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SIGNUP for March Repair Workshop 3/6 & 3/7, 2021
by Jeffrey Brace 24 Feb '21

24 Feb '21

Our next repair workshop will be March 6 & 7, 2021 Signup here: March Repair Workshop Signup Sheet <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XE6z0-LwO77hg7BIhphhP6eSjbo5AhJ5Jdc…>

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sad news
by Jeffrey Jonas 24 Feb '21

24 Feb '21

1) good news: his collection was off the floor but the house was water damaged https://youtu.be/hc4_PnKoea4 Texas in Crisis - My house is ruined! The 8-Bit Guy 2) by the time you read this, Fry's may be gone for good https://www.shacknews.com/article/122935/frys-electronics-rumored-to-perman… Fry's Electronics rumored to permanently close nationwide tonight The American software and consumer electronics store is rumored to be closing its doors for good. ___________________________________

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1970's TV show that taught FORTRAN ?
by Andy Meyer 24 Feb '21

24 Feb '21

Looking to settle an argument... I remember there was once a TV show that taught FORTRAN programming. This would have been the mid-1970's and I think it was broadcast over WNET channel 13 (NYC metro area PBS) in the afternoon. I can't have been the only one to have seen it, but I'm unable to find anything about it on the net. Reply to the list. TIA, Andy

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RASCSI scsi emulator device
by Andrew Diller 24 Feb '21

24 Feb '21

Reading over these RASCSI devices, I decided to pick up one to see how it works with some other classic UNIX systems, where I'm currently using a SCSISD (SGI, DEC and AUX). The performance seems to be a nice boost when used with Pi4. https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki/Benchmarks It will be nice to have an intelligent alternative to the SCSISD. This device reminds me of DavidG's wonderful MFM emulator. I'm hoping that with access to a real PI doing things like imaging of drives will be much easier than it currently is. -andy

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TRS-80 in Easton, PA
by Mike Loewen 23 Feb '21

23 Feb '21

There's a TRS-80 system on Craiglist for $100. From the description, it sounds like a Model I, but there are no pictures. https://allentown.craigslist.org/sop/d/easton-trs-80-rs/7280636195.html No connection with the seller. Mike Loewen mloewen(a)cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/

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Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast
by Christian Liendo 22 Feb '21

22 Feb '21

In case you may not know who Jim Keller is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) The Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hL5Om4IJ4 This is a long video, most of this may be boring, here are the parts of the video that may be interesting to us as people who are interested in computing history. 11:40 - RISC vs CISC 15:39 - What makes a great processor? 17:09 - Intel vs ARM 18:58 - Steve Jobs and Apple Complete Video 0:00 - Introduction 1:33 - Good design is both science and engineering 7:33 - Javascript 11:40 - RISC vs CISC 15:39 - What makes a great processor? 17:09 - Intel vs ARM 18:58 - Steve Jobs and Apple 21:36 - Elon Musk and Steve Jobs 27:21 - Father 31:03 - Perfection 37:18 - Modular design 42:52 - Moore's law 49:50 - Hardware for deep learning 56:44 - Making neural networks fast at scale 1:04:22 - Andrej Karpathy and Chris Lattner 1:08:36 - How GPUs work 1:12:43 - Tesla Autopilot, NVIDIA, and Mobileye 1:17:23 - Andrej Karpathy and Software 2.0 1:23:43 - Tesla Dojo 1:26:20 - Neural networks will understand physics better than humans 1:28:33 - Re-engineering the human brain 1:33:26 - Infinite fun and the Culture Series by Iain Banks 1:35:20 - Neuralink 1:40:43 - Dreams 1:44:37 - Ideas 1:54:49 - Aliens 1:59:46 - Jordan Peterson 2:04:44 - Viruses 2:07:52 - WallStreetBets and Robinhood 2:15:55 - Advice for young people 2:17:45 - Human condition 2:20:14 - Fear is a cage 2:25:04 - Love 2:31:27 - Regrets

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New Commodore PET games
by Jeffrey Brace 19 Feb '21

19 Feb '21

Found someone at the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) who is making his own Commodore PET games: https://www.masswerk.at/pet/prgs/ Some cool games. He is working on a Lode Runner Clone at the moment. It's not uploaded yet. By the way can someone point me to some 8K PET games that I can load into the museum's Original Chiclet PET computer? Jeff Brace ========================================= Vice President & Board Member Vintage Computer Festival East Show-runner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey(a)vcfed.org cell: 732-759-1783

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Personal IRIS PSU repair
by Joseph Marlin 18 Feb '21

18 Feb '21

Hey, all. Just thought I'd reach out and bother everyone to see if there's anyone else out there who's dealt with a dead Personal IRIS PSU. Apparently they pretty much all go eventually, but I haven't been able to find anything about what the common failure modes are. Hoping there's someone with some thoughts or experience, because I'm massively a novice when it comes to power supply diagnosis.

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Re: SX GBIC fiber cable speed
by MikeWillegal 17 Feb '21

17 Feb '21

Neil, Unless you need the speed or connectivity, I would prefer messing with copper. Just too many strange incompatibilities with optical SFPs and various vendors equipment when you go optical. Things that should work, don’t, and visa versa. Wasn’t that terrible in our lab at work, because we had loads of different SFPs, cables and switches to change out to try to get things working, but at home, that sort of experimenting will most likely cost you money. At work, it mostly cost us time, and it was just part of the cost of doing business. After a while, it became a pretty routine thing for us to swap SFPs or switch ports when optical links didn’t come up when connecting new gear. When Service Providers do deployments of new equipment, they trial every component in the system before rollout for a reason. Just my two cents… Mike Willegal

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2021 Event T-Shirts
by Adam Michlin 17 Feb '21

17 Feb '21

Hi Everyone, With the news that VCF East has been postponed to the Fall, we are able to move forward with one of many projects to give members more input into the day to day running of VCF. To that end, we're going to try a new approach to designing the T Shirts. For those who may not know, we design one t-shirt for all events in the year (VCF East, VCF West, and, historically, VCF Pacific Northwest). This year we are going to ask several graphic designers to submit designs on the theme of the anniversary of the IBM PC 5150 and the general theme of text adventure games. To that end, we are opening the floor for both input and suggestions. The running idea is to have a stylized IBM PC 5150 with a classic Colossal Cave Adventure (CCA) quote on it. Personally, I'm hoping for "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." The idea is that CCA was played on the 5150 but also predates it on mainframes and minicomputers. We're also leaning towards the green and amber on black options from last year. We won't necessarily do this every year, but it seems to make sense when talking about the 5150 and, of course, who can resist a good old fashioned green versus amber argument? Once we have a quorum of submissions by graphic designers, we will return to the membership to help decide which shirt goes to press. We realize this takes some of the fun of the surprise out of it, but we also realize that designing a t-shirt that more people like and have input on is a win all around. We also have near term hopes to make shirts available for print on demand after the events and may even bring back some of the classic shirts (thank you, Dan Roganti! May you RIP), also as print on demand. General and specific suggestions, publicly or privately, are most welcome and we would love some more ideas of different classic text adventure quotes. To answer the most obvious question, Zork was high on our list but there are already a lot of t-shirts with the famous Zork quotes. We would also love any submissions of the actual drawn design from any of you, the more the merrier! Best wishes, -Adam --- Adam Michlin Director of Marketing Vintage Computer Federation http://vcfed.org https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation https://twitter.com/vcfederation https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKdBVD2wVUkuJQZhxGvVr0Q

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