- vcf-midatlantic - lists.vcfed.org

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Artifact handling and becoming better caretakers
by corey cohen 26 Mar '18

26 Mar '18

Everyone, Ok, I’m back from my trip to India so could delve more into this issue and would like to clarify a few things since we are all friends here and sometime emails or electronic postings can be misinterpreted in tone. As many of you know VCFed was created as an outgrowth of the old MARCH group which was a group of motley vintage computer collectors. We created VCFed as a federal educational charity with the goal of becoming more professional so that we could expand the hobby and provide a safe place for people to donate vintage computing artifacts so they can be shared with the public, many of these artifacts have personal history to the donor. When I say safe place, there is an assumption of care that is implied when someone donated an item or artifact to us for caretaking. To be clear, VCFed and its members ARE the experts in many of the fields and disciplines in vintage computing, so much so that traditional museums contact us for information. For example, no one could be trusted more than Bill Dromgoole with repairing and curating a Univac or Dave Gesswein with a PDP-8. I would trust no one more than Ian Primus repairing a CRT on something like a PDP-1, if we hypothetically owned one. Common machines like the Commodore 64 or compact Mac have similar experts in VCFed with specialized knowledge of how to repair and restore them. As many of you are aware, our members get asked by collectors and museums all the time on how to handle them. We all are the experts here. So, as they say, let’s cut to the chase… How did much of this knowledge come about? Experimentation which allowed us to learn what we should do or should not do. This knowledge is one of the things our group is great at collecting and sharing. Experimenting on a scrap C64 case with peroxide or some sort of thickened oxidizing solution like RetroBrite is something our members have done and posted the results. In the process, vintage items have been destroyed and when successful items have been restored. A C64 is a common enough artifact where millions were produced and tens of thousands may still survive so when mistakes happen the impact to history or our nerves may not be significant. Heck I even removed the black paint on one of my hand-held football games cleaning it with an alcohol wipe not knowing the paint used ISP as a solvent. They are common enough so I simply masked and repainted it with similar paint. I did learn a lesson on how to clean handheld football games from Mattel. When it comes to rare artifacts, we must take much greater care as there may be no simple fix or way back from a failed experiment or mistake. Artifacts from the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s use paint, materials and manufacturing techniques that are different than those used in the past 30 years and in many cases, are not compatible with cleaning techniques used on consumer items like a C64 or more contemporary ones like my Macbook pro. Some of these challenges have already been faced by our friends at the Computer History Museum, Living Computer Museum and others with artifacts of similar vintage. From their training, they have learned the discipline of both brush and dental pick, patience vs carelessness. They experiment with more common items that are similar construction and age before touching something that cannot be replaced. BTW, this is how I learned some of my Apple-1 and vintage computer restoration knowledge. Does anyone think I tried any of my techniques without testing? It is common knowledge that I will bake some Apple-1 computers in an air oven to reset the ceramic caps so that they are more reliable computers when operating. Sure, there were scientific papers on this relating to military components and resetting ceramic caps, but was I willing to risk something so rare as an Apple-1? No, I tested with similar vintage Atari arcade boards and NTI S100 boards to determine not only temperature and time, but which components need to be removed before doing this. I have shared the details of this knowledge with museums around the world on how to maintain their Apple-1 in operating condition for future generations and so they don’t need to risk an artifact needlessly. So, what does this long-winded message really say… At VCFed, we are trying to up our game so that we can accept and care for rarer artifacts with the same kind of trust people would have donating to a place like the Smithsonian. People need to trust VCFed and we do know the right people to learn from and become fountains of knowledge for others. I think that is what the board was trying to get across with our earlier postings that may have been misunderstood by some. So, to keep your trust and gain more, we don’t want to attempt any invasive cleaning or cosmetic restoration work on rare objects until some guidelines are established. To be honest, this may be the first time someone is attempting to write all this information down in one place for “Vintage Computing” and that is a good thing. As always, your friend, fellow collector and VCFed board member, Corey p.s. I look forward to seeing many of you at the various Vintage Computer Festivals and workshops that we host. On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 10:25 PM, Drew Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 12:56 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < > vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: > > > > > To draw parallels between a quite benign Wang joke and sexual > > harassment/rape takes things a bit far, don't you think? > > > I have to agree here. If you think the joke was inappropriate, fine. But I > don't see how it's "offensive". >

