What should/can the RISC OS community do to support teachers in this position (apart from bang on about the likely advances in technology by the time children leave, which is ok in respect of 5-year olds but less convincing applied to children aged 16/18/students)? Should there be people available, who use RISC OS machines at work, to talk to governors/headteachers and "help them to make a properly informed decision"? ;-)

I used to work as a Computer Technician. The school I worked for are ridding themselves of their Acorns and buying PCs :-( So now they have a lovely new network of PCs but can't afford the extortionate prices demanded for software. They are also having to train staff to use the d**n things and all the resources such as instruction booklets and worksheets must be created from scratch for the Windoze platform. They also have to employ two technicians as opposed to one part time when they had Acorns!

The moral of the above story is obvious. Schools need to be reminded of it.

However we also need to consider vested interests. One school that I am aware of has been "encouraged" to move over to Intel machines by a gift of a new IT suite from IBM. In these cases it is going to be much harder to have an impact in the way you suggest.

Don't know how relevant this observation is now.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the building, in a rather folorn and forgotten room had plenty (20+) of working A5000s and a Risc PC. Nobody really used them because they were stuck around the edge of a large room used for graphic design which was always filled with irritating first years covering eachother with prittstick.

Oh, and there were some really, really ancient A3000s provided for general use, but were so ancient, dust covered, underspecced and slow (2mb memory, econet network...) that nobody used them. Anyone who saw them judged the entire RISCOS platform on them and said "Acorns are crap". So there you go.

They say they'll be keeping the acorns too, but who's going to want to use a grime-covered 6/7 year old computer when there's an exciting new looking computer?

When asked why they'd changed platforms, they said they felt under pressure to do so. Children had PCs at home and knew how to use them, whereas they didn't know how to use the Acorns (probably because the staff didn't teach them, probably because the staff didn't know) They said they didn't really know of any Acorns available now. (Note: Acorns, not Riscstations, or Micos... somebody needs to do some marketting here).

Hardware cost: (one-off)
Windows: 10 computers @ 500UKP each = 5000UKP.
RISCOS: 10 computers @ 1000UKP each = 10000UKP.

Wetware cost: (per year)
Windows: 1 person @ easily 20000UKP per year = 20000UKP!
RISCOS: Whoever happens to be around, teaching IT already,= 0UKP

Hmmmm. And when you consider how long RISCOS machines last compared to Windows ones, the maths seems obvious.

But the bean-counters in schools and local government can't seem to cope with such calculations. The apes.

I can understand why people leave the market for "industry standard" (no such thing) and because they heard of Acorn "going bust" (wrong again) but have not the slightest idea of the present situation. I am getting rather frustrated at the lack of advertising and the lack of tastey information on forthcoming machines myself and I am a die-hard. The average user is probably not going to wait with such blind faith.

The sorry situation is as existing teachers and heads retire, new staff are coming in on the Wintel bandwagon. These people are really not suitable to be in education because they know nothing but one platform and seem very unwilling to consider anything but Windows and seem completely unable to work out the cost benefits of RISC OS technology, never mind the superiority of the system!

If all the manufacturers and RISCOS Ltd can't/won't work out a marketing strategy such as group funding a campaign (like All The Phone Companies Together) then they will be left with a small enthusiast market. Quality of product alone will not get customers. And maybe some info on what they are working on would help keep people interested - it shows that the platform is active.