age has been the best Atari ST PD library around,
and the good news is they are branching into the PC  market.  Although
they  currently  have only around 100 titles for the PC, many more are
expected very soon. I predict that within a year, New  Age  will  have
the  best  ST library, the best Archimedes library and the second best
PC library (after us - Stunn! PDL is going to be with us this side  of
Christmas if all goes to plan).

Apart  from  New  Age,  there  were a great many junk stalls and a few
people selling commercial software at competitive  prices.  There  was
also  another  PD  library  (who  will  remain nameless) which had the
audacity to ask twenty pounds for one disk  of  ST  shareware.  Now  I
don't  care  if it was compressed and had 20 programs on or not - that
is FAR too much for one disk. The only other thing worthy  of  mention
was  a  disk  company who were selling bright pink 3.5" DS/HD disks at
dirt cheap prices - I promptly bought several hundred.

You may think I'm about to start telling you how  the  event  redeemed
itself.  Well,  you are wrong! The whole day was a serious con, asking
4 for entry into such an event is seriously over pricing. If I hadn't
have come away with a real bargain in the disks and had a nice  couple
of  hours  chatting away to Caroline and Henry, I would have seriously
considered asking for my money back. Having said all this, I'm assured
the Birmingham event and most of the others are bigger  and  better  -
yeah right - I'll believe it when I see it.


                     Lee Bohan - September 1992.
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