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Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 26 Mar '18

26 Mar '18

Chris F. and Tony were at the museum for us today. Chris said there were five groups of visitors ranging from seniors to children and from very interested to barely interested. :) That's a normal Sunday: a mixture of all kinds of people. We also received the second half of the Wang system: its ASR-33 and the proprietary electronic control box. (Chris said that it "has several Nixie tubes for a display and about 25 keys. It looks like an oversized calculator with a long serial cable" -- just like this one, but without the demo stand and presumably not in black and white :) -- http://www.thebattles.net/wang4000/img/trantanella4.jpg.) Tony continued his ongoing maintenance goal of fixing all of our many Apple II-series computers and Macs. I made a trip to the nearest Micro Center store and picked up a 4-port KVM for our rack.

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free at workshop: thin 3.5 inch floppy drives
by Jeffrey Jonas 26 Mar '18

26 Mar '18

Free: several thin 3.5" floppy drives from laptops. Ideal for retro projects or compatibility with old media. They should all be +5V only (no 12V). I'll bring them to the workshop, if anyone claims them. -- Jeff Jonas

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Help identifiying a disk.
by Neil Cherry 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

Another one of my recent finds is my ATR800 and it's disks and documentation. I didn't know this until after I read the documents but the ATR800 is able to act as a bootable disk drive for the Atari -OR- as a normal CP/M system. I've found a couple of sets of disks for the ATR8000. One 5 1/4" CP/M disk, one 5 1/4" Atari disk (which I think works as the ATR800 Atari boot diks) and a bunch of 5 1/4" disk which I think are Atari disk formats (Atari 810 or 1050 drive compatible, not normal 5 1/4" drive format). What I don't know is what the ATR800 drives used were. What was common with CP/M? Has to be 5 1/4" would a 40 track double sided drive work with a SS disk? I doubt I'm looking at an 80 track drive. Also what does it take to create CP/M boot disks? Technically this is my first CP/M system. Thanks -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Need to change April workshop date
by Evan Koblentz 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

>> April 28-29 by a vote of 5-3. >> >> I'll inform the right people at IA... > So is the next workshop date of April 28-29 now set? Just checking so I can make some reservations. I know I was jumping the gun last time I asked. I informed the right person at IA about our change request, haven't heard back, will contact him now.

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] VAX 101 class - need a VAX does VMS even matter anymore?
by VAXman＠tmesis.org 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic writes: >I will be teaching a VMS 101 class - the basics for those who want to >*get started with* VMS (using a VAX, Alpha, or even simH). If you are a >VMS ringer you might be bored but you're invited too. Why VMS? perhaps >you want to learn about the dawn of the WWW era Internet or you like to >program in C but find ancient UNIX under-developed. Maybe you simply >have a burning desire to expand your horizons beyond what one can do >from the BASIC prompt of an Atari 800. > >I will put VMS in historic perspective. I will talk about the rise and >fall of VMS. - Yes it's still used today but there was a time when Fall? Two new VMS sales here in the past month.

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Old linksys router
by Eric Rangell 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

Hi all, I’m wondering if that old linksys router can be repurposed as a Linux machine and patched, and if anyone has done cool things with that “Woody" hardware. Eric

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VCF BBS
by Evan Koblentz 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

As some of you may remember, last year we bought an inexpensive analog PBX for use with the planned BBS. Martin and I talked. He says it won't work with modems and that we * will * need Asterisk. We'll see. :)

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Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

Dean, Drew, and I were at the museum today working on the network upgrade. We'll have to finish it next week (probably Adam and I) due to some glitches experienced today. But we got a bunch of prep work done, we learned some things not to do :) (pro tip: use a real Cisco console cable, not a homemade one), and we have a solid plan for how to proceed based on advice from Chris L. and Martin. We also did some work on the BBS server and a few miscellaneous things.

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test
by Jeffrey Brace 25 Mar '18

25 Mar '18

Just checking to see if I can get e-mail replies from this list.

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