July 2022 - vcf-midatlantic

Museum Report 2022-07-02
by Jeffrey Brace 03 Jul '22

03 Jul '22

A good day at the museum despite a sunny day. People are still interested in seeing the museums during the busy shore season. Bart did his second time as docent this day and had about 22 visitors. He can fill in the details, but from my perspective at the front desk there was a good mixture of interests and ages coming through there. I stopped in before the museum opened to show Bart how to load some demos on the C64, C128, and other micros. Ian Litchfield also came to continue repairs on the Apple 2. He discovered some unsoldered pins in two different microchips and resoldered them. There continues to be problems and he continues to investigate the source of the problem. Bill Dromgoole continued working on repairs of the Univac 1219 and he can report on that. Rick Lewis stopped by to reload the PDP-8 demo programs from papertape. We have two demos now and are considering a third demo now that the docents are becoming more comfortable learning how to load programs from papertape. Perhaps the music playing program (plays through AM radio), or a text game, or a calculator program. ========================================= Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Showrunner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/> jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

1 0

Xerox 800 Word Processor 1974 promo film
by Jeffrey Brace 03 Jul '22

03 Jul '22

Found this posted on cctalk by Don Resor of the Computer History Archive: At the end of the video, a recap of several Xerox computer products are shown. XEROX Word Processing Machines & Computers 1975 (Xerox 800 vintage promo film) https://youtu.be/Zkl80BAiaIw ========================================= Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Showrunner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/> jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

2 1

Computing's Woodstock in 1976 at Los Alamos
by Jeffrey Brace 02 Jul '22

02 Jul '22

>From the CHM website https://computerhistory.org/blog/computings-woodstock/, a conference in 1976 which have videos available now: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8dajXDgwQzSKo1UyKmWpa9bI ========================================= Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Showrunner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/> jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

1 0

Museum Report 2022-06-29
by Jeffrey Brace 30 Jun '22

30 Jun '22

There haven't been regular reports about the museum on the discussion list for a while. Sometimes we had few visitors, sometimes we were busy and never got around to sending out a report. We have had visitors most days. I normally am docent on Sundays, but I work in a school. Schools are closed for summer vacation. So I was able to fill in this past Wednesday. Normally Wednesdays are very slow with few or no visitors. Now that it is summer time we get around 20 to 30. We had 25 visitors this past Wednesday. We had a bunch of organized tours in May and half of June and are going to have two more in a week. First two visitors from upstate New York did a self guided tour. They were reading and scanning the QR codes of the artifact display cards. They read the new display cards. It's nice to see that people notice them and are interested in them and use them. They spent about 50 minutes looking around and taking pictures. Two different boys and one mom printed out PrintShop pictures. This seems to be a fun thing for many kids to print out a picture. I even got some to try a line or two of BASIC. I tried out for the first time the Atari Mega STE MIDI setup. It has three songs on there now. Not sure how to get more on that system. Also not sure how to get BASIC running if we want. I have to get familiar with the operation of CuBase. It seemed to lock up after kids hit the wrong keys on the keyboard and I had to reset it each time. Not sure what is going on. There are a few machines that need repair. Maybe someone can take a look at them at the next repair workshop: I would like to get a copy of a Zenith boot disk that will run Microsoft BASIC. The current disk has errors and we were unable to copy it due to the B drive not seeming to work properly. We either need a copy of the disk or to get the B drive working. Apple // - Is being worked on by Ian Litchfield. IBM PCjr – Error H on boot. Ian has looked at this and fixed it. It is having problems again. Don’t know what was fixed and don’t know what is wrong. Sol 20 – Corey is the expert on this one. There was another one in the warehouse that we could try. This is the second one that we had working. Don’t know what is wrong with it. Heathkit H89 – It’s been a while, but I don't remember what is wrong with it. Mac Portable is glitchy. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it locks up. ========================================= Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President Vintage Computer Festival East Showrunner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/> jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

1 0