The VCF East 2024 Review

It’s spring. Do you know where your vintage computer enthusiasts are? Here, in Userlandia, they’re returning to VCF East.

Welcome back, my friends, to the computer show that never ends. That’s because Vintage Computer Festival East—the great gathering of obsolete computer fans on the eastern seaboard—is upon us once again. As I bombed down the bag-o-change expressway—better known as the Garden State Parkway—I pondered the questions that must be facing every returning attendee. Last year’s event surpassed all expectations in terms of turnout and things to do. Would there be better management of crowds and people traffic? Would the new consignment arrangements maximize the movement of merch? And what about food service and parking? All very valid concerns. Jeff Brace, the lead organizer, held some livestreams leading up to the show promising many improvements for the 2024 event. But would those promises match up with reality? The only way to know is to return once again to the Jersey shore. And although I’m not a YouTube celebrity, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express during my trip, which I’m sure qualifies my credentials as a commentator.

The first change—for me at least—came at check-in time. Folks who shelled out eighty-ish bucks for a three-day pass now got a real badge and no longer suffered the indignity of wristbands for three days. A secondary gate on the west side of the campus was open during the day which made the secondary parking lot less of a penalty box for those who couldn’t arrive at the crack of dawn to snipe a spot. The merch booth was moved out of consignment and into a dedicated room, making it easier to buy a T-shirt without waiting in long lines. And the cafeteria was fully dedicated to lunch—more on that later.

One thing that hasn’t changed much is the schedule, which is still packed full of panels, exhibits, classes, and consignments. So packed, in fact, that tables and panel slots filled up faster than ever before. Arranging exhibit halls and organizing panel times isn’t as simple as just placing tables and putting people here and there. Some tables need to be near each other, others might need to be placed in certain areas to account for electrical needs. People traffic is another concern because crowds need to flow through rooms and bad table placement can cause choke points. All these factors play in to the exhibitor layout, especially when the show is still using the same exhibit spaces.

Hall A seems to have become an unofficial vendor room, with tables focusing on folks who had cool things to sell. Eli’s Software Encyclopedia is back with another bounty of big boxes for browsing. I saw many titles that weren’t there the year before, so whatever warehouse he’s scouring for these relics is still paying out. Next door was author Jamie Lendino selling his books about computer and gaming history. Atari fans will be delighted with the available tomes for purchase.

Tech Dungeon is back, this time with a selection of joysticks! These new controllers for old computers are all made with arcade-quality parts, which means they won’t collapse from exhaustion after some strenuous exercise in Summer Games. Jeff’s Vintage Electronics returns with tables layered with cards and connectors. If you were hunting for an ISA sound card, ethernet card, or some oddly specific part he might have just what you need. Meanwhile, Emmy Bear Retro had all manners of storage tech: Greaseweazels, Zulu SCSIs, and Goteks were on hand for reasonable prices to help you replace failing drives or image your disks before they succumb to the ravages of time.

Hall B is where the exhibits begin, and we’re welcomed by RCA computer systems. Josh Bensadon’s traveling exhibit has been making the rounds from show to show—you might remember it from my VCF Midwest video last year—but this time I had enough time to try RCA’s early attempt at a home game console: the Studio Home TV Programmer.

Want to give your beau a retro gift? Happy Hardwear had an arrangement of retro-themed pixel jewelry. Floppy disk earrings or a necklace is the perfect way to say I love you to your favorite geek. Or if you’re more interested in gifts for your beloved CoCo or Commodore, Retro Innovations returns with their array of add-ons.

Amiga of Rochester’s table was busy performing life-saving operations all weekend long. One particular A4000 board saw extensive rework and troubleshooting on Saturday night.

Across the hall FujiNet had their new Macintosh version on display. It joined the Commodore, Apple II, and Atari versions to show how this little device keeps getting more powerful. And once you bought one, you could attend one of the FujiNet sessions to learn how to get the most out of it!

You can’t have a theme about graphical interfaces without mentioning GEOS. Most people associate GEOS with Commodores, but the 8-bit GUI was ported to multiple platforms. You could swap between four different architectures using Jonathan Sturges and Alex Jacocks’ neat picture-in-picture setup.

Nicholas Mailloux’s Eighties Luggables table had some suitcase-sized semi portables running games and productivity apps. Hey, if you squint hard enough a compact Mac counts as a luggable computer.

Most people think of serial terminals as a text-only affair, but Ethan Dicks’ graphical terminals will wow you with their ability to move images over RS232. Maki Kato’s Motorola 88000 systems let you play with working examples of a rarer RISC workstation. The Core Memory crew was back with a display that seems to be getting cooler and flashier at every show. And one of the corners was dedicated to HeathKit computers, with Glenn Roberts and Alex Bodnar’s tables featuring many of Heath systems and restorations.

If you’re interested in pen plotters, Paul Rickard and Erin Sicuranza’s was drawing cool artwork all weekend at the aptly named The Plot Thickens. Plotters are making a bit of a comeback and as a former plotter user I approve. You could even buy some of their finished work at consignment.

South America was famous for its unauthorized copies of various microcomputers, and Ricardo Setti displayed many examples at the appropriately named Clones of South America. Apple II, Commodore, and Sinclair clones were produced by several Brazilian and Argentinian companies. Most of these used pirated ROMs and therefore were quite illegal, but despite their illicit nature they encouraged many an aspiring programmer or user to start a career in computing.

Coming all the way from the Netherlands is the Home Computer Museum, with a display featuring two Dutch PCs. Philips sold PC clones in America under the Magnavox brand but as far as I know we never got their P2000 microcomputer or their MSX machines. These machines have a Dutch flavor that pairs perfectly with their licorice and stroopwafels.

Over in Hall C Ryan Burke took the “rise of the GUI” theme to heart. This gaggle of graphical Apple computers was the largest single exhibit of the show. Start your six-table-long odyssey with the Lisa, then partake in the timeline of compact Macintoshes. Your reward for making it through this expansive exhibit is this cool custom G4 cube with a retro Apple paint job.

Apple wasn’t the only company that influenced the GUI, and the aptly named History of the GUI exhibit displayed its origins from electronic typesetting to early toolkits running on UNIX workstations.

And though you might not think of DEC minicomputers as visual powerhouses, there were several on hand to demonstrate what Digital Equipment can do for digital graphics. Doug Taylor’s Tektronix terminal displayed renders from a PDP-11, while David Gesswein’s PDP-8 spooled ASCII art to a plotter.

Amiga fans had lots to love at this year’s show, with multiple exhibits catering to Commodore’s colorful computer. Dave Test and AmigaBill’s accessory showcase spanned three tables covered in modern add-ons for Amigas. RGB lights and custom cases aren’t just for modern PCs! PiStorms, Vampires, and even the AmigaOne PowerPC tower are available to let you test drive an Amiga with a turbo boost. When you’re done checking out modern accelerators, head over to the GVP table to chat with GVP veterans Robert Miranda and Pete Keretz. They had a full deck of Amiga expansion cards from their tenure at GVP on display. Disk controllers, SCSI cards, retargetable graphics, and accelerators supercharged many Amigas back in the day. And if you wanted to see the cards in action, the fellas had upgraded Amiga demos running all weekend.

If you need a reference for TRS-80 expansion cards, Pete Cetinski’s table had two towering displays showing the many ways you could add functions to your Tandy. With some of these cards you can go where no Trash-80 has gone before!

System Source was back again with a spotlight on IBM. This massive IBM 1130 is what counted as a “midrange” computer back in the days of mammoth mainframes.

Behind the Screens set up shop again with its usual Weather Channel and Prevue Guide systems, but this year saw a new addition to their cable company contraptions: a working cable modem system. The gear inside this rack delivered broadband internet to many American homes at the turn of the millennium. All it’s missing is a Road Runner sticker. Meep meep!

More classic video fun could be found at Dave’s Retro Video Lab. His monster Sony camera attracted a lot of attention. I owe Dave an apology for not being able to chat as much this year—we’ll meet up next time!

Hey, it’s the lovable tramp, and he’s here to tell you all about the greatness of the IBM PCjr. Just don’t ask him about that chiclet keyboard. All kidding aside, the PCjr’s more capable than you think. Dan Fitzgerald set up this booth for you to try it yourself instead of repeating internet hearsay.

Friend of the show BigBadBiologist’s booth had several neat projects from their workbench on display. The key attraction was the cordyceps Mac, which had its Motorola 68030 attached to the logic board by a series of wires. IIIDIY’s station presented an eclectic collection of Apple rarities, like a Twentieth Anniversary Mac, a PowerCD, and a Mac TV connected to a Super Nintendo.

More Mac mayhem was provided by Collin Mistr—who you might know better as DosDude—and his table of hacked and modified systems. There’s no live upgrades this year, but you can see the results of his handiwork with an iMac that’s had a G4 CPU transplant.

This year’s prize for most obscure system might go to Edgardo Saez’ Seequa Chameleon. It’s a dual CPU luggable with a split personality. Those dual CPUs let the Chameleon run Z80 CP/M or 8088 MS-DOS in one box. Alas, this two-in-one combo didn’t get Seequa much traction in the market.

Brave beta testers in the crowd could test drive two cancelled operating systems at Katherine Ahlksog’s OS What-Ifs. The two systems on display were a land of contrasts: Mac OS Copland was a notorious disaster while Windows Neptune was more of a quiet detour. Publicly available Copland builds are a hot mess, and the crowd played a fun game of guessing how long it could run before crashing.

Taking over a whole corner of the hall was Totally Normal Computing, and everyone’s favorite gang of Mac Mavens returned with all sorts of new ideas. Sean of Action Retro brought his modern BeBox to spread the good news about Haiku. Mike’s Mac Shack had an Apple IIc+, the rarest and fastest of all Apple IIcs. Steve from Mac 84’s Mac-controlled LaserDisc player gathered a lot of attention, though I found this wacky split keyboard to be particularly fascinating. And Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids rounded out the crew with his very helpful collection of boards and adapters.

The last set of exhibits is over in Hall D, and the first one up is J&M Consulting. LED keyboard kits can brighten up your Commodore 64 or make your Speccy display a literal spectrum. There’s also the Retro Chip Tester Pro which can test RAM, dump or program ROMs, or even sniff out PALs and GALs.

Next door is the MIT AI Lab recreation team, simulating a PDP-10 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s artificial intelligence lab in the ‘60s.

Never Obsolete: the Race to the Bottom paid tribute to eMachines, everybody’s favorite discount PC punching bag. A complete example of an eMachines Celeron with matching accessories will tug at the heartstrings of those who got their first PC experience thanks to these affordable computers.

And last, but not least, Henry Rietveld had a Nabu PC connected to RetroNet. If you managed to pick up one of those new old stock Nabu PCs, you can bring it back online with RetroNet and the Nabu Internet Adapter. Thanks to Cloud CP/M you can do fun stuff like play MSX games! Radical.

Events and Panels

If it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it, and that’s the sense I get from VCF’s event scheduling. There’s tweaks and tune-ups, but the folks in charge aren’t reinventing the wheel every year. Workshops, classes, and panels fill out a three day schedule catering to all aspects of vintage computing. It starts at the Computer Destruction Lab, where Atari 8-bit computers were the stars of this year’s computer classroom. Sessions included programming classes, free play, and deep dives into hardware architecture. Glitchworks once again offered soldering tutorials and DIY build sessions featuring their usual array of kits. This year’s spotlight was an updated version of the 8085 single board computer, and what computer is more personal than the one you assembled yourself?

Something I haven’t mentioned in recaps of past events is that a ticket to VCF East allows entry into the Federation’s computer museum, which hosts dozens of computers for you to see and use. Almost all of the microcomputers are functional, even some real rarities like a GRIDcase laptop. A working Xerox Star anchors a showcase of graphical user interfaces, and it joins a Lisa, Macintosh, and NeXT cube in demonstrating how pointing and clicking evolved over the years.

Some computers are lucky enough to get dedicated displays with artifacts of their time, like this Atari Mega STE set up as a MIDI digital audio workstation. Most systems are set up on space-saving shelving in a grouping that generally correlates with their time and contemporaries. IBM PCs, Amigas, Ataris, CPM machines, and even a few Brits are available to play games, process some words, or partake in some programming. And before you think there’s only Johnny-come-lately microcomputers, there’s plenty here for big iron enthusiasts. The museum’s headliner is a UNIVAC-based guided missile computer that dwarfs everything else in the room. Flanked by Wang, DEC, and Data General minis, the museum has restored these old beasts to paint a picture of the pre-microprocessor period.

Next to the museum was a room hosting a live restoration by Dave of Usagi Electric. He was tasked with reviving a Control Data Hawk hard drive, which is no easy job given the complexity of these old beasts. A crowd of onlookers watched as he carefully cleaned the platters and serviced the mechanical bits. Although it took something like eight hours, he was successful in bringing it back to life. Bravo!

