VCF MW Post Mortum

After a long pause (mostly due to other events, the scamdemic, and the old venue being too small), we went to VCF MW this year.

tl;dr;  It was really nice.  The venue was really good.  The main room was at least twice (some people said three time) as large as the other venue.  It was crowded, but not "subway at rush hour" crowded.

Let's start with the bad:

1. Food poisoning.  We went to the "canteen" in the main room for a quick snack.  We only picked up a pack of peanut M&Ms to hold us until dinner.  Even though the date on the packs were 2025, it was obvious that they weren't stored correctly and the one M&M that we ate was certainly off.
2. Loud neighboring party.  There was a big wedding going on in the ballroom next to VCF and sometimes their "music" system intruded into the VCF panel room.  More of an annoyance, but someone should have told them to turn it down a bit.
3. The wedding also blocked certain hallways for a while.  This was a minor annoyance, though, as there were other (but less direct) routes from the con to the rooms.
4. The traffic!  It took me 1 day (each way), to physically recover from the drive.  Chicago area traffic is horrible.

But that's about all I have to complain about.

Lots of cool displays and loads of nice people.  Everyone was very polite and pleasant.

My goal was to git rid of stuff (and not accumulate more).  I succeeded.

All the stuff I brought to the auction sold for a good amount.  We "donated" at least $400 through the auction.  All of the stuff that I dropped off at the free table disappeared by Saturday morning.

So, what did we see:

1. Adrian from Adrian's Digital Basement on YouTube.

1. David from 8-Bit-Guy on YouTube.

1. Veronica, Geri Ellsworth, June (Nybbles and Bytes) - but they were there as more of con-go-ers, not to talk/display.

1. TexElec had a table.

1. A nice Osborne display.  An 01, Execute and even a Vixen!  All working!

Most of the talks were interesting, but not real useful to me.  They still had lots of good information, though.

One of the things I got from the YouTuber channel was the realization that most LLM AIs are really nothing more than high-powered versions of Eliza.

Sperry HT

The Sperry HT is done.  I finished refurbishing the keyboard today.

Pictures are here.

The computer pretty much worked fine when I got it.  The seller shipped it correctly and it arrived in the correct number of pieces - even the CGA monitor.

As expected, some parts were worn:

1. Clock battery was dead.  But it didn't leak.
2. Hard drive was dead.
3. The foam in the foam-and-foil keyboard was disintegrating.

So, complete disassembly and clean.  That was surprisingly easy.

Clock battery replaced.

So the Sperry HT was one of the first IBM clone systems that came with a real time clock.  The battery only keeps the clock running when the PC is off.  But that comes at a price.  You need to use the special Sperry MS-DOS 2.11 to have MS-DOS use the clock.  Some people wrote some drivers if you want to upgrade to DOS 3.x.  But the system came with the original DOS 2.11 disks.  I imaged them and uploaded them to the Internet Archive.

I pulled the hard drive and disassembled it.  I wanted the "cage" with the face plate so that I could reinstall it back in the case.  I pulled the XT-CF-IDE from the Sperry Portable and hooked up the light to the old hard drive cage.  So the old hard drive light will flash as the XT-CF-IDE access the "hard drive".

So my 1985 computer has a flash drive.  :)

I then ordered some foam-and-foil replacements from TexElec, but they were going to take a while, so I grabbed a "loaner" keyboard I had in the spare parts box and started to put the Sperry through its paces.  Once I saw it was working, I reinstalled DOS 2.11 from the Sperry disks to the CF card and set the clock.

When the foam-and-foil replacements shipped, I disassembled the keyboard and popped out all the old disks (see this video).  As expected, the foam was failing.  Some would work, but most would either not come back after being "squished" or they would disintegrate completely.

The replacements have to be installed individually and there are 101 keys on the keyboard.  I spread it out over several days so I didn't go insane.  :)  But it's done and the keyboard works fine.  I might need to lube the keys, though.

Misc. Updates

 I haven't posted an update for a while.

Kaypro 1 - It was giving me fits, so I sort of turned it into a "parts" machine and got a Kaypro 4/84 working very nicely.

I was finally able to acquire a Sperry HT.  The first computer I ever owned.

As expected, the hard drive is long toast, so I took the IDE-XT-CF card from the Sperry Portable and put it there.  Then fixed the DOS on it.  Explanation: The Sperry HT was one of the first to have a real time clock, but it requires a special version of DOS 2.11 to work.  So I installed that version.

Cleaned it up.  Lubed up the floppy drive and cleaned it.  Now working on fixing the foam-and-foil keyboard.  It's looking nice.

So some of the items that I was going to bring to VCFMW won't be going now (or will be on the free table), but I still have a good amount of stuff to bring and donate.

And I'm looking at downsizing a few other systems that I simply don't have table space for.  Goal: I have all computers available for use at any time and try to rotate through them to play with them every couple of weeks.  Also, to get rid of systems that I simply am no longer interested in anymore.