Past events: 2005
VCF Europa 6.0, April 30-May 1, 2005
LUCKI Commodore Spring Expo 2005, May 13-15, 2005
VCF 8.0, Nov. 5-6, 2005, Mountain View, CA
by Evan Koblentz
Ewing, N.J. - This past weekend was the 30th Trenton Computer Festival, held back at its original location of Trenton State College, now called The College of New Jersey. As noted on classiccmp.org and other mailing list, there was fewer deals for vintage gear in the flea market and on the main show floor, compared to previous years. But the vintage action this time was in the MARCH exhibit.
MARCH, which I'm a member of, is the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists. The club just formed a few months ago, and TCF was its first exhibit. In fact, it was the first time most of ever met in person. Club members attended TCF from as far as Long Island, Maryland, and central Pennsylvania.
The club's exhibit included the following live demonstrations:
- David Corbin, DEC PDP-8 replica
- Andy Meyer, two Sony SMC-70 CP/M systems
- Bill Degnan, huge Commodore collection
- Bill Sudbrink, computers with wooden cases
- David Gesswein, DEC PDP-8/E with accessories
- Me (Evan Koblentz), many vintage handhelds from 1976-1994
- Jim O'Brien, huge Apple collection
- Kelly Leavitt, huge Tandy collection
- Scott Austin, MOS Kim-1, HP-25, Lear Siegler ADM3a Terminal
We also gave away several free books. CCN's Mike Nadeau donated three copies of his book Collectible Microcomputers, Tom Owad donated a copy of his book Apple 1 Replica Creation, and I brought copies of the Guide to U.S. Computer Museums. We didn't have a specific contest, opting instead to give the books to whoever seemed especially passionate about the relevant topics. Mike and Tom: thanks! Still other club members and non-members alike came to help out.
Aside from a few power and logistics glitches, the weekend was very smooth and very successful for MARCH. Almost all of our computers were live and running, not just static displays. We lured people in with an Atari 2600, volume turned up, with Pac-Man and Space Invaders ready to be played. The most common reaction among the hundreds of adults who visited our exhibit was "Wow, I remember...", while the reaction of their children was mostly pure awe, upon learning that computers weren't always beige boxes and Windows. (I enjoyed the reaction of one boy, maybe about eight or nine years old, who examined my 1976 Mattel Auto Race, compared it to his GameBoy, and asked "Where's the screen?")... it was also great that club member Andy Meyer printed out dot-matrix signs for many of us, on-site.
Saturday night many of us went to a local rib and steakhouse, on the suggestion of local S-100 collector Herb Johnson, and then to an ice cream and candy shop. (Herb's site is http://www.retrotechnology.com -- he even donated $20 for the club to buy a domain name. Thank you!)
There were surely moments of the MARCH exhibit and TCF in general that I missed, but I hope this brief summary encourages anyone who's considering forming a local vintage computer club to go forward with it. Spending the weekend with the faithful made all of planning efforts, emails, and time more than worthwhile. The hobby may be changing, but there's nothing like a good vintage computer exhibit!
by Christine Finn
Munich, Germany -- I'm just back from Munich and speaking at the 6th Vintage Computer Festival Europa.
It is not as big as its Silicon Valley twin, though it also has speakers and a flea market, but has the same intention of bringing together early tech enthusiasts and attracting a new generation of collectors.
It has a different locale, too, providing a neat cultural exchange: a sports hall at the back of an antique showroom, where we give our data- projected talks in a room adorned with Bavarian hunting trophies, antlers, and scenes from folklore (the traditional VCFe Saturday supper of hearty German fare is is held in the shooting range next door... similarly decked out, and it also houses the locals' May Day paraphenalia). Enthusiasts wander around the sports hall clutching massive steins of beer, and conversation continues well into the night.
