The Network

T H E N E T W O R K

When we first moved here 14 years ago, the farmhouse was almost derelict, certainly unmorgageable. It was January, half the windows were missing and there was no fire. We spent this, our first year, with a wheelbarrow in our front room.

During the course of the renovation we found the remains of an old bell pull system left over from Victorian times. This was a system of bells and pulleys which connected the house with the cottage - all the network of copper wire to make this work was quite extensive, and some of the D-rings which linked it all up are still in place in one of the attics.

I often wonder how the people who had lived here when this system was up and running would regard the place now.

Where there once was an old way of communication there now is an ether network and we can communicate between the rooms with sound and motion. On top of that we have a small telephone exchange and the phone network runs through the property. It is possible to speak, fax, voicemail, or logon to any Acorn on the internal phone network independantly to the ether network.

This kind of flexability has not been cheap but over the years we have managed to install it piece by piece without any funding whatsoever - our network pays for itself through the many uses we get it to do, whether that be audiowork, videowork, graphic design, printing, designing Web sites or just plain typesetting - our Acorn network is just as easy and intuitive to use as putting pen to paper.

Our choice of Acorn technology was simple.

Living in a 'remote' location we needed a technology with a zero maintainance overhead and the design of an Acorn means just that.

We also needed a technology that is 'resource friendly' with an extremly small and efficient software footprint and the RISC design of an Acorn is just that.

We also needed a technology that had extremely low running costs, specifically in the area of power consumption, as we hope to run the entire network, including the main Arcanian web server, on a home grown energy source and to that end we are investigating solar power, hydraulic rams and kinetics.

And when it comes to security, since Acorns have a ROM based operating system the OS is totally secure from hacking and bugs.

In all of the areas above the American PC is a total non starter - rather like their cars really!.

even Tabitha joined in in the early days!

here are some of our in-house
personnel

Meet the other residents of The Webfarm

THE NETWORK is just one part of

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