Did anyone here make it out to VFC east this last weekend?
https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/
I got there on Saturday, it was a good time.
There was an display of Brazillian Apple II clones and a lively guy there that had all sorts of intersting stories around clone manufacturing and selling in the 80's. An interesting sidebar was one company actually secured the rights to the name "Apple" and produced an Apple II+ machine that looked nearly identical to the US equivalent.
Lots of other cool 8 bit stuff there as well.
I haven't been in years. Did you take any photos?
Not many, sorry. But I might have one or two as well as my friend ... I'll see what I can post.
Here are 2 photos.
The first was part of a display of early terminal "graphics". Most of the terminals just had special character sets to produce crude images and such. This one was an early Tektronics terminal that produced real line drawings (see all the squiggles at the bottom)
Tek
the 2nd was my personal favorite. It was a DMD 5620 from the good ol' days of Bell Labs. This one was spceial to me as my father worked there back int he 80's and briefly had one of these. For the day it was really cool as it ran full monochrome graphics, games, and had a simple windowing system caller "layers" that could open muliple terminal sessions and vi ediror windows (and the vi editor then had simple mouse control).
These things were typically attached to 3B2 machines, and nearly had the same processing power as the 3B2.
The picture here was me playing "nuke a smileys" one of my favorite "dad's work" games to play. The smiley's at top drop down quickly and you have to shoot them before they hit you.
The guy that owned this told me he bought it cheap back in the 90's ... but it wasn't until the 2000's that the IP holder released the code open source for these things. He ported it to FreeBSD, and so ran this thing from his FreeBSD laptop over USB/Serial link.
DMD
Next year I promise to take more pictures for cool stuff.
This time around I was a bit too focused on attending classes and talks. There was a series of Atari 8 bit classes that had some mild interest for me. I'm mostly an Apple II person, but happen to have received an Atari 600XL that I'm planning to put into service. There was a somewhat fun class on Action! (which I never herd of), apparently a Pascal-like langulage that compiles and runs at near native machine code. I had a bit more fun in the Atari 6502 assembly class. Most of the Atari 800XL's there were networked with FujiNet .... something I never looked at. But it looks like Apple II now has a SmartPort device for FujiNet, so maybe I should build a few and check it out.
I also took the soldering class there (mostly for my friend's benefit) and it was fun; we made a mostly non-functional TV Be gone but the teacher, students, and activities were all more than enjoyable. I mostly learned that my soldering skills are still pretty decent, but my eye sight is completely shot so I need to solve for some serious magnification and lighting tech.
There was a consignment barn that had a lot of stuff for sale, but not much of interest to me. There was a Franklin Ace 1200 that dissippeared early morning, and a very over priced Apple IIe. The $75 "original box" VIC 20 was probably the 1 thing that got my interest, but the guy right in front of me snatched it before I reached for it!
There were a number of other displays there. Someone had a Lisa, another a rare IIc+. There wasn't much Apple II stuff there.
Next year I am going to invite you all to join me there -- perhpas it will provoke an even livelier conversation that this!
I deleted a bunch of off-topic posts. If you said something relevant and I inadvertantly included it in deletion, message me and I'll find it and put it back.
We should have an Applefritter meet-up at VCFe next year!
I have to say, the ranting thread following my innocent quetsion bordered on simply epic. Somthing I likely would have enjoyed contributiong to in some other thread dedicated to such topics. Your cleaning here has hopefully saved whatever computer enthusiest value this VCF topic might have had.
I knew that I saw wandering people there from some of my other favorite sites. Here is a better job of pictures and descriptions over at HackADay today:
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/vcf-east-2024-was-bigger-and-better-than-ever/
I saw all that stuff, and it was much fun.
There was a good roundtable there with 3 accomplished women who identified as Dr Rebecca Mercuri, Joyce Weisbeckrer, and Burger Becky. Lively war stories and discussion around 80's 8-bit programming, game development, sound/audio, etc. The Dr. is involved with a group that has grant funding to bring amatur radio to 500 new young and preferrably female people (althogh us guys can get in as well). I was able to reconnect with the Dr. online to inquire if the scouting units I assist with could qualify. It seems like both the program and the leadership of my units see great promise there, so I'm gearing up to lead a group of young ones into ham radio. I'm actually interested to see how many of the girls I can get interested in something like this.
A lot of good and positive things came of the day. I should have spent more than 1 days ... maybe next year (especially if they host more Apple content).