Running between all these activities burns a lot of energy, and before I knew it I was hankering for some lunch. In an effort bring in new dining options the VCF staff reached out to several commercial food trucks but were turned down because of profitability concerns and local complications with the township. I’m not in the food truck business, but color me surprised that hundreds of computer geeks plus many families couldn’t meet the threshold for profitability.

I was hoping the fire team from the last swap meet would return with their scrumptious chili dogs, but apparently they were already booked for the weekend. The show reached out to OCEAN Community Action Partnership, a local organization that helped with hurricane Sandy relief. Their kitchen truck served hamburgers, hot dogs, breakfast sandwiches, and snacks all weekend long for very reasonable prices. The bacon egg and cheese bulkie really hit the spot after a long morning waiting in line for consignments. This isn’t flashy food, but it was good service with good food for a good price and I definitely appreciated it. I believe the proceeds go right back into OCEAN’s community relief efforts, so I hope they made out well over the weekend.

Joining the classes and workshops are the show’s many panels and roundtables. Some focused on the show’s theme of graphical interfaces, but the overall schedule had something for everybody. Whether it’s programming techniques, history, collecting, or oddly specific deep dives, you’re bound to find at least one to put on your must-see list. Dave McMurtrie of the Commodore International Historical Society hosted interviews with two Commodore alumni: Andy Finkel and Al Charpentier. Both were key characters in the development of the C64, and McMurtrie teased out may interesting stories and anecdotes. Ron Nicholson regaled the crowd with tales of his tenure at Apple. As a member of the original Mac team he has an insider’s perspective of the wild and crazy days of Apple’s pirate flag era.

Friday's streamer and creator’s panel, hosted by Sean of Action Retro, pulled a fantastic combination of AmigaBill, AshSaidHi, Ron McAdams, and LadyAiluros. These are peers who understand the struggles of growing a channel, blog, or podcast, and the guests bounced between funny stories and advice to those who might want to break in. Saturday’s roundtable hosted by Dr. Rebecca Mercuri with Joyce Weisbecker and Rebecca Heineman explored their careers in the early days of computer game development. There’re no dull moments in these group discussions, which goes to show how just letting interesting people talk to each other is a great recipe for learning and entertainment.

Managing the crowd at these panels is always a concern, and I wondered if the seating setup carried over from last year would be OK. Thankfully there was enough space to accommodate everyone who wanted to watch, even during the popular roundtables. What wasn’t carried over from last year was live-streaming. Dropouts and crashes plagued last year’s event livestreams and the AV team decided that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. This let the folks behind the recording setup concentrate on recording the panels versus troubleshooting internet issues. Don't fret if you missed out on a panel—they’ll be posted on the VCF YouTube page for people who couldn’t make it.

Consignment Considerations

Last year’s consignment was, shall we say, overwhelming. The tsunami of people and product flooded the cramped spaces of InfoAge’s kitchen and rec rooms, forcing staff and attendees to cope with unexpected complications. In the aftermath of the event VCF’s consignment crew were open about the fact that they underestimated the demand. While total disaster was averted, the arrangements were no longer fit for purpose. Changes would have to be made for 2024.

The first order of business was ditching the hacky Google Sheets intermediary and creating a new self-service inventory management system. After registering an account on the online portal you could enter your items for sale with quantities, descriptions, and price tags. You could even print out your own price tag barcodes at home if you wanted to skip the label line at the show. If you needed to update prices or correct mistakes you could do it from your phone or one of the terminals in the hall. And when I reported a particularly gnarly bug in the site the team hot fixed it within an hour. That’s one advantage of a self-hosted product like NexoPOS over a service like Square. Overall it was a massive improvement from last year’s registration.

The second item on the to-do list was securing more space, and 2024’s consignment moved from the confines of building 9010-C to the Monmouth County Fire Museum’s engine house. On paper this was a brilliant idea—it’s a bigger building with more square footage and lots of outdoor space for people to line up and cars to unload. But you know what they say about the best laid plans, and the crew ran into a major issue. Apparently a large part of the engine house’s concrete floor collapsed before the show. This rendered nearly half of the floor plan unusable for consignment. VCF’s volunteer team dealt with it as best as they could, and they still managed to carve out more space than last year despite this curveball.

Floor space wasn’t the only improvement gained by moving to the firehouse. Its position near the side gate made load-in easier than ever. People could drive their cars up to the loading doors or park beside the building for a stairway-free and hallway-free unloading experience. After getting barcode labels from the volunteers sellers could place their stuff at any open spot. According to the schedule consignment drop-off was open at 5 PM, but shelves were starting to get a bit crowded when I unloaded at 5:15. I’m guessing the doors were opened slightly earlier.

After a busy set-up day on Friday I prepared for an early start for Saturday’s buying bonanza. I learned my lesson from last year and arrived early on Saturday morning to secure my spot in line. The gates opened at 7:30 AM and I was among the first people to line up for the 9 AM opening. Lining up outside meant the crowd wasn’t as cramped as last year, but Saturday wound up being the coldest day of the weekend and few people were dressed for the occasion. I bet somebody could’ve made some decent coin selling hot drinks or hand warmers to the ever expanding line. But time passed quickly and at 9 AM the gates opened to the hungry horde. The buying experience was painless—grab your find, bring it to the register, and pay with cash or card.

Lines weren’t completely eliminated this year, thanks to the aforementioned floor collapse throwing a wrench into the gears. But the volunteers did a good job at crowd control and aside from the morning rush the lines and waits were pretty reasonable. A checkout line wound up snaking through the narrow aisles in-between the back shelves, but folks in line were good about letting people through to browse. This cleared up as the day went on and by the afternoon traffic was flowing freely in and out of the hall. Another smart idea was the free stuff shelves, which were positioned in one of the loading doors. They were still covered by a roof, yet people could walk right up from outside and take free things without having to wait in line or wade through a crowd. Smart!

I checked in on the hall at various points over the weekend to monitor the vibe and watch for new arrivals. While browsing I noticed fewer bargains on rarer or unique items compared to last year. Not to say they didn’t exist, but I didn’t see anything quite on the level of the $100 A600 from last year. I believe there’s a few reasons for this, most of which are outside of VCF’s control.

First, sellers might be doing a little bit of fishing by putting rare or unique items out there with a higher price in the hopes that someone’s fear of missing out will get them to open up their wallet. If nobody takes the bait, the seller will lower it to garner a few more bites. The new POS system’s database made it easier to add contact information for negotiations, so haggling or trading was more accessible than before. I actually got a phone call from someone who wanted to do a trade, though I declined because I already had what they were offering. It’s not as smooth as negotiating at a swap meet, but it gets the job done.

Second, I think sellers are less willing to offer low prices due to flippers. Wouldn’t you be annoyed if you saw someone buying a machine you listed at $100 and saying they were gonna flip it for double the price? I know people want to keep the spirit of community in mind by not maximizing their profits, but allowing flippers to exploit people is probably worse for the community. Pricing wares somewhat below instead of significantly below market value deters the flippers while still feeling like a deal to most buyers.

Third, sellers are factoring the show’s commission into their prices. This year the cut was 18%—that’s up 3% from last year. I think people generally recognize the value of the commission, because it helps fund the show and run the hall. I certainly value it, because it saves me from vendor complications like being chained to a table and dealing with sales tax. But people are cognizant of the commission as a cost of doing business and are pricing accordingly. If you’re looking to get $300 in your pocket for an A500, then you’d probably price at $350 to pass the commission on to the buyer.

Pricing observations aside, merchandise moved at a healthy pace throughout the weekend. At closing time on Sunday there were rows of empty shelving and only a smattering of parts and systems left over. Exhausted but happy volunteers were satisfied that things went mostly to plan. I didn’t go nuts and buy anything super expensive, because there was no oddly specific PC that I needed to buy at any cost. A complete Atari 1040ST setup was very tempting, but I wound up passing on it. Instead I bought a few smaller but still neat things: a PicoGUS, a boxed copy of GEOS, and a copy of Springboard Certificate Maker for the C64.

Assuming the floor problem is fixed for next year, what other issues remain? One concern I have is that consignment is vulnerable to bad actors. The show’s been incredibly lucky that, as far as I can tell, everyone’s been acting in good faith. Volunteers were minding the doors and I believe there was a security camera set up to monitor the area. When things were misplaced, staff helped sort things out. But there’s vulnerabilities ripe for exploiting if people aren’t careful. Nobody was checking merchandise on the way out the door, so what protections were there against sticky-fingered individuals from just… walking out with stuff? I realized this at the end of the show when I walked in and took my two unsold towers back to my car with nary a peep. What was stopping me from taking somebody else’s tower? I’m not saying that consignment suffered from loss and theft, just that my QA security research brain is poisoned to always be on the lookout for flaws.

I also think there’s room for improvement in the general layout and handling of items in consignment. Right now consignment is a kind of free-for-all, where people put stuff wherever they can. This results in smaller, but still valuable, items being overlooked. Denser shelves or racks could help with this. Space concerns often meant people’s stuff got spread out throughout the hall—I had computers on three different tables. Sellers also moved other people’s items around to give their own items a better chance of being seen. Many computers wound up getting stashed on the floor which cut down on their visibility. You have to wonder how many people overlooked matching accessories or useful add-ons. RetroTech Chris bought a PS/2 model 70 and missed out on my PS/2 compatible SIMMs because they weren’t nearby and weren’t obvious. It worked out in the end because I mailed them to him after the show, but how many others missed out?

If I’m permitted a spin on the what-if machine, I wonder how things would go with a radical redesign. Basically make the hall into a giant computer store. Have the staff tell consignors where to put their things. Sort and organize systems into one area, software in another, have a section just for parts, and so on. This is wholly impractical, for a variety of reasons—most of them staffing, others because you can’t predict how much of something you’ll get—but I can dream. Honestly, we just need more space so everyone can keep their own stuff together.

My pie-in-the-sky dreams aside, 2024’s consignment was a massive improvement over last year’s. It’s not perfect, but nothing ever is. I won’t let that be the enemy of the good, and the changes made for this year made it very good indeed.

A Change Can Do You Good

One of the most challenging aspects of putting on a yearly show is mitigating mistakes or grappling with growth without killing the appeal that draws people to your event. My concerns from last year—consignment issues, food, and crowd control—were largely addressed. The Vintage Computer Federation did a good job executing these year-over-year improvements, and its reward is a crowd that consistently returns.

As I wandered across the InfoAge campus on Saturday—usually the busiest day of the weekend—I sensed that things were a little less busy than last year. There were still plenty of people roaming the exhibit halls, but it never quite reached the frenzied status of last year. I haven’t heard any post-mortem reports from the staff yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if absolute numbers were better than 2022 but either on par or slightly below 2023.

Last year’s attendance numbers were goosed by appearances from two big-name personalities making their first visits to the show: Adrian Black and David Murray. I wager some attendees came specifically to meet these two guests, and it wouldn’t surprise me that some of those first-timers didn’t return this year. That’s not unusual at all for conventions, because not every first-timer gets converted to an annual visitor. Not every guest is able to return to a show because of schedule conflicts or personal reasons, and honestly I don’t think the show wants to become too dependent on VIP guest for turnout.

My take is that VCF East isn’t prioritizing growth at all costs, and that’s a good thing. They’re joined at the hip with InfoAge, for better or worse, and its headroom is limited. Although I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon, the boom in retro / vintage computing will cool to a certain degree, and VCF has been around long enough to know that growing too fast can backfire. If they continue their current approach they’ll be able to weather the ups and downs.

A show is nothing without its community, of course, and the people that continue to show up to VCF East give it a flavor that you can’t find at other events. Although you’ll find many familiar faces, there’s always new exhibitors and panelists who want to tell you all about their technological passions and pasts. After all, connections are what conventions are all about. It doesn’t have to be one with a VIP guest—it might be the one you make with someone sitting next to you at a panel. And even if you’re not able to make it to VCF East, I’ll always encourage you to look up your local vintage computing events. It’s a great way to make a new kind of local area network connection.

The VCF Midwest 2023 Report

You! Yes, you! Are you wondering if anyone shares your passion for an old arcane operating system? Then I’ve got the place for you! Come on down to Vintage Computer Festival Midwest! It’s the most happening place for obsolete tech this side of Lake Michigan! They’ve got Commodores, they’ve got Apples, they’ve got stuff you haven’t even heard of! What the Hell is this? I don’t know, but I wanna find out! Here in Userlandia, we’re going to Chicagolandia for VCF Midwest.

It’s September, and you know what that means—computer con! Geeks across America leap aboard planes, ride friendly trains, or climb into automobiles to make their way to VCF Midwest. With 2023 being its eighteenth edition, it’s been around long enough that people could yearn for its early days. Nostalgia for a thing celebrating nostalgia? Stranger things have happened. The show’s popularity has risen dramatically over the past five or six years, and there’s never been a better time to meet up with fellow enthusiasts of obsolete technology.