Germany plays a major role in computer history, and has great tech museums in Munich and Paderborn: the place is bristling with stories. Among the collectors at VCFe was Gerd Schuenemann, a former DEC engineer, who fixed the machines for 35 years, making him an expert on the changes over time. I took a photo of him with a core memoryboard from a DEC PDP 11 and afterwards we figured how much more memory there was in the cellphone I'd used to take that image.
The German TV station, ZDF, spent a day at VCF.
They got excited by my lusting over a Commodore Pet 8296, which had been painted bright yellow by a previous owner. It was a steal at 10 euros, but I barely have room for a functioning computer in Rome (did I mention that it was sold untested?) so I sadly let it go...
It turned out to have been owned at one time by a German woman called Gaby who I know as one of the few female computer collectors in the world. She said she had bought it for the same aesthetical reason. Maybe it's a girl thang...
I met German digital media expert Winnie Forster, who wrote the well received "Spielkonsolen und Heimcomputer" a few years back. He has just brought out a second edition, expanded as an encyclopedia, and in English, called "Game.Machines". It's a wonderfully-illustrated book featuring more than 400 machines, and it's also a good read for anyone interested in 1970s-present day tech material culture. While tracing the history of Atari and Sega and other big names, the small players are also included, together with those incidental details about sales and software which are keenly devoured by avid collectors. The book certainly ups the nostalgia ante; even I can remember playing "Pong" in a smoky East London pub in the late 1970s.
[Editor's note: this report was originally published in Christine's blog.]
New Albany, In. -- Late out of Los Angeles! Late out of Chicago! Darn airline! Oh well, at least I was getting plenty of sleep on these red-eye flights to Louisville, Kentucky and the LUCKI Commodore Expo. This was my first one - I had been to other Commodore shows/expos, and they always had an attendance of about 50-75 people. Other than that, I didn't know what to expect.
The Expo began on Friday, May 13, with night-time festivities. Unfortunately I didn't arrive until late morning on Saturday. The Expo was in full gear. I hastily paid my $10 entry fee and bought a one-dollar, a three-dollar, and a five-dollar ticket for the raffle. The grand prize was SuperCPU 128 accelerator cartridge with 16MB RAM.
Yanking out my camcorder, I quickly found Bo Zimmerman demonstrating how to play MULE on the Commodore 64. Bo is a collector of Commodore prototypes and programs GEOS utilities. Following Bo was BBS guru Jeff Ledger, talking about the growth of telnet boards and how to connect the Commodore 64/128 to a PC, thus using the PC's abilities to connect to the Internet. (I didn't have to worry about that; with my ISP's shell account, I could easily telnet with the Commodore alone!) Jeff also spoke of his Telnet BBS Server 1.2, a Windows program that bridges the necessary serial-to-TCP/IP connection from the Commodore to the PC. Next up was Jim Brain, an all-around Commodore hardware hacker, who explained how to use the "screen" command in UNIX shell accounts to switch from chat to e-mail to the Net, all without closing one to open another.
Greg Nacu, who makes utilities for the multitasking operating system known as WiNGs, demonstrated an alpha version of his SpiffyPaint program. The hi-res program has some features never before seen on the C64, such as layers, transparency, and masking. Leslie Bird, delayed by disk drive problems, also showed a 40-column drawing program that she wrote in the 1980s.
After a lunch befitting we nerds - pizza, soda, and candy - Jeri Ellsworth was up. Known for making the C1 Reconfigurable Computer and the C64 DTV 30-in-1 joystick, she took the opportunity to explain the upcoming DTV 2, which features the full range of 256 colors, 8-bit sound, and most illegal C64 opcodes included.
Jim Brain, up for a second round, explained three of his prototype projects: PSXJoy (an adapter for using PlayStation controllers with the Commodore 64/128); VIP (Virtual IEC Peripheral - an "intelligent" cable for communicating between Commodores and PCs; and the "Brain IEC project" (for lack of a better name, it's a small device for connecting IDE drives and CompactFlash cards to a Commodore via the serial port). All very interesting! All with people wanting to have them right now!
