Subdued RM says government cuts challenge its business

Nice keyboards

Thewir keyboards are wonderfully colourcoded to match those on "learning to type" posters, but that's all I'd have from them.

I used to work in their Milton Park (nr abingdon/ didcot) facility and the components used/ cost of items ratio was quite shocking. Build quality was terrible but their top flight PCs had okay components and I remember a few P2s walking away.

Yeah, so over priced, under specced, built by stoned students (the summer holiday period was the busiest and they hired students who were on their holiday and often stoned, hung over or just plain not caring) computers not selling when schools have to be more competetive in their purchasing. It's no surprise Dell are making such inroads into education.

Never convinced about RM

Many, many years ago I justified and built a computer resource for teaching what was called Computer Appreciation around BBC micros, ECOnet and Acorn file servers in a UK Polytechnic. I managed to get so much for the budget, including colour monitors, robot arms, digitizer tablets, touch screens, printers, plotters, speech recognition and synthesizers, teletext decoders, video cameras, mice, lightpens, and a basic CAD systems (remember, at the time, an Apple ][ with a Bitstick was considered good). We also had representative word processor, spreadsheet and database products and a good Basic (natch) as well as Acornsoft Pascal. This was to teach people from all learning disciplines, not just computing students, what computers could do in the early 1980's before DOS/Windows PC's had achieved dominance, and also before people had Home computers.

The main Computer Unit poured scorn on our efforts, because they wanted to put in RM 480Z's backed up by a 380Z as a file server. Equipping the lab with what they suggested would have blown the whole budget on the computer hardware without being able to afford any of the peripherals, demonstrating that their systems were overpriced. And I don't believe that it could have been used for half of what we actually used it for.

I was very sad to see Acorn loose out in the education sector, especially when RM moved to MS-DOS based systems. The 80186 based Nimbus 1's were neither cheap, standard, or IBM PC compatible.

I just looked at their web site, and saw a device for mobile data capture, priced "from £3.75". I thought "Wow, that looks interesting and cheap. Maybe RM have learned". I then looked further. £3.75 apparently buys you an extension cable (basically a 3m M-F 15 pin serial cable from what I can see).

The actual device itself costs £170, plus £19 for the software (you would have thought they could have included that, bearing in mind that it is essential to use with a computer), and all of the more interesting additional sensors cost £50-80. Suddenly I'm not interested.

I'm glad I'm not working in education any more. The thought of hearding rooms-full of PC's would fill me with dread.

RM

Frustratingly, schools seem very fixated on Windows and MS Office. At a teacher friend's school, when they bought new machines, they took away the old, perfectly serviceable ones and left them with fewer PCs than before. Genius. Is this due to restrictive contracts, good old corruption, or just stupidity/intransigence? Who knows. But I bet if they spent less on Microsoft products, using open source software instead, authorities could afford a lot more machines.

(A RM 380Z was the first computer I used. As a student I worked as a RM technical author - and no, I wasn't stoned. I was however surprised to find that one of my colleagues was an ex-member of the Belle Stars...)

I remember

I remember the old School network.

approx. 30 machines, RM Nimbus 386s. Effectively dumb terminals (no hard drives) Running off a BNC network booting Windows 3.0 off a server in the back room.

The machines themselves took 5 to 10 minutes to boot off the network.

Their Pentiums of the later generation, just as I was leaving, seemed a bit better but didn't offer anything that any other vendor couldn't offer.

another RM summer employee

I'm another mug who spent their summer toiling in the sweatshop that was RM.

They obviously had done some research in China for manufacturing practices, long shifts and poorly paid staff, combined with cheap components make me want to run a mile whenever I see that badge.