Success breeds success and VCF’s attendance has grown year over year as folks like me come in from parts unknown. As I boarded my flight from Logan to O’Hare, I wondered how they would accommodate the expected increase in crowd size. Going to the show with me was my friend Mark, an Illinois local who lives about twenty minutes away from the venue. He’s a veritable regular, having attended the show since 2019. After stuffing a hot hatchback full of old computers and components to donate to the show, we hopped on I-294 and made our way to the Waterford Banquet and Conference Center at Elmhurst’s Clarion Inn. The conditions for attending VCF were largely the same as years past. Free entry? Check. Free tables? Check. Free Parking? Also check. We expected the show to have more attendees than last year, and adjusted our plans accordingly.

Number one: get there early enough to get a good parking spot. We got one of the last remaining spots when we showed up ten minutes before opening time last year. This year we showed up about half an hour before opening and empty spots were already becoming scarce. Somehow we scored a primo parking spot near the doors.

Number two: pack a lunch. Last year the line at the cafe was extremely long and we lost our parking spot after going out to eat. Bringing some sandwiches, chips, and Polars saved us both time and stress.

Number three: bring a hand truck. Last year we had to make multiple trips to the faraway parking spot to unload donations. A hand truck reduced it all to one easily managed delivery of servers and PCs directly to the garage sale.

Some things just can’t be planned around, like waiting in lines or navigating through the sea of bodies or when interesting stuff shows up in the free pile. But what you can plan for is all the cool stuff you’ll see at the show’s amazing array of exhibitors.

Exhibits and Ambience

Just as Mark and I tweaked our plans for attending, the VCF Staff did the same for exhibiting. A big challenge facing VCF Midwest 2023 was the demand for exhibitor space. Allocating floor space for exhibits and tables was so tricky that the show needed to implement a waitlist for the first time in its history. To create more room, the VCF staff relocated the Panel and Auction space from Hall A to a downstairs function room. Now all four sections of the Waterford’s main ballroom could be combined into one large exhibit hall, resulting in 25% more exhibition space. This created some unique logistical challenges for the auction, which I’ll address later, but the tradeoff was worth it.

The crew also optimized the space between tables to improve navigation in the ballroom. Last year the wall dividers were partially open to let people cut through from hall to hall, and this year the dividers were opened even further. Combine that with a central alley bisecting all four rooms and you could walk from one end of the ballroom to another without exiting to the main hallway. Compared to last year the main ballroom actually felt less claustrophobic despite the mammoth crowd of people. One place where crowding can’t be fixed is the main hallway, which serves double duty as vendor space and people space. The vendors lining both sides of the hall and the free pile attracted a sea of people during peak hours, which generated wave after wave of traffic.

Computers of all kinds are peppered throughout the ballroom, but it’s fair to say that the more power-hungry Jurassic-era megafauna congregated in Hall D. Familiar faces like the Meridian PBX and the VCF Midwest phone system from Shadytel Midwest anchored a room full of terminals and workstations. Turn right from the door and you’ll land upon this set of Apollo Workstations. I loved seeing these since I used to live a mile away from Apollo’s headquarters in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Forgotten Machines’ massive exhibit featured all kinds of stuff from companies that are long gone, like Data General. Did you know RCA made microprocessors? I didn’t until seeing them at Josh Bensadon’s table!

Scott Swayze’s Retromodem was a piece of hardware after my own heart. It’s a replacement PCB for external Hayes Smartmodems just like the 1200 baud one I had back in the day. It connects to your Wifi network up to the maximum supported speed of your serial port, and even makes simulated dial tone sounds when you connect to a telnet bulletin board. It wasn’t the only WiFi to modem bridge on display, either—the WiRSa adapter is a cute little device that bridges your old machine to a new network.

Almost all of these exhibits of the sixties and seventies era machines had some kind of guided demo to help explain these machine’s roles in “data processing.” A common theme amongst these exhibitors of niche and very old equipment is sharing the unique experiences of machines that are hard to find. Steve Maves had a NeXTstation, DEC AlphaStation, and a blue and white G3 with a 21 inch monitor all on one table. That’s so laser focused to my tastes that I couldn’t help but bask in 21 inches of Trinitron glory.

Though other beefy workstations were peppered around all four halls, it was nice to see the evolution of “real machines for real work” as you walked up and down the aisles of Hall D. There were enough Silicon Graphics boxes on display to explore the real breadth and depth of their power. System Source was back, this time with some new additions to their lineup. Other SGI stands included a multiplayer mini-LAN with graphics performance that would have blown away a contemporary PC.

Most people visiting the show are going to be interested in their own favorite platforms, and there’s a healthy balance of hits and deep cuts from the exhibitors. I figure that Commodore was the most well-represented company, with over a dozen tables featuring 64s, 128s, and Amigas. The most distinctive had to be this Commodore Colt PC—I’ve never seen a Commodore PC clone in person before, and this was a fine example. Most tables featured a unique thing you could do with a Commodore, like Paul Wilga showing off a C64 playing Sonic and a C128 with an 8-bit Guitar Hero clone. CBMstuff featured their colored keycaps, Wifi modems, and even a Mega65. It was my first time seeing a Mega65 in person and I have to admit that it looked really cool. Amigas were peppered about here and there, but Ethan Dicks probably earned the award for most Amigas on one table. This funky tower lived side by side with an A1000 and A3000.

You can’t go to an old computer show without tripping over a bunch of Apple computers, and this one’s no exception. Friend of the show Sean from Action Retro had his modded SE/30, of course, but it was joined by one of his new acquisitions: a wicked-fast IIfx. Next door was Joshua Stein, with a working Mac Portable and PowerBook 100 side by side. Passers-by could get a real sense of the magic Sony pulled off in transforming the former into the latter. Speaking of cool portables, Pete R. had a full DuoDock connected to a portable Color StyleWriter. There’s not enough printing at these shows, and anyone who facilitates it gets a gold star. Other cool friends Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids and Steve from Mac84 were nearby to talk all about old Macs. Need some floppies copied for your Apple II? Intergalactic Microsystems had a live AppleSauce setup that could burn your disk images to a real floppy on demand. Avery Grade and Bea Thurman’s Apple II Sight and Sound had this monster stack of Apple IIgs multimedia which let the computer really flex its audiovisual muscle. The towering Altec Lansing speakers are the peak of 1990s computer audio aesthetic. Lots of Mac mods were on sale from CaymacVintage, with ROM SIMMs, flashers for those SIMMs, diagnostic equipment, and more oddly specific stuff for your oddly specific Mac.

Atari computers and consoles rivaled Commodore in how much table space they occupied. The Chicago Atarians lead the charge with this fantastic Atari VCS display, which carries the torch from their big glass cabinet that unfortunately perished after last year’s show. Ever used an Atari Falcon? I got a chance to test drive one thanks to Liam Coyne’s display of ST systems. Maybe 8 bits is more your style, and if that’s the case you could see a whole lineup at Slor’s Atari for Show, Small Iron for Dough. If you want to connect to other Atari fans using original hardware, the Atari BBS community had live demos to show how you can still go online with your Atari computer in 2023. And if you’re interested in BASIC programming on the Atari ST, check out this Apollo standalone running the GFA Basic editor.

What about IBM and compatibles? Joshua Conboy’s OS/2 and You returns, this time with even more paraphernalia and boxed software. Kevin Moonlight’s collection of IBM Palmtop Thinkpads demonstrated that a little chassis could mean big power. Of course they can run DOOM, but did you know they could be repurposed to portable video players? If workstations and servers are more your style, then Mike Mason and Chris Simmons’ tables have what you need. An AS/4000 next to a PS/2 Academic System tower shows that whether it comes in black or white, IBM knows how to make a good looking server. IBM tech also powered this retro selfie station thanks to this washing machine-sized printer. Where iBM goes, clones tend to follow, and there’s plenty of PC platform equipment lurking about.

With the host of the usual British computer exhibition unable to exhibit at the show this year, the community had to step up to ensure representation of computing from across the pond. Sinclair systems of all kinds were highlighted at Scott Hardin’s table. The Other 8-Bit Computer Maker had the full line of Sinclairs from the ZX80 all the way to the modern ZX Spectrum Next. And since the Spectrum is one of the most-cloned systems out there, you could see some modern reproductions on display from Chris and Gavin Tersteeg.

If you thought I’d forget about the Tandy folks, think again. VCF Midwest takes place during SepTandy, after all! Almost every hall had a CoCo or two running a demo. And you can’t escape the TRS-80; this one at Nihongo Retro had a very cool floppy replacement with USB thumb drives.

Japanese computers also had a healthy presence thanks to some new and returning faces. Danielle from Thegirlgeek returned with the Casio Loopy and Sharp x68000, but there were other x68000s lurking about as well. Nearby was nephrite.fm with Nihongo Retro, which had a lovely NEC PC-98. Not one, but two Famicom Basic setups were on display this year. And if you were curious about the MSX, Liam Coyne’s Sony MSX setup was a fine way to see the platform that built Hideo Kojima’s empire.

Dante Blando had this neat micro server called the NetWinder. Made by Corel of CorelDraw fame, the NetWinder could be deployed as a slim server or workstation. It has the distinction of being the first commercial ARM-based Linux machine. Neat!

Want a Gravis Ultrasound but don’t have the scratch to get one on eBay? Ian Scott’s PicoGUS can bring one to your ISA-based computer thanks to the power of the Raspberry Pi Pico. And if you want to learn more about other PC sound cards, the OPL Archive can fill you in on the wonders of FM synthesis.

Hey Kids, it’s Crusty the Mac! This Mac SE has survived multiple burials, and amazingly still works, although when I came by it wasn’t running anything or doing anything. This meme machine makes a rustic fashion statement at every festival it visits.

Keeping a returning exhibit fresh is a challenge on its own, and the folks at Genericable are doing their best to keep the excitement around obsolete cable television alive. Preview Guide and the Weather Channel kept everyone up-to-date on the event’s programming and weather conditions. Princess Twilight Sparkle has blessed the weather this weekend, apparently. Sit down with a character generator and make your own title sequences to show off to your friends at home!

Lastly, I’d like to give an award for “Committing to the bit” to this giant SX-64. This macrocomputer is exactly the kind of gimmick I want to see at these shows. The CMBSX64 Ultimax looks like the kind of interactive exhibit you’d find in a science museum. Very cool.

Testing the Limits

VCF Midwest has called the Waterford Conference Center its home since 2019, and every event has exceeded expectations. With an estimated 3,000 attendees this year—nearly 50% more than last year—VCF is showing no signs of slowing down. And that popularity brings some complications, both expected and unexpected. For 2023 the venue and VCF staff tackled these challenges head-on, and they largely succeeded.

The first—and most obvious—limit is parking. This year VCF Staff made official arrangements for overflow parking, but it was quickly exhausted on Saturday. Given its location in suburban Chicagoland, cars are the only practical way to get there. Carpooling might be a good idea if you’re local! If you’re staying at an offsite hotel, consider sharing a ride with a fellow attendee. There isn’t much more that can be done except moving to a new venue, so my advice to fellow attendees is to arrive early and plan your day so you don’t lose your spot.

I’ve already mentioned the adjustments made to the exhibit hall to maximize table space. I think these moves worked out in favor of the show, because more tables means a wider variety of exhibitors. But allowing more tables isn’t without complications. Power was particularly problematic—there were considerable voltage sags as the weekend progressed. Many demos and machines lost power at various times during the weekend. Some exhibitors scrambled for voltage regulators while others had to wait for electricity to be restored. Expanding into Hall A was also the last lever the show could pull to increase indoor exhibit space—there’s literally nowhere left to put tables without making significant compromises.

Another consequence of expanding the exhibit space is changing the flow of walking traffic. I thought the main ballroom felt less crowded overall despite more people attending the show. Most of the attendees were cognizant of not blocking aisles, and exhibitors did a good job of keeping their tables within their actual space. But when you put a bunch of bodies in one room you’re bound to hit a few snags. Take the end cap of Hall B. It’s been the traditional home of the show’s VIP guests, and on the face it sounds like a great idea. Being able to meet LGR, Krazy Ken, 8-Bit Guy, Voidstar, and Ben Heck all in one row of tables sounds like an amazing idea. But the downside to that is lines, lines, and more lines. Plus, when a non-tabling guest holds court nearby, that adds even more bodies into the mix. Thankfully the lines eased up as the show went on, but there was always a bunch of bodies in the area. Are there ways to solve this? Absolutely, but they come with their own tradeoffs. VIPs could be split up and moved around the hall to clear up the jams, but that takes away some of the magic of seeing all these people together. Plus, the guests might like being in their traditional spots! The right and proper solution is a dedicated VIP area with queues, but the guests might not like that isolation, and it can’t be done in the current venue anyway due to lack of floor space.