Jim Butterfield closed out the official talks of the day with his recounting of computer television programs of the 1980s, specifically a Canadian show called "The Academy" which was geared to computer novices. Jim appeared on the show, seeming to be very much like his self these days, except with darker hair. The show treated its material in a humorous, almost patronizing manner, but it was fun to see how home computers were such a new entity back then, instead of being the ordinary tool that they are now.
Dave Moorman gave private demonstration of dotBasic, his VisualBasic-like language for the Commodore and offered through the Loadstar disk magazine. This talk was especially interesting thanks to attendee Eric Kudzin's sharing of whiskey (the drinking kind, that's not some technical code-word!). Back to dotBasic: you design a screen, and dotBasic would interpret it! This was all followed by a video screening Jeri Ellsworth's recent talk at Stanford University.
Maurice Randall also grabbed my attention. He said that HD-DOS+, the first upgrade to the original CMD hard drive version of DOS in years, would be ready before the September Chicago Expo. He said it would break the 4+ GB limit of the current DOS.
Two additional highlight from Saturday night: real-time chatting on the C64-and-friends IRC channel, and watching Jim Mazurek, Eric Kudzin, Earl Williams, and Raymond Day work on Commodore-compatible Palm Ethernet cradles.
Sunday began with K. Dale Sidebottom moderating the "The Future of Commodore" roundtable discussion. Topics included how to speed up the process of manufacturing SuperCPUs (Maurice Randall is undecided about simplifying the SCPU features at this time), the future Commodore Expos (such as the Commodore Vegas Expo, Southwest Regional Association of Programmers Chicago Expo, Toronto World of Commodore, and Commodore Show of the Netherlands), and the Commodore person-of-the-year award, with a nearly unanimous vote for Jeri Ellsworth (she being the only person voting otherwise).
In the end, the LUCKI show was a great experience. I left with a 1581 disk drive case and various programs, and even heard that the show organizers made a small profit - encouraging news to ease the long trip back to California.
by Evan Koblentz
Mountain View, Calif. -- (Computer History Museum) -- Comparing trips to the Vintage Computer Festival is like comparing your favorite "Star Wars" installment: they're all great but everyone has a favorite. This weekend's VCF 8.0 was my third trip but it was also the best. Nothing will ever have the "Wow!" factor of my first VCF (6.0, 2003), and it certainly wasn't as convenient as my second time (East 2.0, just a few hours' drive from home). However, at 8.0, I finally had a good-looking exhibit and came home with some excellent gear and experiences. We'll get back to that later in this report...
My trip began with an alcohol-induced Halloween journey through San Francisco's Castro district, followed by recovery most of Tuesday. I also stopped by the Computer History Museum that night to meet some of the PDP-1 restoration team as described in last week's newsletter and I visited BookBuyers, a local store known for its vast computers and technology section.
Wednesday was much busier. First on the itinerary was the Intel Museum where I received a tour from curator Tracey Mazur (she's no relation to Intel 4004 co-inventor Stan Mazor.) The museum has a $500,000 annual budget and they're currently planning a chip simulator ride and a platforms exhibit for next year. I was impressed that the museum focuses on the whole industry, not just on Intel. Tracey mentioned that a smaller exhibit will be installed in the Parsippany, New Jersey office (formerly telephony board maker Dialogic) which is very close to my home, so look for coverage of that in an upcoming issue.
Next up were stops at Weird Stuff Warehouse, the Sunnyvale Fry's, and Guy Sotomayor's warehouse. At the Weird Stuff electronics heaven, I didn't find much in my preferred collecting niche of vintage handhelds and laptops. The "weird stuff" far exceeds what's listed online but not much of it fits in carry-on luggage! Ergo my minor purchase of a t-shirt and power strip. Next, at Fry's, what impressed me most was the selection and actually helpful employees. Dealing with CompUSA here on the east coast is a nightmare of terrible selection and pulse-lacking moronic employees. At the Fry's store, when the first person I asked for help didn't know the answer, he found a more senior coworker to help me and then said, "Let me come along so I can learn what you meant"... I was blown away! Maybe it was just a song-and-dance or a fluke, but I liked it. Finally, I visited Guy for about an hour. Guy rents a 1,400 sq. ft. warehouse to store his immense collection of DEC computers and currently he's working on both a CPU diagnostics board and a 32K/128K-word memory board. (Hmm, is that a big K or a little k? Guy, are you reading this?) The diagnostics board is available now for $35 unassembled or 85 turnkey; the memory board will probably ship next summer or fall for about $250, he said.
