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VCF East 2020 Update
by Dean Notarnicola 24 Feb '20

24 Feb '20

The Steering Committee is thrilled to share that planning for VCF East 2020 is off to a running start! With two months until the event, we already have forty exhibitors confirmed with more pending < http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/vcf-east-exhib…>. Our speaker slots are almost entirely filled with exactly one open slot remaining < http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/classes/>. Adding icing to the cake, we are excited to share with you all the wonderful improvements made in the museum. This all combines to make for a packed, exciting and informative VCF East! Ticket pre-sales have started < https://www.eventbrite.com/e/vintage-computer-festival-east-2020-tickets-92…> . Please remember, online pre-purchase gets you in the gate thirty minutes early for priority seating and ticket prices are discounted versus the day of event door price. Online sales end April 20th so don't wait!

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Asus PIII CUSC motherboard drivers needed
by Sentrytv 24 Feb '20

24 Feb '20

Good afternoon to all I'm trying to locate drivers for windows 98SE for an Asus mini PIII motherboard SIS chips on board.(mini/micro tower) I tried their website but no luck with that model. Downloaded a couple others but did not work. Does anybody have a good idea where to get windows/Dos drivers for such a motherboard besides the Asus site? I don't usually come across these old or PC's but I wanted to get this up and running to play some old Star Wars games that I have. That needs windows.(DOS) Everything is on board, sound, video, serial, joystick, parallel, IDE. Please let me know if you have any ideas where to get them, off list is OK. Thank you Mike Sent from: My extremely complicated, hand held electronic device.

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Museum update
by Adam Michlin 23 Feb '20

23 Feb '20

Hi Everyone, The elves have been hard at work and, as many of you may have seen on the various social media feeds, we have all sorts of new things going on in the museum. New exhibits include: A now working (thanks to member Ian Primus!) Soviet Union era Spectrum ZX clone called the Orel (not "Eagle" as I incorrectly reported recently) donated by member Bill Lange. Working, as long as long as you can figure out the unlabeled Spectrum keyboard commands on the roman/cyrillic keyboard! Insert your own "In Soviet Russia..." joke here. Anyone have a Spectrum ZX Tetris cart they want to donate? A Timex Sinclair 1000 to match up with the aforementioned Spectrum clone. Still don't have the real English ZX working, but one day! A new office display with a pristine DEC Rainbow 100 and *all* the neat toys (beautiful color monitor!) associated with it that boots into MS-DOS and runs a DEC branded word processor. A TI Professional Portable (luggable) running MS-DOS and 123. One of the last CRT based portables with an absolutely amazing color screen A pristine PCJr including a monitor that was in a sealed box (literally brand new). A Panasonic MSX on loan from member Dean Notarnicola adding Japan to our growing list in the international exhibit area of the museum. Speaking of international, a Bulgarian Apple II clone called "Pravetz" was also added to the international exhibit area on loan from member Tony Bogan. A very cool and very rare officially branded Osborne monitor for our Osborne luggable/portable A Zorba CP/M luggable that is filling in for the Superbrain QD (which was just added, as well) while we get quad density disks (TIL!) up and running.. Best of all, all the above are for museum goers to *actively* use. The modem exhibit is almost complete with several USR and Hayes modems. A Telebit modem, an acoustic coupler modem, and an S100 PMMI modem card round out as many facets of the modem world that we can fit in one display case. The video game exhibit has been changed for East to feature only the 6502 (and 65816). Atari 2600 (same one), NES, SNES, and Atari XE with carts in the machines and representative retail boxes. Post East we might put back the archived "Atari 2600 and earlier exhibit", maybe keep this around, or do something entirely different! Suggestions are most enthusiastically welcome! The "All these things on the wall.." exhibit has been archived for return at another date and we have begun the CPU exhibit in large part due to previous work done by member Jeff Jonas. This Is still very much a work in progress and an email will be sent out shortly with what we have, what we expect to be getting, and what we need. Our goal is to bake the lesson of Moore's Law into the entire museum (supremely important to our mission!) to give more flexibility to the exhibit spaces. Member Bill Inderrieden has generously taken the lead on restoring the Wang 4000. We have high hopes it will be running some time very soon but these things, of course, require a methodical approach and patience. There's an ongoing project to get some DEC equipment running some form of VMS for musuem goers spearheaded by member Connor Krukosky. We're also working on getting the CoCo 3 runnings OS/9 with a solid state solution, but would love a donation of a non-working CoCo floppy drive so people can see what it should look like. The Xerox Star still doens't work, but several members are stepping up to come up with solutions. Any leads on a mouse would be golden. A museum by the people, for the people. And reminder of all our social media feeds: https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation/ <https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation/> https://twitter.com/vcfederation <https://twitter.com/vcfederation> https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation/ <https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation/> Best wishes, -Adam --- Adam Michlin Vintage Computer Federation VCF Mid Atlantic Steering Committee Member