Lines and bottlenecks weren’t exclusive to the VIP guests, either. This year the show’s doors didn’t actually open until 9, and sure enough a significant line formed at the door. This line took a while to clear as it immediately led into the garage sale and T-shirt tables, which formed their own line that interfered with this line! There is an alternate entrance to the venue, so you weren’t blocked completely, but if you were a newbie this wasn’t eminently obvious. There’s not enough space to relocate those tables, and the doors aren’t wide enough to set up multiple entry queues without blocking egress. The sizable T-shirt and garage sale line did move at a reasonable pace during the day, but you needed to commit to it. I don’t think it cleared up until the T-shirts sold out in the mid-afternoon.

The last bottleneck is food service. You were going to wait a while to get lunch from the venue’s cafe, and tables were crowded. If you weren’t hungry enough for lunch but still felt a bit peckish, a stand offering snacks and drinks for sale was open in the main hall on Saturday. That was new for this year and it’s a smart way to let people get something light without clogging up the main counter. Also, I understand that encouraging people to buy lunch to support the venue is a noble idea, but a single register is not up to the task of feeding everybody at the show. We brought our home-packed lunches because we had the capability and that freed up a spot in line for someone that was traveling from out of town and needed to eat at the cafe. To cover my lack of buying lunch I donated an extra $20 to the show, but I’d have no problem spending that money on expanded food options if I didn’t have to wait 30 or 40 minutes in line.

Let’s Make a Deal

VCF Midwest is jokingly referred to as an overgrown flea market, and the people cracking those jokes aren’t wrong. Just like last year, vendors in the hallway and some exhibitors in the ballroom are happy to sell you just about anything. If you’re hunting for something specific, this is a good place to find it. Computers, parts, and paraphernalia are all here if you’re willing to open your wallet.

Most of the vendors were folks in the main hallway selling hardware and software in spreads across their tables. Karl and Ted’s Excellent Macventure specialized entirely on classic Macs and Mac accessories. There were more Macs at this table than I could count, and I’d say they’d sold about 95% of them by Sunday afternoon. Bonus Life Computers were back with more restored machines, and the usual Commodores and Tandys were joined by this cool Tektronix terminal. The Wisconsin Computer Club was parked in their usual spot by the corner with an impressive array of parts for many old machines. BitHistory’s buckets of big box software was cool, but these Zenith Data Systems laptops are even cooler.

If you weren’t looking for hardware, there were plenty of people selling software. Big box, small box, jewel box, and even no box programs were available. Plenty of console games were for sale too, with box after box available at an outdoor vendor.

Here’s a clever idea: sell accessories and doodads that people at the show will need, like this rack of video and power cables. It’s brilliant, really—you could buy a Commodore 64 at one table and then walk over to 8-Bit classics to buy a matching chroma-luma cable. And when you’re done messing about with your new system, you could kick back and read one of the many books they had for sale about computing history.

Need a hard drive emulator? The BlueSCSI folks were here in full force with all flavors of BlueSCSI to replace your sputtering SCSI hard drives. With some Macs on hand to demonstrate its features they were able to sell almost their entire inventory over the weekend. Not bad!

MacEffects had a shiny new product to present: a transparent RGB mechanical keyboard for the Apple IIc. If you don’t set yours up in an Apple rainbow pattern, then you’re not really living. Their color Mac SE cases were on display, though I wasn’t sure if any were actually for sale. I still marvel at the clarity of the transparent Apple II case—if this same case travels to all the shows, it’s held up really well.

And hey, it’s great to see the TechDungeon folks again after meeting them for the first time at VCF East. Their array of merchandise has expanded considerably, and they had a pile of boxed vintage machines that they sold throughout the weekend.

Joining the more business-like vendors were individuals selling large collections, personal or otherwise. This is where you see the niche and the exotic. If you wanted a NeXTstation, here’s one begging for you to take it to its forever home. Sun pizza boxes were hot and ready for takeout. This is where those flea market comparisons come into play, and this veritable bazaar of computing could easily drain your wallet if you weren’t careful. Make sure to practice your haggling skills ahead of time. You’re dealing with old, used gear, and that comes with all the caveats you’d expect.

Most vendors labeled the machines that were working and ones that needed work. If you’re looking for a bargain, you could save by buying a machine that needs repairs. There were certainly plenty of as-is or project machines for sale. But make sure you know what you’re getting into, as almost all sales are final. If a fixer-upper isn’t your style, you might be more comfortable paying a little more for a machine that’s known to be working. For example, Bonus Life has a guarantee and a warranty on systems that have been serviced and tested.

I noticed fewer tables with bins of random stuff for sale in the main exhibit halls this year, which is a plus in my book. One reason why is that most of this year’s large collections of miscellany weren’t indoors. Because of the high demand for tables, the show staff gave official blessing to set up outside. That meant tables lining the walkway to the main entrance and people selling out of the trunks of their cars. This kept people from wandering the halls trying to sell stuff, which I think is helpful for traffic flow. There weren’t too many parking lot tables, and they largely stuck to areas where their wares wouldn’t block traffic. These folks were also incredibly lucky that the weather was clear and sunny all weekend long. If the show was a week later it would’ve been raining outside and the entire experiment would’ve been scuttled. There’s also the risk of the tragedy of the commons when it comes to parking lot sales. Who determines who gets to set up where? I even saw someone set up an awning, which, well, okay, one is fine, but imagine if a bunch of people started setting up tents or awnings and hijacking adjacent spaces for their makeshift sales? I have to imagine that if the show wants to set up an unofficial outdoor flea market area, the center courtyard would make a great place for it.

After you spent your discretionary dollars at the various vendors, your next stop could be the VCF Midwest Garage Sale, which sells donated items to raise funds for the show. This year’s sale was especially packed, and some bargains could be had if you swung by at the right time. This is a great showing by the community, and I’m sure the show raised thousands of dollars from the generosity of attendees who donated items. There’s only one suggestion I’d make to my fellow donators, and that’s to put a little bit of effort into what you’re giving to the show. Case in point are these old HP Inkjet printers. We had a debate over whether they were uncool or not—we settled on cool due to the fact they had both parallel and serial ports—but damn were they dirty. Considering the effort Mark put into his servers—cleaning them, zeroing out the disks, loading a valid ESXi install, and so forth—the minimum you could do is wipe them down. A little bit of spit shine can go a long way to help the show sell your donations. You do want to raise as much money as you can to benefit VCF, right?

If some of the donations were too cool for the garage sale, they would get set aside for the famous VCF Midwest auction. The downstairs function room was at full capacity as chief organizer Jason Timmons once again donned a getup straight out of a county fair—complete with Stetson hat! But he wasn’t all hat and no cattle, because even when faced with several technical challenges the auction kept a brisk pace. The first challenge was how to present the items to hopeful bidders. Bringing them all downstairs wasn’t practical, so the crew upstairs used cameras to broadcast a video stream of the items up for bids. Everything from Xserves, terminals, and big box games paraded across the big screen next to Jason, and save for a once or twice hiccup on the camera feed this worked like a charm. I didn’t bid on much—I tried for some of the boxed software, but was quickly outbid by other attendees. Even with all the cool stuff on display there wasn’t something that spoke to me personally like that NeXT accessory kit did last year. Don’t worry—the show got my money in other ways.

Last, and of course not least, is the legendary free pile. This year’s free pile was so huge that it was two piles, really—one in its normal home in the hallway corner and another in the outside courtyard. Once again this was possibly only because of good weather—a passing rainstorm would have soaked anything on the open tables. Yet the organizers did the best they could to tame this torrent of generosity. Guesstimating how much will be given away is an impossible task, but I can’t imagine next year’s free pile being any smaller. To my fellow attendees, consider your behavior when taking and leaving items at the free pile. The inside free pile was unable to cope with the number of items and people constantly hovering over it. Sometimes it felt less like a share-alike giveaway and more like vultures picking on corpses. The VCF Midwest rules are pretty sensible, but maybe people aren’t adhering to the spirit of the pile. For instance, don’t bring non-computer stuff. Who leaves a pressure cooker, honestly? Also, to you jerkbenders taking stuff off the table to resell it, shame on you! And for God’s sake, don’t leave stuff behind for the show to dispose of afterwards. You know who you were.

People and Panels

Vendors and exhibitors may get attendees in the door, but what makes them stick around is the crowd itself. I know that’s tautological, but a convention would be a pretty lonely place if you were the only person there. With a dizzying crowd of attendees, exhibitors, guests, and staff, you’re in good company when it comes to old computers. It’s hard not to make new friends and connections with a crowd as big as this one.

VCF Midwest’s a community driven show, and that’s reflected in its panel schedule. Programming an event like this isn’t easy, but VCF Midwest strikes a balance of big crowd-pleasers and niche subjects I’ve never heard of before. Where else can you hear about reverse engineering an online service, or a deeply detailed history of a dead software company? There’s the requisite Youtube personality roundtable, of course, but you’re missing out on some really cool presentations if that’s the only one you see. Ever wondered how a terminal works? Richard Thompson will take you inside old-school HP, DEC, and Beehive models to show you how we interfaced with mainframes and minicomputers. Eric from Eric’s Edge had a whole stack of slides about Hypercard. Ron and Steve served up a sequel to last year’s Mac collecting panel by focusing on PowerBooks and Apple portables. The willingness of the show to let people passionately delve into niche topics is great to see.

Community is also about doing things together, and there were two excellent ways to do that. One was the Build-a-Blinkie tables by the bistro, where you could learn the basics of flux and solder. I saw several complete strangers having a great time learning some DIY skills. They weren’t just building circuit boards, they were building friendships. Same goes for the LAN Party area right next door. A collection of machines from the height of the LANing era running some greatest hits like Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom gave attendees the chance to take a fifteen minute break from the hustle and bustle to relax with some gaming. There’s a special feeling you get when fragging folks shoulder-to-shoulder that can’t be replicated online.

But the most powerful connections we can make are one-on-one with other people. Imagine my surprise when Taylor and Amy from their eponymous show pulled me over at their table to talk about the Apple IIe Computers of Significant History. Or chatting about the finer points of my sound card history with Ian Scott of PicoGUS fame. Something that people forget is that everyone behind those social media handles and Twitch streams and YouTube videos are, well, people! Striking up a conversation is the best way to learn about all the stuff you see. The enthusiasm of exhibitors performing live demos or chatting up random passers-by was infectious. Everywhere you looked you saw people forming new connections and building a stronger community.

Another benefit to mingling with people in person is drawing on a vast ocean of expertise that can be hard to replicate online. A prime example is picking the brains of fellow fixers and tinkerers. During the filming of my SE/30 video the display would spontaneously go blank. A reboot would usually bring it back to life, but it eventually stopped booting altogether. I swapped the logic board with my SE and the problem followed, so I could safely rule out the analog board as the culprit. Could I have messed something up when recapping the board? After spending many hours fruitlessly trawling 68KMLA and TinkerDifferent, I couldn’t figure out quite where to go. Poking around with my multimeter was proving fruitless. At that point it was beyond my ability to troubleshoot, so I brought my SE/30 logic board with me on the trip so Mark and I could diagnose the problem together. With his working SE/30 and a spare parts board I was sure we could solve the mystery. After some poking around with a logic probe and the schematics we determined that something was preventing the CPU from starting—we just didn’t know what.

Mark chatted with Adrian Black about theory of operation, while I tossed a few symptoms at Tom from Amiga of Rochester and his tablemate Eric. They had a few ideas, and the first thing they said to troubleshoot was clock generation. Either the crystal was bad or something was faulty with the clock circuit. Check the clock lines to the chips and find the fault. Armed with that advice, we took another crack at the SE/30 board after the show. After some more interrogation of the clock circuit, we found the culprit: a ferrite bead on the bottom of the board. There’s three of them in series, and the middle one—part J13, that little guy right there—was cracked at its input terminal. It looked OK visually, but it lifted right off the board when heat was applied to it. That bad bead broke the circuit providing 5V power to the clock crystal, and without power the oscillator can’t oscillate. No clock means no CPU which means no booting! We replaced the bum bead with one from the parts board and that cured it of its black screen blues.

We had an inkling that it could be a clock problem, but we didn’t know exactly where to look or which chips to probe. Having some experts to point us in the right direction saved us hours of faffing about. Mark posted a complete post-mortem on 68KMLA, just in case if you run into the same issue. We owe many thanks to Tom, who ought to get a medal of commendation for offering advice to anyone who asked while simultaneously fixing paying customers’ boards.

The Vibe

As I was chatting with Nik Chavez of NK-Tek-Fix Retro Market, he made a quip that I thought summed up the entire show. “VCF Midwest? More like VCF Wild West.” He said he couldn’t claim credit for it since he'd heard it from someone else, but this game of telephone rings true. VCF Midwest is capital-C Chaos. Not in the Discord or Jack Garland sense, but in the Muppet Show sense. You never know what you’ll see, and it’s guaranteed to be a good time, but without concerted wrangling by those at the top it would’ve come crashing down.

I’ve tabled at conventions that collapsed because their staff couldn’t handle the pressure or their spending dreams outstripped their budgetary grasp. VCF Midwest isn’t one of those shows—the community shows up not just in person, but with their financial support. The staff is cautious in how they expand the show so as not to overspend. Diversity of both the people attending and the exhibits on display are its greatest strength.

