What a awesome time. Here are some highlights.
First of all, thanks to everyone at MARCH for putting on a great event. I felt that this interation of VCF east, was the best ever.
Great speakers – Brian Kernighan and Bob Frankston
The variety of systems present and running was very impressive
An especially large number of PDP-8s of different vintages were present. Makes me want a mini for myself, or at least get my ancient printout of collosal cave OCR’d, compiled and running on something
It was very nice to meet all the HAMs, old friends, helpers and visitors
Too much RFI, a poor antenna situation, and poor conditions prevented actual communications during the show, but I was able to cheat and display a SCELBI decoding morse generated out of a PC sound port and an Apple IIe decoding the RTTY feed from rtty.com – more about this coming soon in my blog and website
I had my first piece of equipment die at a show. My Apple Monitor II’s fuse blew towards the end of the day on Saturday. A quick investigation didn’t reveal anything obvious, except high current draw. Thanks to Ian and Jeff for taking the time to help me take an initial peek at it. This is my only monitor that has really acceptable 80 column output, so I’ll have to continue to work on figuring out the root cause and get it back to 100% health
The number of simulated platforms surprised me. I’m calling a simulated platform, a physical piece of hardware platform that at it’s core, is made up of a more modern processor, like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. The number of people using modern technology to restore or simulate vintage hardware is growing fast
As always, I wish I had more time to spend at other peoples nifty exhibits
