- vcf-midatlantic - lists.vcfed.org

Small rescue help needed in Wilmington DE
by Evan Koblentz 20 Mar '18

20 Mar '18

Who's available to pick up some boxes of important magazines/journals in Wilmington, Delaware on April 20? (Already asked Bill Deg.; he's not available that day.) These are for the museum.

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Museum report
by Jeff G 20 Mar '18

20 Mar '18

I use WD40 to remove tape/label adhesive with very good luck, and often no damage to painted surfaces. Once the label is removed I usually use regular isophyrrl alcohol to clean up the WD. You can always test on some hidden spot to make sure its safe too.

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] NeXT in the family.
by Lou 19 Mar '18

19 Mar '18

Oh I know all about the community site, I got myself into the forum on Saturday and I am loving what I have read so far. As for the peanuts archive believe it or not I believe its actually installed on my NS! The previous owner was a collector himself and replaced the drive with a Scsi2SD board which works wonderfully well. Sure I don't get the classic sound of the disk spinning up but as long as everything works the way it's supposed to I cannot be picky haha! The other interesting thing about this acquisition was that it came with actual documentation and the official OS Install/Dev tools Disks! The Documentation itself seems to be the original "Getting Started" Booklet that covers both the NeXTstation and the NeXTcube setups and walk through. There is also an official user reference guide, applications guide, release notes, some letters and another book which is a third party publication on how to use the Operating System. The Documentation alone is awesome looking through and I might consider bringing it up the next time I am at the Museum if anyone wants to look through it! Thanks again for the reach out Tony! Lou >Very nice! If you have not already, make sure you check out nextcomputers.org >Especially their file archive (down the bottom of the home page) > >They have ISO images of the peanuts archive CDs along with disk images (cd and floppy) >of many of the utilities, apps, games and operating systems that were available for >the NeXT machines. > >Tony

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Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 19 Mar '18

19 Mar '18

Good day!!! We got a Wang 4000. This was the first computer model from Wang. Before that they only made calculators. Back story: the computer belonged to a chemical company here in NJ. They bought it around 1967-1968, used it deep into the 1970s, and replaced it with an HP-3000. Frank's father tightly wrapped the 4000 in plastic, put desiccant bags inside, built a wooden crate for it, and put it in some corner of his warehouse. The father died several years ago. His son Frank took over the company and recently decided to sell one of their warehouses. While clearing the warehouse this month, Frank and his colleagues found the crate. Frank remembered that the company had the HP-3000 so he Googled, found an HP mailing list, and posted about its availability. Dave M. and Mike L. read that message, noticed it was here in NJ, knew VCF would love to have an HP-3000, and forwarded it to me. He agreed to donate it to VCF. He didn't want to wait until he got here to see it, so he opened one side of the crate back at his warehouse. It happened to be the front. He saw it was a Wang 4000 and not the HP (he has no idea now what became of the HP!) He re-sealed the crate and brought it to us today -- special thanks to Infoage volunteer Ray B. for operating the forklift. Steve A. led the crate-opening party. We were shocked at the good condition of the computer inside! It looked very clean. Steve and I determined where to put the computer (in place of the Data General Eclipse in the museum) and then we removed the plastic wrap. That left a lot of tape residue; I went out to buy some Goof Off (they didn't have Goo Gone). But then there were about 30 museum visitors today and other tasks to do, so I'll clean the new artifact another day. 4000 picture 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MFIYqIOVHKRH-D87sBpTxxnwA3lPWBJp/view?usp=… 4000 picture 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/199JTwJwFYkaxR_hUfhc2o1OsDZ60zBe-/view?usp=… 4000 memory: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WP1qDzZlwn9DLbpsBc3WaFoaJEdJvQzW/view?usp=… Frank: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G2pd9sbWmzxakkQQSdB1Ak2-lLc1ub2X/view?usp=… Forklift: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C4sQpHQamzexjJKoTbV_7QmiIOnkX3-H/view?usp=… Beside the great visitorship today, I also installed the next rack shelf and put the combo DVD/VCR along with the laserdisc player in there (the LD has a karaoke feature... I can't see us using that!). I couldn't find where in the warehouse I put the stereo receiver, but it was an old crappy one anyhow, so it's no big deal if we need to replace it. Also on the agenda: replace the rack's network wires with black ones in order to continue the "stealth" theme which I like. A/V so far: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EU6TZoSwIW5NVtoXUV2Crr6kzODONQE3/view?usp=… Whole rack so far: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vqdd5YqtoLOW1BhWdCa0xBK6dT7oaTsa/view?usp=… A weird thing about the tablet server: its power button is on the front near the top left side -- exactly where you wrist would hit when using the keyboard that sites on top of it (since we don't have a keyboard tray). But the server happens to have pull hooks on both sides, the hooks happen to have round indentations on their inward-facing sides (facing toward each other, that is), and the height of the indentations happens to line up with the power button about a half-inch in front of it. So I went to Home Depot, bought a metal rod, asked Roddy next door to spray it black, and installed it between the indentations. Got all that? :) (The pictures below will show you.) Now the rod serves double-duty as a wrist-rest and power button guard. It worked very nicely. Front: https://drive.google.com/file/d/100dAtR4HGtHJ-Nhzi8f1fTK1HcheJNjk/view?usp=… Top: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WsF5UYQ4EQBBjlIUFPCpbikcyFO8bWVN/view?usp=… Looking ahead: next weekend (or maybe Friday) is when Dean, Drew, and I will swap from the Pi to the server and the consumer router to the Cisco access point. ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, executive 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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NeXT in the family.
by Lou 19 Mar '18