And yet I see VCF Midwest at a crossroads. The past few years have seen such explosive growth because it’s attracting previously untapped audiences. It’s not just local graybeards sitting around reminiscing about the old days. Parents bring their kids to share a piece of their own childhood. Fans come to shake the hands and talk to the hosts of their favorite Youtube channels and podcasts. The numerous vendors create an bazaar so unique that people show up just to shop. The graybeards are still around, but they’ve become elder statesmen who can pass on their knowledge to whole new audiences. This isn't unique to VCF Midwest, but it’s certainly been the beneficiary of prominent figures in the community like LGR consistently returning and using their platform to advertise the show. There’s an almost San Diego Comic Con style air of “I gotta be there, it’s where all the action is!” To their credit, Chicago Classic Computing has embraced this unexpected spotlight wholeheartedly. They understand the kind of responsibility this reputation requires.

The big question is will they be back in Elmhurst again next year? I’m not privy to the show’s financials, so I have no idea what they can afford or what kind of agreements they have in place. But the limitations of the venue have to be on their mind, even if they’re already locked in for next year. The adjustments made for this year have given them enough runway to accommodate some growth. But could the venue absorb another 50% increase in attendance? That’s a valid question. Could the venue support the event five years from now? I’m not sure it could—but that’s assuming current growth trends continue.

I think a good way to blunt some of the demand on tables is to continue emphasizing the main ballroom as exhibitor-oriented space. Take what worked about this years’ changes and extend them further. One way to do it is embracing the flea market reputation and actually organize an outdoor flea market in the central courtyard. Put up one of those big enclosed tents like at a wedding and move the vendors inside along with other traders. Allow people to sell out of the trunks of their cars, but enforce rules like no awnings or tents or occupying adjacent parking spaces. Make sure anyone who wants to do that signs up ahead of time and is assigned a parking space, say, along the north line of spots. Revoke people’s privileges if they behave badly. Take the space gained in the hallways and prioritize it for more exhibitor tables.

I’m sure the staff has plenty of ideas like these to improve the show. I wonder what they could do with just 25% more floorspace, let alone 50. Having some more panel rooms would do wonders, because having more panels balances out the people traffic in the exhibits. Even having more space just for people to walk around would improve the ambiance. You want a show to feel lively, of course, but no one likes feeling like a sardine in a can. When the day finally comes that they have to change venues, I’m confident they’ll handle it well. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve moved, after all.

After the show wrapped up on Sunday, Mark and I surveyed his massive haul of Macs and miscellany, all of which he acquired for somewhere around $350 total. Not bad, considering some of the price tags I saw around the show. After a dinner break we dove right in to working on my SE/30, inspired by the people we met and the spirit of keeping our favorite old computers going. I even got to spend time enjoying some local fun. If you ever come to Chicago, check out American Science Surplus—I bet if they had a table they would’ve done pretty well too.

That’s the fun part of shows like this—the atmosphere energizes you. Talk to any random person at the show and you’ll hear about what an amazing time they had. There’s no such thing as a perfect convention because pleasing everybody is impossible. Someone won’t be able to get a table, or the weekend conflicts with their schedule, or they couldn’t find that incredibly obscure part they wanted to buy. Them’s the breaks, but that’s not a fault of the show itself. People come back to conventions as long as they’re not boring, and VCF Midwest is anything but boring. Its fate rests on the overall health of the vintage computing hobby, which I believe will weather the eventual deflation of its bubble. I look forward to next year and seeing all the new and exciting ways VCF Midwest will grow.

The 2022 Vintage Computer Festival Midwest Report

Here in Userlandia, my Windows color scheme is Portillo’s Hot Dog.

Hello, Chicago!

Hey everyone, I’m back from the 2022 Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, and I’ve got a mostly off-the-cuff podcast to discuss the ups and downs of the experience. VCF Midwest took place on the weekend of September 10-11 in Elmhurst, Illinois; a Chicago suburb just south of O’Hare Airport. After much prodding by my Chicagoland friend Mark, I booked a flight from Boston to Chicago to get my fill of retro served with a pickle, tomato, and sport peppers.

Despite the words “Vintage Computer Festival,' VCF Midwest isn’t actually related to VCF East or VCF West. Those two are put on by the Vintage Computer Federation, while VCF Midwest is a product of a separate group: Chicago Classic Computing. The two groups are friends that support each others’ events and have no desire to wage trademark war unlike, say, Comic Con International going after shows with “Comic Con” in their name. This is the seventeenth event under the VCF Midwest banner, but its origins stretch back beyond that to various Chicagoland user groups and exhibition orgs in the nineties.

The first thing I noticed about VCF Midwest is that it operates differently than other events. Most conventions I attend require some kind of admission fee at the door—VCF Midwest does not. Most conventions I table at require some kind of table fee—VCF Midwest does not. The show is funded entirely by cash donations, T-shirt sales, auction revenue, and its garage sale. We’ll get to what each of those means in a bit, but this revenue model makes VCF Midwest very much free as in beer. By foregoing any kind of fees or charges, the show tries to uphold the early microcomputer era’s ideals of openness and community.

Mark and I arrived early on Saturday morning—if you consider fifteen minutes before opening time early—and found a nearly full parking lot. Arriving early is important if you’re interested in buying stuff, because the vendor tables will have the most stock at that time. We also had a trunkful of items to donate to the auction, garage sale, and free pile, so we needed to unload the car ahead of prime browsing time. The event takes place at Elmhurst’s Clarion Inn and Waterford Banquet, a run-of-the-mill hotel with attached conference space. When entering the front door you’re greeted with the auction pile, check-in desk, and the vendor’s hallway. A large exhibition hall is divided into four rooms, three of which host the various exhibit tables and a fourth dedicated dedicated to panels.

A very busy opening hour.

After unloading the car and walking around the halls, my impression of the show was a feeling of organized chaos. After years of growth the venue seems to struggle with the number of people that show up on a Saturday. VCF Midwest’s website says over two thousand people showed up over the weekend, and I believe it. People crowding around vendor tables clashed with people streaming in and out of exhibit halls, and navigating the traffic was sometimes tricky. These jams were partially relieved by opening up the movable barriers and creating shortcuts inside the halls. People could cut across from room to room instead of having to exit and navigate the vendor hallway, which helped relieve those bottlenecks. As far as I know there wasn’t a printed schedule or information booklet—not even half-folded xerox copies. Thankfully cellular data was working well and we could check the schedule and exhibit list online.

Sometimes the distinction between exhibitor and vendor gets pretty blurry. Of course VIP guests would sell their branded merch, but I was a bit surprised to see museum-style exhibitions next to a table covered in boxes of random hardware and software. Speaking of that, let’s talk about the various exhibitors and all the neat stuff on the floor.

Exhibits

The exhibition hall was divided into three rooms: “Mostly Micros,” “Youtubers and More,” and “Big Iron.” One brand that had a lot of representation was Silicon Graphics. SGI machines were prominent in two of the three rooms, and seeing an Indigo and Onyx in person was a mesmerizing experience. Some were from System Source while others from Anthony Bolan, and their applications ranged from Maya demos to the requisite Nintendo 64 development kit. A few were running Irix desktops with productivity software and games. Even oddballs like the Tezro were on display. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve touched an Octane, and I still regret not taking it with me when it was retired. These SGI enthusiast groups are frequent guests to VCF Midwest, so if you want to see real SGI gear in person, you’ll want to make the trip.

Meridian Telephony

A Meridian PBX System

A complete office PBX phone system with a Windows NT Telephony server anchored the Big Iron room along with the minicomputers and terminals. Two exhibitors, Dial 1 for IT and The Phone Company & More set up a switched phone network complete with real phones and fax machines. It was connected to the publicly switched telephone network too, so you could dial in with any phone and speak to someone right at the table. This phone setup was the most Rube Goldbergian contraption in the entire hall.

Along with old phones were plenty of old televisions! You might remember from my VCF East report that there’s enthusiast groups keeping old cable TV equipment alive, and one of them was at VCF Midwest. Behind the Screens had two tables chock full of your favorite ‘90s cable TV time wasters. On one side was a Weather Channel broadcasting setup with a Macintosh TV tuned to the forecast. Given that my Macintosh TV is currently inoperable, it was nice to see one working in the flesh. I talked with the fellow behind the table and clued him in to the fact that his Sony remote control could also control the Mac TV. His mind sufficiently blown, he thanked me for the tip and we talked about restoring one of the coolest flawed Macs. Next to their Weather Channel equipment was a Prevue Guide setup running on an Amiga, which was the real hidden gem of the show. The slow scroll of TV listings stopped me dead in my tracks. I haven’t seen a scrolling guide in almost twenty years, yet I felt like I was immediately transported back to my parents’ living room in a Ratatouille-like trance. Other attendees also fell under its spell—I guess that Saturday afternoon “What the Hell is on TV?” vibe is a universal one.

An Amiga 2000 hosting Prevue Guide.

Another great opportunity is experiencing computers and software that may have passed you by, and VCF Midwest had plenty of exhibits to fill in your blanks. Jeff Fetta had two tables full of Sinclair products, like various Spectrum and ZX computers. Another table run by Chris Ellmore had more British computers, including Acorn products. Japanese PCs were well represented, with multiple Sharp X68000s, NEC PC-88s, and a Casio Loopy MySeal. It’s a console… computer… thing? Danielle Herbert AKA thegirlgeek had it running some JRPGs I’ve never heard of with some very cute graphics.

Though Commodore had the most representation of the eight-bit brands, other popular systems of the eighties got their due as well. CoCoFest consumed a whole corner of one room with the largest collection of Tandy computers I’ve seen in one place. Atari users were represented by the funnily named SCAT, or the Suburban Chicago Atarians group. Add the aforementioned British micros and you’ll have hands-on with most of the major players of the eighties.

While there were plenty of IBM compatible computers spread across the floor, Big Blue got a lot of love from Joshua Conboy’s Warped! The end cap of the Mostly Micros room was a celebration of everything OS/2, with boxes, memorabilia, and a PS/2 running OS/2 Warp. Featuring games and productivity software, the display challenged you to experience a “better Windows than Windows.” I gave SimCity 2000 a run, only to find it unplayable because the mouse sensitivity was cranked to the maximum. I poked and prodded everywhere, frantically right-clicking through OS/2’s endless settings windows to find its version of Control Panel. After five minutes of flailing I finally discovered the mouse settings, adjusted the sensitivity, and was ready to go. I tabbed back into SimCity 2000 to build a quick town and, well, it’s SimCity 2000 all right. Other than OS/2 styled menus it plays exactly the same as the other versions. But OS/2 users had one big advantage over their Classic Mac or Windows 3.1 counterparts: if the game crashed, it wouldn’t bring the rest of the computer down with it.

And, of course, the VIPs had exhibits as well. These were personalities like Clint Basinger (LGR), David Murray (8-Bit Guy), and Ken (Computer Clan). Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement didn’t have a table, but he was roaming the floor talking to people. Mark told him the tale of a Mac Classic he resuscitated thanks to Adrian’s video about the reset line under the sound chip, much to Adrian’s amusement. These were some of the busiest tables at the show, and not just because of the celebrities. Each table had computers or items featured in their videos, which attracted lots of attention on their own. Ken’s NeXT cube got a lot of love, as did Clint’s eMachines iMac knockoff. If you’d never heard of their channels, you’d think they were just like any other exhibitor at the show—and that’s a good thing! But not all exhibitors are there just to show stuff off. Some were there to make some cash, and that’s where vendors come in.

Vendors, Auction, and Sales

Most of the pure vendors were lined up along the main hallway. The majority were people selling various old computers, hardware, and software. Some, like Bonus Life, are vintage resellers that fix machines to sell them at a markup. Others are collectors that are looking to divest themselves of pieces they don’t need anymore. Rounding out the selection are local groups like the Wisconsin Computer Club and the remnants of FreeGeek Chicago.

My favorite vendor that I couldn’t afford to buy anything from was MacEffects. They make the clear transparent Macintosh SE case that you’ve seen floating around. Clear Mac and Apple II cases were in stock, but they one upped themselves with their color cases. The Mac was available in red, green, and blue translucent acrylic, but the real star was the gloss black Apple II case. Unfortunately, gloss black plastic has a huge drawback: it shows every single fingerprint and a feather could scratch it. But for those few moments that you take it out of the box, it’ll be the coolest looking Apple II in the world. Take that, Bell & Howell!

