The traffic was... well... horrible. But that's pretty normal for Chicago but we made it through.
The hotel overbooked (the reason that was given was a good one, though, and I agree with it) but they got us a room on Friday night at a nearby hotel. That would have been nice, but my GPS sent me the wrong way, so it took us a bit to locate the backup hotel.
VCFMW started on Saturday morning, so we just checked out and went back to the original hotel.
But you don't care about our hotel and traffic issues. You want to hear about the show.
Josh Bensadon - RCA 1802 Microprocessor
Very good talk about an early CPU that I never heard about: The RCA 1802.
Also we learned about Joseph Weisbecker, the Cosmac computer and his flip game. All items that I had never heard of before.
Glenn Holmer - geoCom (a BASIC Compiler for GEOS)
This was a nice talk about a backwater product. I had used GEOS way back in the day but I think it was for AOL on an IBM PC.
Mike Willegal - The History and Technology of the SCELBI Computer Business
Another good talk about a computer that I had never heard of before. It's interesting that some of those computers are still in use today and how important this company was in the PC business.
http://www.willegal.net/scelbi/the8008andScelbi.html
http://www.willegal.net/scelbi/the8008andScelbi.html
The Auction
So every year, people donate stuff and they auction it off. Proceeds go toward finding VCFMW (since the event is free to attend). Lots of cool stuff. Lots of old Sun stuff. An ADM3A. And more. It was supposed to be 2.5 hours and lasted over 4!
The last couple of events were videos, but we were tired and skipped them.
Side note: For some reason, we did not sleep well all weekend.
Jack Rubin - Annual Family Of Eight Panel
Another interesting talk about the PDP computers. I'm not that interested in these, but still, it was interesting to hear how people are keeping them running.
A very good talk on how he created an Altair-like system based on a variant of the 6502. Lots of detailed information. He learned a great deal how these old computers worked.
https://hackaday.com/2018/06/13/vcf-east-cactus-retro-because-it-wants-to-be/
CommodoreZ.com
The final talk was painful, so we bailed and headed home - dealing with the traffic and all.
I was able to pick up:
A TRS-80 TP-10 serial thermal printer
A Z80 assembler book (which should be useful when I get my RC2014 working)
A couple of other TRS-80 books
A new laptop case for my niece
Unfortunately, the deals that I had hoped for weren't there. 8( I did see a TRS-80 Model III Cassette Only for $125 (working!), but I need to not bring in so much hardware. I just don't have the room and I want to spend time actually playing with my machines.
Overall, a good weekend. This is not an event that I'd go to every year - just because it won't change much from year to year. But we will go back in a few years (or sooner if they have a speaker that I really want to hear).
