December 2017 - vcf-midatlantic

Lisa 2 for sale
by Adam Michlin 15 Dec '17

15 Dec '17

Hi Everyone, I had previously been asked by my friend to try to sell his Lisa 2 at $2,500 and have convinced him that $2,000 is a more reasonable price. Pictures: http://ceos.io/lisa/ In working condition and not recapped as far as we can tell. If interested, contact me privately and we'll go from there. I can likely to meet for pick up at the VCF museum (maybe even at the upcoming workshop!) or generally in the northern NJ area. Best wishes, -Adam

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Anyone awake?
by Evan Koblentz 14 Dec '17

14 Dec '17

I have an idea that I want to bounce off someone. Who can take a phone call now? It's 12:20am. ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, director Vintage Computer Federation a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit evan(a)vcfed.org (646) 546-9999 www.vcfed.org facebook.com/vcfederation twitter.com/vcfederation instagram.com/vcfederation

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OT: Surplus LTO Library?
by Ethan 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

Anyone know of a Dell ML6000 style tape library for sale via surplus channels? HP and IBM and ADIC sell the same unit ,all made by some German company. They have a head unit with a LCD on the front and you can keep stacking expansion modules below them to expand them. Looking for a LTO5 one for home to backup NAS server. eBay has a bunch but at high prices, especially when 8TB disks are $150 now. Any pointers appreciated!

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Festivus is officially over!
by Jeffrey Brace 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

Finally cleaned up the place, put everything back, drove home, unpacked and now relaxing. Festivus is a labor of love for me and I love seeing everyone together enjoying themselves. It is the one event where we are just there to socialize, have fun and geek out! Favorite quote from Festivus (Evan talking a selfie with two other guys, a third tries to get in the picture) "Go away. Your not bald enough." Thanks to Herb, Bernie S and Jeff Jonas to help clean up. Thanks to Evan, Ian and Connor for staying late to help finish up. I hope that everyone had a fun time and look forward to the next event which is the January 13/14 workshop. Until the next time, enjoy the holidays! :-D -- Jeff Brace

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Brick Vocational School Tour Today 2017-12-13
by Jeffrey Brace 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

I took the day off work today (at my expense, If I don't work, I don't get paid) to give a tour to Ocean County Vocational school (Brick Township, NJ), which is a vocational high school. Two groups of about 25 students. They seemed to like it, but as always there is never enough time to explain everything or demo very much. They looked at two or three other museums, but asked for ours in particular. It's always nice to educate younger people about the history of computers.

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I visited MOS Technology building today...
by Douglas Crawford 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

See the thread. Open issue: A ton of mag tapes are in the basement. Could possibly have C= stuff on them. Any one interested in that? I'll have pictures tomorrow of the site. http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?60872-Gmt-plant-final-cleanout-co… DC

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Please read: Personal note about Festivus + 2018
by Evan Koblentz 12 Dec '17