Commander X16

Another favorite was the BlueSCSI team. It’s the hottest hard drive emulator in town, and you could buy your BlueSCSI either as a kit or preassembled. I bought preassembled external and internal versions, and they’ll be perfect for my various SCSI computers. Meeting the team in person further cemented my appreciation for the project, as their infectious enthusiasm comes through at every opportunity. I believe this is their first time tabling at a show, if my vague memories of Twitter are correct. The Commodore-centric group DDI had a full range of MagicCarts for various computers for sale, which allows you to load disk images without much fuss, or create custom ROMs. Seeing old machines and modern hardware working in harmony is the most exciting part of this scene, which is a big reason to go to this show. TexElec’s booth was showing off the Commander X16, which is a new 6502-based microcomputer. Think of it like a modern successor to the Commodore 64. Working examples were showing off games, and as of this writing I don’t know when it will be released. Still, they’ve clearly made a lot of progress.

In addition to actual vendors, the show also had what it dubbed “the garage sale” and “the free pile.” The free pile is exactly what you’d expect: anything there is up for grabs. Make sure to follow the ground rules—no uncool inkjet printers, you should give an item when you take an item, and don’t leave stuff behind when the show ends. Tons of cool stuff flowed through the free table, like a Dutch copy of ClarisWorks, various monitors, busted computers, a box full of webcams, and a pile of round mousepads. Stuff kept showing up as the days went on, so we were constantly checking it for new things. I nabbed a copy of PageMaker 3.0 for the Mac and Norton Utilities for Windows 95. The latter will probably be more useful, but that PageMaker came on 800K floppies which are pretty rare these days. I donated a Linux-based Sharp Zaurus PDA to the free table, and I hope whoever took it makes good use of the parts.

The free pile.

This Sun Server was a standout at the garage sale.

What about the garage sale? When visitors donate an item to the auction, it gets “graded,” which is a fancy term for “we decide if it’s interesting enough to generate a lot of bids.” Stuff that doesn’t make the cut gets tagged with a price and put on the garage sale table. I donated a set of new in box Packard Bell CRT monitor speakers to the garage sale. Mark donated some computers, NAS devices, and other doodads, some of which wound up in the auction. A minifridge-sized Sun server was the standout item, and yes, someone did buy it. Dozens of computers, monitors, accessories, and more moved through the garage sale during the weekend, generating much-needed money to fill the show’s coffers.

Items that do make the grade end up in the Saturday evening auction. Although head honcho Jason Timmons isn’t an actual auctioneer, he played the role so well that I thought he stayed at the Holiday Inn and not the Clarion Inn. Items ranged from voltmeters and oscilloscopes all the way up to an Amiga 2000, with many Macs, PCs, and doodads from every era of computing up for grabs. That A2000 wound up selling for over $500, making it the highest grossing item. A Mac Performa 640 with a DOS Compatibility card netted over $400, while a C64 kit with monitor and extras went for over $300. A particularly grody NeXT Cube, covered in mold and maybe a little bit of rust, went for over $300.

Bidding at the auction.

After several items came and went, something caught my attention. This offering was listed on the auction site as “NeXTCube documentation set (complete),” but that belied its true significance. We’re not talking about a pile of manuals here—this was a 100% complete original NeXT computer accessories box. Before the bids started, they opened up the box and displayed the manuals, warranty cards, disks, and more, but they saved the best for last: a sheet of NeXT stickers. They’re just like Apple stickers, but NeXT! “God Damnit,” I muttered, because I knew I had to have them.

The bidding started at fifty bucks and went up in ten dollar increments. I kept raising my hand as the price went up. Eighty dollars. One hundred dollars. One hundred and fifty dollars. It kept going on as one person kept bidding against me. Someone even pulled the whole “wait for going twice and then bid” trick. Such tactics wouldn’t deter me, though, and I was eventually victorious at the cost of $270. I’m planning on doing a separate post or maybe even a video about the accessory kit. I don’t normally buy things at auctions, but the money directly benefited the show and the odds of finding this again is astronomically low. And yes, those stickers will be stuck on things and given away to other NeXT fans in my orbit.

Panels of Fun

How about the talks and panels? Can’t have a convention without those. The show had one large panel hall, and it was booked solid on Saturday. Another sign of growing pains is that the Saturday afternoon YouTuber panel was so full that we couldn’t get in after returning from lunch. Thankfully the panels were recorded, so I can eventually watch the YouTuber panel… on YouTube. Other panels weren’t as difficult to attend, as the Apple Lisa documentary and Vintage Mac Collecting panels were both held later in the evening. Unlike most small conventions, the audiovisual setup for all the events in the main hall was excellent. Bad AV is an easy trap for small shows to fall into, and the technically minded volunteers nailed it. We’ll see how the recordings come out, but I’m sure they’ll be fine.

Dave Greelish hosted a panel about the Apple Lisa documentary he’s working on. You might think it was a screening of the film, and that’s an honest mistake to make. The panel was about the process of writing and directing a celebratory film about the Apple Lisa. Dave played several clips from interviews he conducted for the film as well as some teaser footage. He even got time with John Sculley, which surprised me. After Dave’s panel was the vintage Mac collecting panel, hosted by Ron from Ron’s Computer Vids and Steve from Mac84. Though its content was targeted towards those entering the scene, it was still a fun time for experts like myself. Slideshow graphics were suitably rainbow colored as the duo covered the earliest Macs up to the end of the beige era.

My award for “panel that surprised me the most” goes to Bill Degnan from the Kennet Classic Computer Museum. “What does it take to start an indie computer museum?” is a very valid question that I didn’t think to ask. I’m unlikely to start my own museum of course, but the answers were fascinating. How do you attract people who are just walking by? How do you keep kids entertained? How do you keep your artifacts from crumbling to dust? Bill matter-of-factly addressed a bunch of concerns and pitfalls that would trap unsuspecting newbies. Even if you’re not going to open your own museum you’ll still enjoy this peek behind the curtain.

Stuff!

I came home with plenty of things. Here they are, in some particular order.

  • A Japanese parallel card. By itself, it’s merely an ordinary Enhanced Parallel Port. I bet it’ll work just fine in any PC. What makes it special is the box! This was an auction item that came at the very end of bidding, and it wasn’t getting much love. I bid ten bucks and adopted it for my collection.

  • A complete-in-box Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball for the Super Nintendo. There was little console representation at this show, but some random vendor happened to be selling this copy of Griffey for ten bucks. He wasn’t at his table, so I left a note and a ten dollar bill under his water bottle saying that I bought it. When I say complete in box, I mean it—the exclusive baseball card is there too.

  • Two BlueSCSI. As mentioned earlier, I bought an internal and external BlueSCSI.

  • IBM Model M Keyboard with built-in TrackPoint. Desktop keyboards with built-in TrackPoints are rare finds, and I bought this one for $60 from someone wandering around the show. I’ll talk more about him later.

  • Free Copies of PageMaker 3.0 for Mac and Norton Utilities for Windows 95. Thank you, free table.

  • A floppy drive for the Toshiba 460CDT. This was from Mark’s collection, since he didn’t have that model of laptop and thought it needed a home with my Toshibas.

  • A Tangerine iBook. Another gift from Mark, since he had a spare in his collection. Fair enough, since I gave him a new old stock Jaz drive!

  • The NeXT accessory kit. Stickers! A hex driver! Magneto-optical disks! This will get proper coverage in a future post. Maybe even a video!

Too Much of a Good Thing

I really enjoyed my time at VCF Midwest. Conventions are fun! It’s great to be around like-minded people, and the variety on display means there’s something for everyone to enjoy. But as the hours went on and Saturday turned into Sunday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that VCF Midwest’s greatest strength—its freewheeling, anything-goes vibe—is also its greatest weakness.

From my selfish attendee point of view, I loved not having to pay an admission fee. But from a sustainability point of view I can’t see that surviving in the long term. If the show gets big enough and the current venue can’t host it, I don’t think they’ll have a choice. The show sustains itself on various kinds of donations, but the downside of donations is that they’re not predictable. Without public knowledge of the show’s finances, I can’t say if charging admission would actually net them more money. A way to keep admissions free would be selling stuff like booster packages. People love being “platinum sponsors” and will pay for the privilege.

Things were much quieter on Sunday morning.

If you’re hungry and don’t want to wait in line, Fry the Coop had delicious spicy chicken sandwiches.

Speaking of the venue, I’d rank it as “fine.” It’s exactly what you expect—no more, no less. I’d rank this Clarion in middle of the pack. If you’ve done a convention at a small suburban hotel, you know exactly the decor, amenities, and facilities available. It’s a thrifty, sensible pick in terms of space, but the number of attendees exposed some weaknesses. Lunch was an issue on Saturday, as the hotel’s cafe was hopelessly swamped by the crowd. It’s designed to serve average hotel visitors, not thousands of people. We wanted to support the venue, but waiting in line a for half an hour wasn’t in the cards. There’s nothing to eat within walking distance, so going out for lunch requires a car, or maybe a call for delivery. A great idea would be to get the venue to partner with a food truck to split some revenue.

When it comes to vendors and exhibitors, I think the show is doing all right. The variety of exhibits is excellent, and that’s largely thanks to the breadth and depth of the community’s expertise. But the experience could be improved by a better organization of actual “exhibitors” versus people looking to sell stuff, sort of like how comic cons separate out “artists” versus “vendors.” I realize they’re working within space constraints of the venue, but ideally people selling random stuff shouldn’t be intermingled with people showing off a collection or a proper exhibit.

Adjacent to vendors is the protocol and organization of the free pile. The ground rules were largely adhered to during the show, but the corner of the hallway that these tables were relegated to wasn’t sufficient for the amount of people and items around it. If the show gets bigger, this won’t work going forward. Some staff observing and tending to the area would’ve been nice. Also, it’s not cool to take stuff off the table with the intent to resell it. I mean, you can, but that’s not the spirit of the free pile.

When it comes to vendor etiquette, the freewheeling chaos had its pros and cons. One pro is that there were plenty of people willing to make deals, but Mark commented that everything was more expensive in general. Retro and vintage computing is in the midst of a bubble, and prices are outstripping inflation by quite a bit. One vendor didn’t even put prices on the product, as when I inquired about a few computers his response was “How much are you offering?” He was the exception, but most people tend to negotiate down from sticker price. Making customers name prices isn’t the way I would do business.

One reason events charge for tables is so they can vet and control who’s selling stuff at the show. Unofficial buying and selling goes on at shows of all sizes, but the spirit of VCF Midwest is that if you’re not an official vendor, the stuff you want to unload should go into the auction or garage sale. One person didn’t get the memo, though. When the show was opening up in the morning, someone was wheeling in a tub of keyboards. I assumed he was one of the official exhibitors unloading his stuff in to set up. He offered to sell me a keyboard at a low price in exchange for watching his stuff, and I took him up on it—that’s how I got the Model M. But after he finished bringing in his computers, he said he was looking for some space to set up, and eventually just started walking around the show with his items in tow. I told him that he should put his computers into the garage sale, but he demurred, saying he needed the money. I don’t have a problem selling stuff to make money, but there’s a social contract with this particular show. If you don’t have a table, put your stuff in the garage sale. It’s the right thing to do in the absence of a consignment room.

The Show Must go On

I don’t want to leave you with a negative impression of the show—I had an excellent time. The overall atmosphere is welcoming and enthusiastic. The problems I mentioned earlier are really just growing pains, and I have full confidence that Jason and his crew will address said pains. Everyone wants the to succeed, and the new people coming into the fold are making the community more vibrant. A successful event means more people get a chance to share their love for computing, and that’s what the goal should be.

If you’re asking yourself “Should I go to VCF Midwest?” I would say yes, yes you should! I had a great time hanging out with people I knew and making some new friends. Sure, it’s nice seeing a particular computer for the first time, but talking to the person who brought it is nicer. Don’t forget to bring some contributions for the auction and the free pile, too. I only hope that it’s able to cope with its growth in a sustainable fashion. I don’t envy Jason and the organizers’ predicament. YouTubers and podcasters posting trip reports only increase the demand. Unfortunately most of that demand gets funneled into Saturday, as Sunday was noticeably less busy. Having some more events on Sunday might even things out a bit. I’m sure I’ll be back there next year, and I hope to see you there too. I look forward to what the VCF Midwest crew will do to make the show even more entertaining.

The Vintage Computer Festival East 2021 Report

Here in Userlandia, you'll never find a more fascinating hive of geeks and nerdery.

The following post is a transcript of a live, unscripted podcast. It has been edited for clarity.

Hey everybody, and welcome to a special off-the-cuff edition of Userlandia. I'm coming to you today with a post-mortem report for my trip down to the Vintage Computer Festival East, held down in the beautiful Jersey shore in New Jersey. It was a pretty fun show! I had a good time and met a lot of people, saw a lot of neat and interesting old computers and figured it'd be good idea to share some of the experiences of what I felt worked and what maybe could be improved and other fascinating bits.

It was a quite a drive from northeastern Massachusetts. It was a pretty  tough drive to go down on a Friday on a long weekend, but I made it there okay. The event itself was held in the InfoAge science center, which is on the old Camp Evans, a decommissioned army base where they've done radio and signals intelligence. It has a lot of neat history all on its own and would probably be a really interesting museum to visit under normal circumstances. But you might be asking yourself, “Dan, aren't there certain current events going on?” Yep, that’s true! Those current events stopped me from going to Vintage Computer Festival East in 2020 when it was canceled because it was being held right around the time that things started happening with the pandemic.

