Castle are on a roll this week and have decided to celebrate the 1st birthday of their Iyonix product range in style. The first ten 512MB Iyonix orders placed after 9.00am on Monday 1st December will each receive a complimentary bottle of Champagne and a box of chocolates, courtesy of Castle."This year has been very exciting for Castle and we hope everyone in the RISC OS world will join our celebrations", Castle MD Jack Lillingston mused today, amid the Iyonix birthday excitement.
"The IYONIX pc has beaten all of our expectations; this is not only due to Castle staff who have worked extremely hard on the IYONIX pc project, but also the brilliance of everyone involved with the IYONIX pc conception and design, including the development of 32-bit versions of RISC OS.
"I would also like to thank all the third party hardware and software companies and individuals who have converted their software to 32 bit. This has all been a remarkably smooth transition and lays sound foundations for the future development of RISC OS."
It was on the 17th October last year that the first, brief details of the Iyonix appeared on the web, on Castle's site. It wasn't until the 28th November that the first Iyonixes went on sale, officially hauling the RISC OS world into 32bit mode on no less than a 600MHz XScale with NVidia powered graphics and a fresh new architecture. A year on, USB and RISC OS 5 support are in place, despite the issue of two OS development streams overshadowing matters.
Now here's a question gnawing away at us. What will we be writing for the next Iyonix birthday article, in 12 months time?
Castle have also announced that a Mr Hamilton of Linlithgow is the winner of the Iyonix prize draw that took place on the anniversary of the Iyonix launch. In addition to this, Richard Hallas has designed and produced some Iyonix themed desktop backdrops, especially for this weekend's celebrations - hosted on drobe.co.uk. And very nice they are too.
The birthday news flew into our inbox as we were dicussing how to write up Castle's new website design after one eagle eyed reader described the changes as being a "wash and brush up". We're told by Castle that the new design hopes to simplify and clarify access to the site for a "wider range of browsers".
Links
Castle website