Thursday, I visited the headquarters of History San Jose, checked in with VCF wizard and CCN contributor Sellam Ismail at his Livermore warehouse, and trekked to Bruce Damer's DigiBarn in the evening. HSJ is a government-funded organization with a $1.8 million annual budget. They use several warehouses to store in-house and externally managed vintage collections which includes film reels (about 5,000 of them), industrial electronics, radios (about 100 will stay), typewriters, vacuum tubes (about 15,000), and of course, computers. Collections manager Monica Tucker gave me the full tour; her work with a limited staff is quite impressive. The computer collection from Douglas Perham includes dozens of micro-era machines and one whopping SDS 930 (like this one). As with most professionally managed collections, HSJ can always use energetic volunteers. They also plan to exhibit at upcoming area technology festivals.
Traversing Sellam's warehouse is always an adventure in itself. It's a shame the GPS units in Hertz rental cars aren't portable because I could have used the navigation assistance! Sellam acquired a forklift and box truck since my visit two years ago. Most amazing is how much perfectly good stuff people drop off to be recycled. I planned to use a 20-inch LCD for my VCF exhibit, which cost $50 plus a $400 deposit at the nearest Rent-A-Center; Sellam stopped me to point out a nice 17-inch LCD which someone inexplicably disposed of for recycling. Instant savings! In comparison, Bruce's collection (albeit smaller) is extremely organized and clean. Bruce also helped add to my personal collection by donating his extra power adaptor for an Epson HX-20 laptop along with a full Grid PalmPad set-up -- the Epson started right up as soon as I plugged it in back home. Thanks, Bruce! The PalmPad doesn't boot at all, so perhaps one of you in readerland can offer some technical advice. (Thursday's only downside was a speeding ticket on my way back to Mountain View. My record and insurance are already nasty, so it looks like Internet traffic school for me...)
Friday morning was my meeting with Len Shustek. Len is chairman of the CHM's board and was an original Homebrew Computer Club member. He's proud of the recently opened exhibit on the history of computer chess; exhibits on word processing and programming languages were also considered and may be built in the future. Also on his mind is the museum's goal of a $125 million endowment. They're at $75 million including the recent $15 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Shustek admits there was some concern about Gates and Microsoft trying to influence the planned industry timeline exhibit, but he also feels that if the richest company doesn't donate, who will? That exhibit should be ready by early 2009, he said. As for technical restorations, there were IBM 1620 and 1401 projects before the current PDP-1 project, and next will probably be a Bendix G15 effort. That will be the museum's first vacuum tube restoration and original designer Harry Husky, in South Carolina, will be consulted.
Another topic on Shustek's mind is individual museum donations. Many collectors get turned away, sometimes without a satisfactory explanation. "We turn down 90 percent of what people offer us and most of the time the reason is we already have one, and sometimes it's sad," he explained. The ratio of willing donators to museum staff and resources is simply overwhelming most of the time. On the other hand, this helps seed the collecting market for the many private museums and individuals, he noted. The CHM's bottom line is simple, he said: "We want to do a good job for companies that are not doing a good job for themselves."