19 Mar '18

Finally a good weekend without snow yesterday I was able to meet up with CommodoreZ of the VCF community over the acquisition of a complete NeXTstation mono setup. For those that did not know a few months back a NeXTstation popped up on craigslist in the DC area. I tried my best to pull resources on my end to get out there but lacking my own personal vehicle few others were not able to assist me with getting out there. Fortunately however CommodoreZ lived not far from there at all and was more than willing to act as a middleman/liaison for me to acquire the NeXTstation. We finally met up yesterday and we chatted up for a few hours, that alone was so much fun I almost forgot what I was actually there for! Transaction done, thanked him up and down for the help and headed back home with a machine I always wanted to get my hands on! Everything runs great after setting up the system. It looks as good as the Museum's NeXTstation! I hope to do some interesting things with it soon enough. Once again I cannot express it enough to give my thanks to Z. Without his help I do not know if I would have gotten this in my hands, but he made it happen.

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Fwd: Re: Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 19 Mar '18

19 Mar '18

Thank you Doug/David. I only used a small amount of Goof Off but it didn't work anyhow. Maybe because the instructions say to let it dissolve the residue for a couple of minutes, however, this is a vertical panel so when I put it onto the residue most of it just dripped down. What's a better method, other than removing the panels (not so easy to do; it requires removing whole components not just typical latch-on panels.)

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Trenton Message-ID:
by Jeff G 19 Mar '18

19 Mar '18

Now I wonder if I'm the actual Jeff G, the "other" Jeff G, or perhaps a third Jeff G that wasn't even mentioned, but I won't lose sleep over it since it was really just in passing. ;-) Trying to keep my nephews focus was tough but he seemed to have fun looking around.

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Trenton
by Evan Koblentz 18 Mar '18

18 Mar '18

Another year of the Trenton Computer Festival is in the books. Basically the same as it's been for several years now -- small one-day event, about a dozen of our group members in attendance (hope I don't forget anyone: Herb, Jeff G., other Jeff G., Jeff J., Dean, Drew, Rolf, Mouse, Ian, Don, Frank) ... also lots of people who know us + come to VCF East but aren't active participants. There were some interesting talks, a small tiny vendor area, and post-show dinner with group members. It remains fun and useful for us to have a table there and it's a relatively low-effort endeavor for us. I brought Corey's Mimeo instead of ours because his is installed in a briefcase which makes it easy to move around. So many people thought it was real, and in some cases I let them. :)

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Looking for weight of vintage computers for Science Fair Project
by Connor S 18 Mar '18

18 Mar '18

Thank you to all who have helped with Connor's science fair project comparing 13 micro-computers! We've been learning so much and greatly appreciate the help testing and interpreting data so far. Connor S. has put together some graphs on time to boot, factorial calculations & time to count to 1,000,000. He also made a comparison table based on information we could find on each computer. We've had difficulty locating the weight of some computers on-line. If anyone can help, we are still looking for the approx. weight of the following computers. (Weight should include computer, disk drives & monitor, if possible) - Commodore PET - TRS-80 model 1 - Atari 800 XL - TRS CoCo 3 - Vic-20 -Tandy model 102 Thank you, Jen & Connor S.

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Museum report Saturday
by Evan Koblentz 17 Mar '18

17 Mar '18

Thank you Tony! The tablet network is about to become much more reliable. In the next week or two we're changing over from the Pi and cheap home router to the new server and a Cisco access point. That should dramatically improve the network. I'm excited about it. On Mar 17, 2018 9:04 PM, "Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic" < vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: Ended up spending most of the day at the museum today. Had a fair amount of visitors. A group of about 12-14 Boy Scouts (8-10 Boy Scouts plus 4 or 5 adults) The group leader mentioned he started in college using a slide rule....when I pulled out the slide rule from the workshop he proceeded to give a demonstration to all of us on its use. Was definitely the highlight of his day and mine!! I had several families come through along with a few other people that were volunteering doing cleanup that took breaks from their work to visit the museums. I got several more apple Computers assessed and tagged for the warehouse. The hallway and museum ceiling hung TVs were not showing their slideshows so I reset them. Bill Inderrieden stopped by and did some work and we coordinated a little more on the April switching of the Univac pallets (new ones that Bill Dromgoole made will replace the older and less attractive ones the computer components are currently sitting on) The wifi network for the tablets went down just as I was closing up around 4:30. I'll stop by in the morning after work to drop machines off at the warehouse and will fix it then. All in all a busy day with some really interested people. Many of which had experience working with various machines in college or at work that we have in the museum (and a slide rule!!) Tony Sent from my iPhone

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