You know how everything else is going—waves my hands at everything all going on in the world. As for myself, I'm double vaxxed, and I wore N95 masks all the time. The folks at InfoAge and the Vintage Computer Federation had pretty reasonable protocols for people and everything else. It is what it is—it’s a fairly small show. I have no idea how many people were there, but I've done my fair share of conventions over the years where I've tabled as a vendor. I would be surprised if there was more than a few hundred people there, tops, but it was still a very fun and interesting show to go and visit. I'd like to give you guys a feel for what it was like to go down and see this as a first timer. I’m hoping to go back there in the future. They’ve got another one scheduled since this is normally a springtime show. VCF East 2022 is scheduled in the springtime, around April or May of next year. We'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll be there with a Userlandia table! You never know. 

So why would you want to go down to a show like the Vintage Computer Festival? Well, if you go to their website—which is vcfed.org—they’ve got examples and stuff from all the various vintage computer shows that have been held over the. About a month or so ago, there was VCF Midwest, which a friend of mine who is local to the Chicagoland area went to and had a very good time. Based on what he was telling me and other video reports I've seen on the interwebs, VCF Midwest is the bigger show. There's more people, it's held in a hotel, there’s more exhibits. Well, I’m not sure if maybe more exhibits, but there's definitely more tables and other things. Compared to various conventions I've been to over the years, It definitely has a small convention feel. That said, it was a three-day show with Friday, Saturday and Sunday events.

Friday was mostly what they would call learning exhibits, where they're having people giving talks and other things, not so much vendors or exhibitors or other things going on. Most of those people were still getting set up on Friday. The average person would be going on Saturday and indeed at these types of shows, Saturday is almost always the busiest day. That's when there was the most people, the most exhibits, the most stuff to buy. If you're going to pick one day to go, Saturday is probably going to be it, but there was stuff on all days that you could go see and enjoy. 

Exhibits

So what I'm going to do is talk about some of the highlights of the various exhibits and things that are at the show and give some impressions and other things like that, because I really had a good time and supporting the Vintage Computer Federation, which helps keep a lot of these old things alive. They supply knowledge on their forums, they help organize these events for people to buy, sell, trade, and exchange information. I think 90% of this really is just talking to people and giving other people more information about things that you enjoy. So why don't we talk about some of the exhibits and exhibit tours at the show?

Except for the last one, these are listed in no particular order, just things that I thought of when I was driving back in the car and decided to commit to paper. We'll start off with Doug Taylor. So Doug had brought several old graphics workstations that were doing 3D visualizations, graph renders, all sorts of interesting stuff—at least to me. He had a Tektronix workstation, which was awesome. There was a DEC Alpha too. He had a few other things that were running on some simulators doing scientific calculations, plots, charts, 3D graphics, and renders. And I found this to be highly cool and informative because as a computer graphics person, I would've never have seen or used it in real life because it was all before my time.

IMG_4912.jpg

Watching that Tektronix workstation very slowly paint in a 3D map visualization was honestly one of the coolest things that was at the show. It was old and it was slow and it was amazing because they were trying to figure out at that time how to do Z-axis occlusion to say “don't render and paint the things we can't see; just go ahead and paint the things that actually are going to be visible on the display or on the output.” Today your phone can chew that up and spit it out and you'd have no problem with it at all. But I thought it was just very interesting and fun to see that all in action in real time. You can make a screensaver out of that or something—people probably have. I could just put it on in the background and enjoy it all day.

I've found that a lot of attention given to vintage computers is a bit skewed. It’s not just at shows, but on YouTube and other places as well. A lot of the driver is games, and that's fair because for a lot of people who are producing content today, their experience was with games. That was true for me too—when I was a kid, games were certainly a big part of my computer experience, and that's why systems like the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, even the old Apples have so much of a presence because a lot of people played games and want to go back and play those games again. It's a lot harder to find people bringing back stuff that was done with productivity or things like that. I was very happy to see a lot of stuff that was not just games. There was a good balance of games and other applications running on all of these old computers. And I really enjoyed that quite a bit.

One thing I found was very amusingwas a fellow named Alastair Hewitt. He was running a project about building a microcomputer out of these TTL chips, which would connect to modern peripherals and things like that. It's actually a very cool project. A link to these will be in the show notes, but what I found most amazing was that the monitor he was using. It was a LaCie Electron Blue. I love those LaCie monitors. When I saw that, I was like, “Heeeey,” because I owned one of those monitors. I worked with LaCie Electron Blue monitors in the graphic arts industry and I bought a 19 inch ElectronBlue III in like 2001 or something like that. That was a $500 monitor in 2001 money. And I still regret giving that monitor away. I should've hung on to it, but whatever. Had I known he would have it there, I would have brought him the hood shade! In production environments CRT monitors had hoods to shade them from ambient light to prevent contamination of the image. And I still have it here in my closet. Like, "damn dude, if I had known you had that, I would have brought that down and given it to you.”

A LaCie ElectronBlue II.

A LaCie ElectronBlue II.

He also had a Be Box, which is very cool because I've never seen a Be Box in person. It does look very cool. I don't know if I could ever be productive on a Be Box, but I just like seeing it all the same, because part of it is just seeing a lot of these machines in the flesh that you might not have actually seen before and actually touching them and using them. It’s kind of like a traveling museum in some cases where people come and bring all of their materials so that other people might have the chance to enjoy them.

Something else that I thought was really fun and amusing and kind of unusual was in one of the exhibit rooms. They had a series of computers all running MS-DOS or x86 emulators that you wouldn't expect to be running them. I think they were calling it the x86 challenge or something to that effect. So you had machines like an Apple IIGS with a PC Transporter and an Apple IIe also with a PC Transporter. There was an Apple Lisa running some kind of SoftWindows type of thing, which I thought was neat. I didn't even care about it running Windows—I’d never used a Lisa before in my life. So that was fun to be able to go and poke around with it. There was also a Iici that had some kind of PC compatibility card in it.

Gotta love rolling shutter capture artifacts.

Gotta love rolling shutter capture artifacts.

Lastly, there was an Acorn Archimedes. Yep, the good old Archie. It was my first time actually using a RiscOS/Acorn machine in real life. Acorn had those PC podules for the RISC PCs and they probably had something similar for the Archimedes as well that allowed them to do that. That was just really fun. I enjoyed just having hands on an Archimedes. Those were not popular here at all in the United States. So it's definitely a rare thing. Once again, you can't really see that without going to a show like this. The odds of something like that coming up on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or whatever is incredibly low.

The x86 challenge was really just one corner of one exhibit hall that featured a lot of IBM and other types of things. They had a whole World of IBM exhibit. There were PS/2s of all different kinds: the all-in-ones, the portable PS2s, and my old PS/2, a Model 30 286. I saw them and was all “aw, straight out of my heart.” It wasn't just PS/2s—there were also PC ATs, PC XTs… basically anything that was pre-1992 IBM, they had it all there. They even had one of these giant 19 or 20 inch IBM CRT monitors, which I had never seen before. I'd only seen the kind of very small PS/2 monitors that they had floating around the show. Part of this was OS/2 throughout the years. They had three machines laid out in a row running OS/2 2.1, OS/2 3, and OS/2 Warp. You could go from each of these machines and see the evolution of OS/2 and just the kind of way that OS/2 fell apart. I've used OS/2 in virtual machines, never on actual hardware, because why would I? But I enjoyed it quite a bit.

OS/2, in the flesh.

It was nice to see the actual evolution of it, to see where it went from that 2.X all the way up to OS/2 Warp. IBM had a lot of neat and interesting things. You know, they had their own scripting language, which was REXX, which people might be familiar with on the Amiga as A/REXX. They had their object model programming, which they tried to adapt OpenDoc and other things into. The System Object Model is what they called it. And the GUI was just really nice. It was responsive for the most part. The 2.x machine, unfortunately, didn't have as much RAM as it should have and the exhibitor apologized profusely, but it was still fun to go and pick it up and poke at it and see,  “Hey, what's going on in this particular machine?” Maybe it's gotten me willing to try OS/2 to a little more and actually dive into it a little bit. For a quickie 10 minute session of interacting with it, it was nice to see that represent not just Windows and DOS, but the other parts of IBM's computing legacy as well.

That world of IBM stuff was really cool. Unfortunately, some of the machines were having trouble as the day went on. That's kind of the risk with these old computers is that they do break. Back in the day they broke and today they're having trouble on and off again with floppy drives and such. Fortunately people had parts and there were people who knew how to fix things and get stuff back up and running again. But if you're going to be presenting at one of these kinds of shows, say with your own hardware, you just got to keep that in mind when you're bringing it all around.

Some other exhibitors had some extremely cool tech. We had Fujinet, which people have been talking about lately. It started off on the Atari, and it's a kind of network attached intelligence that you can use to access things locally over your own network via the retro computers. They're expanding it to more systems, too. I'm interested in picking up the Apple II version to use with my IIGS, because I think that would be interesting. They had the Fujinet weather display up on the monitor and then you'll find out later that weather was kind of a theme at the show.

I talked with Tom Cherryhomes, who was a fellow there doing the presenting—very affable guy. I heard a lot of interesting things about Fujinet and how they were planning on bringing it to other retro computers. I have a feeling that these types of bridges to the outside world are going to become more and more important when it comes to retro devices—to at least give people a reason to use their old computers other than just to say, “oh, I'm going to boot it up and play a game for 15, 20 minutes and turn it off.” It's a way to try to make things a little more overall useful in a modern context. I applaud them for it and I hope more people pick up Fujinet and then it gets more popular.

Another cool thing was the theme of the show, which was adventure gaming. At some of the exhibits there was a lot of adventure gaming going on. Scott Adams was a guest of honor at the show—he wrote many adventure games. His panel was very interesting, but a lot of other people here were in the text adventure theme as well. You had people playing live text adventures. There was a multi-user dungeon, displays of old Infocom games, things like that. One thing that came up was Ken and Roberta Williams' new game. Another exhibitor to keep in with this theme of the adventure game was Marcus Mira, who was there playing the hype man, as he has been for a little while, for Ken and Roberta Williams is new interactive adventure game.

The details on that game are still a little scarce at the moment. I mean, it's been announced and Marcus himself is doing a lot of work. He's doing 3D modeling and other stuff. Marcus offered to teach me some 3D modeling and, uh, hey, if you can make that happen, I'd be happy to stop by and see. As a regular artist I'm average at best, but sculpting was always my weakest point. So I would definitely be willing to try it sometime. He had an Apple III set up too. There were other things running various Sierra at his table. There was a C128 that Bill Herd signed, which was pretty cool. But most of it was talking about the new game and hopefully trying to get people interested in it.

The Apple III.

The Apple III.

I was never a Sierra OnLine guy—I was always a Lucasfilm guy because my platforms didn't really have Sierra games. So I never really played King’s Quest or stuff like that when they were contemporary. It was always kind of after they were past their prime. But I'd be willing to check it out and see what's going on. Marcus was very generous with his time and at least within the span of questions that he was allowed to answer gave some pretty good information about what people should expect about a new game from Ken and Roberta Williams.

But I think the exhibit that really stole the show and the one that everybody was just completely 100% on-board with was Smooth Jazz and Stormy Skies. These people had two tables of old vintage Weather Channel WeatherStar equipment. This is the stuff that would produce the images and slide shows and graphics work that you would see when you tuned to the Weather Channel in the eighties, nineties, and early aughts. They had a bunch of CRTs set up basically showing live local weather as if it was the old Weather Channel. It was great. There was some music too—you know the kind of music that you would hear on the Weather Channel. “And now the forecast for Belmar, New Jersey: cloudy with a high of 70.” They would just run that all weekend long.

I have to say a lot of the fun I had at the show was just sitting there and watching the freaking weather. It certainly attracted the most attention out of any exhibit simply because they had a lot of space and they had a lot of equipment. You could come up and see all the various stages—the SGI-based equipment, the Intel-based equipment, their homegrown equipment. Just seeing it on all these old TVs, like an old Commodore monitor that was running the Weather Channel, which, I dunno, something about that just seems very appropriate to me. I would highly recommend checking it out if you have any kind of affinity for the old aesthetic of the Weather Channel or just how weather used to be delivered in the past 30 or 40 years. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Classic weather for classic computers.

Classic weather for classic computers.

In addition to these sort of exhibitors who are there to talk about various things like the Heathkit computers and such, there were also people there who are trying to sell things. These shows usually have buy ’n’ trades and there was a consignment and free table, but also there were just people there who are dealers selling things, which is cool—they had a lot of interesting things that I hadn't seen before. I think compared to VCF Midwest, there was definitely less stuff for sale. I stopped by and purchased a SCSI external enclosure from one of these fellows who was selling a whole bunch of various cards of different provenance. Things like ISA network, adapters, ethernet, adapters, serial cards, parallel cards, just all sorts of neat doodads that unfortunately were not on my neat do-dads to buy list, but it was still cool to see them altogether.