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Cisco 2100 series WLAN controller (and rack kit) up for grabs
by Martin Flynn 23 Feb '20

23 Feb '20

Title says it all - there is a Cisco 2100 series WLAN controller (and rack kit) up for grabs. It's sitting on the rear bench in the makerspace, so it you grab it, reply all.

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Some personal updates
by Evan Koblentz 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

Some folks asked what is going on with me. They want to know if I am still in the hobby. The answer is yes. I'm as much of an Apple II fan as ever, and I am definitely going back to Kfest this summer -- can't wait! But I am staying away from VCF events for now, because there are three specific people whom I really don't want to be around. I feel deeply hurt and betrayed by these individuals. One person in particular -- for the record, it's not Jeff Brace -- is someone who, quite frankly, I don't trust * myself * to be in the same room with at this point. I'm a pacifist, but this one person deserves a large bucket of my aggression. Corey, whose friendship I value very much, urged me to do a Lego/computer display at VCF East. I am torn between obliging (because it would be insanely fun) and declining (because of aforementioned certain people.) I'm leaning toward saying no, because it would hurt too much to see people take credit for my work, and to see all the changes of which I do not approve. EK

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Kickstarter: Injection Molded Clear Case for Apple IIe and IIgs
by Adam Michlin 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

As I understand it, from the same people who made the SE/30 clear case and attempted to Kickstart the II/II+ case. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maceffects/injection-molded-clear-case…

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CPU exhibit, reborn
by Jeffrey Jonas 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

Several years ago, I made a CPU exhibit for MARCH mostly demonstrating how the pin count went from 40 (Z80, 8086, 6502 ...) to 64 (wide-body 68000) to hundreds (Pentium, Pentium-Pro, AT&T 32000) to a thousand. It's the "tyranny of numbers" all over again: too many pins to casually prototype (particularly the dreaded ball-grid-array). I never completed the accompanying chart with other stats: year it was introduced, word size, number of transistors, line width, die size, clock speed, CMOS/NMOS/PMOS). I was hoping to correlate it to the systems that used the chip and how so many mfgrs were in the game, particularly with the homebrew & demonstrators (RCA, Motorola, MOS, Zilog, Intel ...) Adam found it in the warehouse, so the exhibit is jump-started! -- jeff jonas

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Parasitic Engineering Altair Clock Fix Kit...
by William Sudbrink 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

Hi, Does anyone happen to have the instructions for this kit? I would really appreciate a scan if you do. Also looking for a 1975ish GE Porta-Color television (borrow, rent or buy) for VCF East. Thanks, Bill Sudbrink

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Impromptu Altair 8800 Demo/workshop Tomorrow 10-1 @kennett classic
by Bill Degnan 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

This will be a local event, by request, but if anyone from VCFed is in the area tomorrow morning come join us, bring your Altair...We'll have three or four on site, how-to load BASIC, how to test the system. https://www.meetup.com/Kennett-Classic/events/268856923/ WE WILL BE CLOSED THIS SATURDAY 2/22 New Exhibit: Salute to the User Group Featuring the Timex Sinclair https://www.kennettclassic.com/the-special-interest-group-sig/ Bill

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Repair workshop in Albany?
by Jeffrey Brace 20 Feb '20

20 Feb '20

So with the success of repair workshops at Kennett Classic and System Source which are west and south of InfoAge, I was thinking "Could someone do one further north? Like Albany?" Just a thought to try to plant workshops in different areas that are more convenient for members from different areas. What would be needed is a host location and person to set this up. I could help with a signup list and advertising on the website calendar and VCF list. Any thoughts? Comments? Questions? Ideas? -- ========================================= Jeff Brace Vice President & Board Member, VCF East Showrunner Vintage Computer Federation http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey(a)vcfed.org

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