Jenny Hopkins wrote:

Ben, I would have been thoroughly interested in going if I had the time - little enough spare time being a full time working mum as it is - don't think we're not interested, though, I think it's a fantastic project and would have loved to come and see how it is going. Was there much interest from visitors?

Jen

Thanks for your reply Jenny!

There was quite a bit of interest actually, largely because I pounced on people as they came through the door!

First I lured them into the room with flocks of A3 sized friendly cut out penguins, dazzled them with the magic CD-ROM drive that popped open at my command from the opposite side of the room, then I impressed them with my ability to muster up a web page stored on my home computer a mile away, next I shocked them by informing them there was a FREE alternative to Microsoft Office and Windows, entertained them with a game of networked battleships and finally flummoxed them by stuffing photocopies of a an AFFS information sheet I got from an ALUG meeting in their faces!

There were machines for people to try out Linux, Mozilla and Open Office, but most people made their way straight to the games.

Reactions were quite mixed but generally positive. The vast majority of people had never heard of Linux, and every person that I spoke to who had, had heard of RedHat. One person had heard of Knoppix. A few people were a little dubious of the fact it was "free", but I did my best to explain to them the different varieties of "free". One man said "Free software? aaaaah, must be spyware" then he walked away! Another told me that when he worked in IT 10 years ago the Unix machines crashed all the time and the Windows machines never broke... I think that guy may have been from a different planet, although I did explain that LInux is Not UniX... something like that. One person said he had four computers at home and didn't want to have to mess around with Linux, finding all the drivers for each one and a distribution that would run on the range of specification computers and I found it a little difficult to talk him round.

To sum up, people were delighted to hear there was an alternative to expensive Microsoft products but generally a little reluctant to switch, although they did say they'd like to try the windows version of Open Office and see what they thought. One man came back at the end of the night and said he had been fascinated by what I'd told him and could he please have some more information.

Considering I was competing with a nostalgic history of computers display, a computer dissasembly, mystic meg (a face projected onto the wall that could answer all your questions), lego robolab, making flash animations and all the VB games the sixth form have made I don't think I did too badly. but I was shattered by the end of the night.

-- Ben "tola" Francis