After meeting with Len, I spent a few hours preparing my VCF exhibit back in the hotel room, and then returned to the CHM to help Sellam with setting up the tables, partitions, etc. - but really what's best about Friday afternoons before VCF is saying hello to old friends as they start to stream in. Set-up would go much faster if not for all the chatting and joking around, but what fun would that be? Hans Franke, a.k.a. the Chief Shlepper, made sure everyone contributed. Hans is a man of action and should be considered for the job of replacing Michael Brown at the Federal Emergency Management Agency! Finally the set-up was complete and I went to dinner with Marvin Johnson, Erik Smith, and CCN contributor Erik Klein.
At last, the main event! Saturday morning was everyone's last-minute rush to finish constructing their exhibits and attend some of the lectures if they had time. Many of us joined the most popular session, which was Bruce Damer's panel on the 30th anniversary of the Homebrew Computer Club. The panelists, all Homebrew members at some point, included Allen Baum, Michael Holley (who also won several awards for his exhibit of the Southwest Technical Products Corp. 6800 computer), Bob Lash, and Shustek. Homebrew member Liza Loop was also in attendance; she has a new wiki at http://tinyurl.com/brwhz. Most notable were Lee Felsenstein, who presided over most of the Homebrew meetings and designed the Osborne 1 and Processor Technology SOL computers, and the most famous member of all, Apple's Steve Wozniak... if we need to identify Woz for you, please unsubscribe from this newsletter now. :) All of the full biographies are at Bruce's site and there is some nice video coverage by CNET News.com. Woz's own hero, John "Captain Crunch" Draper attended the VCF and the Homebrew panel as well. (Don't forget, there will soon be a searchable archive of the Homebrew club newsletters, thanks to several CCN readers and yours truly.)
My personal victory for the morning was having Woz and Draper sign my VCF t-shirt - they simply wrote "Woz" and "Crunch" which is awesome. I'm going to have that shirt framed to hang on my computer room wall! Another autograph came from Slug Russel (see above PDP-1 section) who marked my Atari 2600 copy of SpaceWar.
Just as Friday afternoon is the traditional VCF set-up time, Saturday night is traditionally dinner at the Tied House restaurant. About 30 of us made it to dinner; the restaurant staff gave us a semi-outdoor and well-heated back room. As always, the conversation and laughter was raucous, the food and beer was delicious, and the nerdity prevailed. In the most blatant example, Jack Rubin presented a flashing "NERD" belt buckle to Sellam. Surely you CCN readers remember the fashion accessory being a wildly discussed topic on the classiccmp.org's cctalk mailing list not long ago! It turns out that Jack purchased it just for this occasion. Booting the flashing lights took some hacking on Sellam's part, but no one will ever forget who's the top nerd around our hobby.
Sunday is typically somewhat slower, which gives the exhibitors time to check out everyone else's exhibit. It seemed like almost every exhibitor took a lot of pride in the actual displays this year, with several people using videos, professionally made color posters, custom plastic cabinets, etc.... the whole show floor just seemed a lot more colorful and upscale this time. Even those who used bare tabletops pulled off some raw technology that blew us all away, such as VCF newcomer Elisabeth who arrived Sunday morning with an original working Apple Lisa and later revealed that she owns three more of them! At my own exhibit, a former Sony employee said he could probably help me acquire the elusive PTC-100/300 handhelds, which in 1990 were the first of their kind to use graphical interfaces. That's great news!
The full list of award winners will be posted, eventually, by Sellam at some inevitably hard-to-find and extremely nerdy web site...
Within a few hours of closing time, the VCF show floor became barren, as everyone packed up and several of us stayed to help deconstruct tables, partitions, and the rest of it. One last hurrah: beer and pizza that night with Sellam, Hans, Jack Rubin, and Stan Sieler. Larry Pezzolo joined us a bit later. I also ran into VCFer Jason Scott (of BBS: The Documentary fame) Monday morning at the airport.
For those who missed VCF 8.0, or those who just haven't got their fill, rest easy! It's only about six months until VCF Europa 7.0 (see here) and VCF East 3.0 (moved from the Boston area to New Jersey, see here). Nor do midwesterners have to wait, with the unrelated Classic Computing and Gaming show rescheduled for Dec. 4.
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