12 Dec '17

I'm sad Festivus is over. It is my favorite event of the year. Random highlights: - Eight of us arrived Friday night to beat the snow and celebrate Festivus Eve! That was a fun change from past Festivii. - Everyone got their slide rules. Mouse and others watched Youtube videos to learn how to use these. - Alex J. brought HP-9000s and donated a working one to VCFed. He also purchased and will soon give us the correct color monitor for our IBM PS/2 486 (Win 3.1 demo machine). - Jon C. brought ADM terminals and floppy disks (which everyone loved; bought a box for myself). He also brought a very clean and fully working Kaypro II. Nobody wanted it, their loss, VCFed's gain! We made a trade -- the Kaypro for an Intel board. This particular Kaypro is in much better shape than any of our other Kaypro units. - I gave the old MARCH banner to Jeff S. who designed the logo waaaaaaaay back in 2004. - "New Lou": it's always great to meet new members! - There were several surprise visitors: Connor; Tony's friend Ken (who's done a lot of manual labor for us in the past two years); Mouse's colleague (whose name I forget); and Jon G.'s friend Davi. I may have forgotten another person or two. - Festivus Claus is real! He gave Tony the long RCA cable that we needed to connect the Lego desk to the big monitor above our workbench. Tony played the part of a reindeer and delivered it to us. - A non-member brought us a very nice homebrewed version of a Netronics Elf II. I included Herb and Bernie when the benefactor arrived because they both know a lot about 1802. - The final highlight, as posted in earlier emails tonight, was Jeff's idea to donate extra items to a local community food bank. It's one thing to be good citizens in the vintage computing community and the InfoAge community, quite another to be good citizens to the real world! I'd like for us to do more things along these lines. Suggestions welcome. Regarding 2018, I talked on Saturday night about some of the Federation-wise ideas/plans for next year and also sent a long email to this list on Nov. 29. Thank you to everyone who donated so far! Some of the near-term plans include museum updates (displays, technology, maybe lighting); VCF PNW (Feb. 10-11, Seattle!); inventory software shopping; and more restorations. ** Please keep the 2018 donations flowing!! ** There are about 180 people on this list. If everyone gave just $5, that would pay for some museum improvements such as another display case that Corey and I are considering to show things like our blue box, 6501 kit, and so on. If everyone reached deep and gave $50, that would be more than our entire VCFed fiscal year budget from 2016! The link to make a donation is http://vcfed.org/wp/contribute/. As for 2017, "That's all, folks!" -Evan PS. I told a little white lie: that may * not * be all for 2017! There's a cool artifact donation being delivered soon. :) I will announce it when it's actually in our hands. Nebulous hint telling you virtually nothing: this artifact has a special connection to Silicon Valley.

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Leftover Festivus food donated
by Jeffrey Brace 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

There were lots of leftover frozen burger patties, hamburger buns and hot dog rolls. I was able to donate them all to the local food bank down the road from me called Fulfill (formerly Monmouth/Ocean Food Bank). I also donated a bunch of keurig coffee pods. I was glad that this will go to someone who needs it and won't go to waste.

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Small Intro and a Thank You to everyone
by Lou 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

Hello! My name is Lou Kohn but I also go by Faust in the community (IRC mainly). I am 27 years young with a jump to 28 next weekend and I live in the farmlands and suburbs of Gloucester County New Jersey. As for my interest in vintage computing it comes from many different places, from my fascination in technology at an early age to experiencing my first time using a system which was a 486sx on win3.11 (I know not really old) and exploring different systems, the history and what ultimately became of them in relation and development to modern technology today. I love exploring more obscure systems and different operating systems with my current interest towards different flavors of Unix, but also I have great appreciation and interest in the "Big Iron" systems which I still want to learn more from. In fact when it comes to learning I still have a lot ahead of myself but I am always eager to pick up anything I can to better understand it. In fact this year I am going to be doing a lot of this when it comes to doing hardware and I hope to grasp hardware repair better because a big part of the hobby is repairing and restoring. I hope that I can find a place here among others who share the same interest and maybe even become a regular in due time! Also I have to give you all a big thank you Saturday night when attending the festivus event! Not only was it my first but being the socially awkward person that I am (with an even more socially awkward fiancee that was with me during the event) everyone was so nice and awesome, we really felt welcome to be there and just have fun among everyone. A special thanks to Evan for the tour around the building, Ian for using his CRT repair kung-fu in figuring out what was up with my terminal and Herb for giving me a scsi drive for a mac that did not have one. I can go on with the thanks but to make it clear its wonderful to be among a group like this and I cannot wait for the next event. Hope everyone else enjoyed the weekend and got home safe!

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Re: More Thank You's to the Festivus Cleanup Crew!
by SVCatITC＠aol.com 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

On 12/10/2017 8:48 PM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote: > Finally cleaned up the place, put everything back, drove home, unpacked and > now relaxing. > > Thanks to Herb, Bernie S and Jeff Jonas to help clean up. > > Thanks to Evan, Ian and Connor for staying late to help finish up. Thanks guys again for the "mop up". Sorry I was not there to help out. Everything was a delicious "Festivus Miracle!" Bill Inderrieden

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