Another thing to do was taking photos. I took a lot of pictures. I'll post some in the blog post. Mostly it was to take pictures of old computers to be able to use if I ever write blog posts about them, because getting photos that are not encumbered by copyright are kind of difficult, dnd I don't like taking things from people. So I try to stick to public domain or things that aren’t going to be a problem with somebody if I use them. It's always good to ask permission from photographers, but otherwise I try to stick to public domain things that are released instead of going to Google image search, and trying to just right click and take whatever random person's photo. It’s not my photo, it's their photo, and I would rather use my own pictures if at all possible.

Panels and Keynotes

Aside from the vendors and exhibits, there were talks and panels and keynotes. I saw two panels, and the first one was Mike Tomczyk, who was the first marketing executive at Commodore for their home computers. He had a very interesting life story. He talked about his experience in the army and how it prepared him to be part of this computer market that was “business as war,” as Jack Tramiel said. And it kind of prepared him for it, because he definitely knew what war was about because he was in one. Mike talked about how he was in the early computing days, where he knew people at Atari and Apple and so on, and he decided to go with Commodore and he built those early marketing campaigns for the VIC-20.

Mike Tomczyk.

Mike Tomczyk.

Mike was part of the William Shatner commercials that everybody has seen. He also was part of getting things in magazines, changing their advertising strategy. Mike’s time with Commodore was until, I want to say, 1985-ish. I believe that was around when he left. And so he was part of those early days where they introduced the Commodore 64. It was interesting to hear him talk about some Jack Tramiel story bits that I hadn't heard before. They might've been out there, but I personally hadn't heard some of them. When he was asked about being in the Nazi prison camps, Jack would say “I try not to live in the past. I try to live in the future.” And for a guy who was in the computer business, I think that was kind of an apt way of thinking about it.

Mike didn't gloss over the problems at Commodore. He was willing to talk about Jack's sometimes self-destructive short-term gain at the expense of longterm-ness that went through Jack's way of doing business sometimes. As he said, business was war and cutthroat, and there are positives and negatives to that. I thought it was just really interesting hearing sort of a guy on the inside perspective from that, because I was never really much of a VIC-20 guy, and they talked about how it was important to get something that was cheap and inexpensive.

One thing that was prevalent in what Mike was talking about was how he believed in making computing affordable for everybody. He wanted the VIC-20 to be under $300. They had to have arguments with engineering about changing designs and other things like that. To be fair, a lot of engineers that he had were willing to work with him on that. They produced the VIC-20, which compared to the Commodore 64 is definitely underpowered and has a little bit of problems. But the VIC-20 was a pretty popular machine. It brought in a lot of revenue and kept Commodore going. It would have been nice to have heard some of these Jack Tramiel anecdotes before I went and did my Commodore episode a couple of weeks ago, but c’est la vie.

Following Mike was Bill Herd, one of the designers of the Commodore 128 and had worked on the Ted series of machines, like the Plus/4 and the C16. Bill was wearing a MOS Technologies t-shirt, which was nice to see. Now, I kind of knew what to expect going into Bill's panel because he has done some of these panels before. I think one thing that really makes him a good public speaker is that he kind of knows that some of this stuff is greatest hits material. It's been on YouTube, he’s done talks before. He's talked about how he put certain things together on the 128 or the Ted machines in the past. Here, he did it in such a way that it wasn't the same as how I've seen him talk about these things before. He knows how to mix things up, he knows how to play to the crowd a little bit. For something like this, where some people here have probably heard him say these things before, you don't know what kind of level the audience is at when you're giving these kinds of talks. So for him to be able to go through and say, “Hey, this is what we did at Commodore. This is what I did. These are the machines I made. These are the troubles that we ran into,” and still keep it fresh and interesting is a real skill.

Bill Herd.

Bill Herd.

And that's probably why people enjoy Bill so much because he has a candor that some other people don't have. He's willing to say, “Hey, you know, this is where we did things, right. This is where we might've screwed up a little bit.” It's a honest appraisal of what they were doing back in the day. You can go watch the livestreams that are on the Vintage Computer Festival YouTube channel. They'll probably divvy them up into separate panels eventually, but the livestreams are there and you can go and check them out at your leisure. That's pretty much what I did on Saturday—it was going to those panels, going to all the exhibits, buying stuff, going around and seeing other things like that.

Hanging Out on Sunday

Sunday was a much quieter day. I spent most of it just kind of wandering around, seeing what was going on in consignment and hanging out with various people. So in one corner of the exhibit hall they had the Mac shenanigan zone, which was anchored by some YouTubers. We had Steve, AKA Mac84—you might've heard him before on the Icon Garden. There was Mike from Mike's Mac Shack and Sean from Action Retro who were all in this corner with their prototype Macs and a MUD running on a Quadra 950 server, some clones, and all sorts of interesting things. I hung out with them for the most part on Sunday afternoon. It was cool to hang out and put some names to faces and talk to people in person.

Yours truly on the left, Steve on the right.

Yours truly on the left, Steve on the right.

We had a little bit of shenanigans there themselves because Sean had accidentally torched his G4 upgraded clone by trying to boot it with a Leopard disc. We wound up having to do a little bit of on-the-show surgery to reset something using a spare video card from one of Steve's clones. You never know quite what you're going to get. It was neat to see the prototype iMac G5 with the compact flash slot, which was deleted in the shipping model. We've heard of and seen these things in pictures, but it's nice to actually see them in person. I would recommend you all subscribing to these guys’s channels—they’re all good. They all talk about old Macs. If you're interested in those kinds of old things, they're cool guys to know and hang around with.

Like I said earlier, if you're interested in seeing the majority of stuff in the show, you're better off going on Saturday than Sunday. But one of the nice things about a Sunday at a show is that there's less people and it's more relaxed. It's easier to hang out with people when there's less people around. You can just break off into smaller groups and just chit chat or whatever. It's also easier to do a little more negotiating if you're interested in buying stuff on a Sunday as well. By then I had already done all of my purchasing.

My Big Get: A NeXTstation!

And speaking of purchasing, a thing that I bought was a monochrome NeXTstation. That's right, a NeXT slab—I now own one! I was thinking really hard about buying the color one, but the problem was, would my monitors work with it? I had to think about it a little bit, but unfortunately, hesitation was a problem because by the time I said, “wait a minute, one of my monitors has RGB BNC connectors,” the color workstation was already gone. So I wound up buying the monochrome NeXTstation for 75 buckazoids. Doesn't have a hard drive in it, but the machine otherwise works. So I just have to put a SCSI2SD or something else into it. I can wire up some way to hook it up to a monitor, and I have accessories that can work for keyboards and mice. So I'm looking forward to giving that machine a shot. Plus I've always wanted a NeXT just to have in my collection. It's a pretty good example of one, and it's in very good shape. So even if it's just a display piece, I'm all for it.

NeXTstations, and I got one!

NeXTstations, and I got one!

I bought the NeXT from Matt Goodrich of Drakware. He was also selling some other things like ADB to USB converters, SGI to USB, NeXT to USB, basically just ways of using modern keyboards and mice with older computers. There's still plenty of ADB things out there, but sometimes you just want to use a nice new keyboard and mouse. Those things did what they said on the tin. He had a nice old Mac SE connected with one and it worked. I’d have no complaints if I needed one. He also had a complete NeXT cube, with a SCSI2SD, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. He listed it for a thousand dollars, and somebody bought it for a thousand dollars. Good for you, man. I'm glad that NeXT found a home. It was too rich for my blood, even though I would love to have a full NeXT setup. But a thousand dollars was well out of my budget for big ticket items. I said, “well, I would allow a $250 big ticket item,” and I didn't even spend that much. The NeXTstation was much cheaper than I thought it would be.

Final Thoughts on VCF East 2021

So after I got home, what would I say about the show overall? I enjoyed it a lot—it was a fun time. If you like old computers, you'll definitely have a good time there. I saw somebody with a nice Wang professional computer, which was nice to see as somebody who lived in the shadow of the Wang towers. There was a lot of just unusual things like the Heathkits. I have no attachment to those Heathkit machines, but it was nice to see them and actually play with them. And hopefully it gets some other people involved to say “Hey, now I'm interested in collecting and restoring these.”

I really enjoyed my time at the show, but I hope that we could have some improvements for future ones. I can definitely tell that this show is a labor of love. It's run by volunteers as most all of these conventions are. But I think something that could be improved is how they're handling the consignment section. Consignments would open up at nine o’clock, and if you were not there on time you could miss out. And I will say the pickings were slim half an hour after things opened—you could definitely tell that a lot of things just got picked off very early. It's very hard to survey what was available, and you might not even have known something you wanted was there.

I don't really see how they can improve that in an equitable way without other knock on effects. What I would do is say the consignment hall is allowed to be open at nine o'clock for people to browse and be able to bring stuff in and set up. But people would only be able to purchase after, say, 10 o’clock. That way people at least have a chance to know what was coming. Yes, there was stuff that came in at various points during the day, but you would have had no idea what was coming and going unless you hung out in that hall all day. Truthfully, for a lot of the day it was kind of empty. There was stuff that came and went kind of slowly, but you would have been in there for an hour and you've been okay, I've probably seen enough.

Unless you had like some kind of notification system to know when things were going on sale, you would’ve had no idea as to when to check it out to even be able to buy something. So I didn't get anything in the consignment hall. I was actually going to put a G4 in there, but fortunately somebody contacted me before the show and I was able to trade it for a PowerBook G4 and I didn't have to worry about any of that. My other stuff that I brought with me was specifically to give to Steve: a Power Mac 8100 with a G3 card and a beige G3 tower. Hopefully we'll be seeing that on his channel in the near future.

Something else to improve would be the handling of the VIP guests. I know they had some people out in the front foyer at times, and at the end of Bill’s thing, someone said “you’ll see him in the cafeteria." I'm like, well, where's the cafeteria? Is that the staff room where they're having the lunches and stuff or what? Is that in the consignment area? It wasn't really clear. Most conventions usually have dedicated tables for like the guests of honor and things like that. I think that would have probably made sense here. I had no idea where to find Bill or these other people. Maybe they didn't want people to come by and talk to them. Maybe they just want to walk around and have fun. And they did. I mean, I saw Mike Tomczyk hanging around at various tables, but it's just one of those things where if I was running things, I would probably try to figure out a way to make those guests a little easier to find. I'm not saying they need to be chained to the table the entire show, just more to say, “Hey, Bill Herd is going to be at X table at Y time during the day, come by, buy his book, shake his hand.”

A thing I think they did really well was that even if you weren't at the show, you could still see everything because they livestreamed the keynotes. So if you wanted to see the Bill Herd talk or Mike’s talk, or Bill Mensch, or Scott Adams, you just go on the VCF YouTube channel and watch them, which I think is very fair. It’s tough for people to go to these things and to give them the ability to see it without having to be there is a smart move. Maybe they have other people living in the house that are maybe higher risk. I'm a single guy—there’s nobody else living in my house. So my exposure risk is probably lower than other people's. I think that was pretty smart of them to do something like that.

So the question is, will I be back in April? The answer is maybe. I enjoyed it a lot. I do have a feeling that I would be seeing a lot of the same stuff. If I went back in April, I don't know what they're going to do for more guests or things like that. It is kind of a long drive. Normally if I go to New York city for things, take the train. I don't like driving through there, and even just going around New York City is a pain. Even if you go over the Tappan Zee and take the long way around, it's still a five to six hour drive. For a long weekend, that’s doable, I’ve done it before, but it’s still a slog. Also, getting to the show requires a car. If you want to take the train, there is one that goes from Penn station down to Belmar. Then you'll need to take a lift from the local station or arrange some other transportation to get to the show. It might still be a good idea to bring your car anyway, just because if you decide to buy something, you need a way to lug all that stuff home.

Next year I'm definitely going to try to go to VCF Midwest, mainly because I know people in the area and it would be fun to go with other people, and it is a bigger show. Will this show grow? I don't know, but if you have any kind of interest at all in these old computers, or even just computing in general, there's other stuff to see there at the InfoAge as well. They have a World War II museum. They have other things are going on there as well, which would certainly interest you if you had a family or young kids. I saw a pretty decent amount of teenagers and other people who I could tell are getting into this because it's a fun thing to get into.

I hope that winds up bringing more people into the fold, because these machines are getting older, and the reality is, is we’re all getting a little older. So I'll close out saying it was nice to see some people and see some new things. And hey, now that I've got a NeXTstation, maybe I'll be able to make some more stuff about NeXT. Thanks for listening and check out the Vintage Computer Federation. See if they have an event in your area. They have VCF East VCF, Midwest and VCF Eest, which is in Portland, Oregon. So make sure to check it out if you're at all interested in old computers and old tech.