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Museum report
by Evan Koblentz 18 Dec '17

18 Dec '17

Today was the last day of the Infoage holiday train show. Busy! Several families came through our museum all day long. We also have a group of about 20 college kids who are volunteering with the Sandy relief organization. Various member visitors today -- Corey/Jeremy, Tony, and Don all stopped by. ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, 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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FS: MITS 1K Static RAM Board, Fully Populated, Repaired/Tested/Working
by systems_glitch 17 Dec '17

17 Dec '17

link: https://www.ebay.com/itm/272986862278 Picked this one up in a larger lot of S-100 boards. The address jumper area was a mess, the soldered wire links were removed and replaced with machine pin socket pins. It's currently addressed to start at 0x0000. This one has a pretty low serial number, from what I've seen the earliest boards had no serial number at all, but this one is the lowest out of the handful of 1K boards I've personally seen, which were all in the 400-500 range. I have it listed starting at $1 as I have no idea what it's worth. If someone desperately needs this particular board (i.e. based on the serial number) for their system, send me an offer off-list and I can end the auction for you. Thanks, Jonathan

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adjunct to bitsavers and Library of Congress?
by Jeffrey Jonas 16 Dec '17

16 Dec '17

old news to us but good to see it in the spotlight: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/15/back-up-back-up-back-up.html A deep dive into the race to preserve our digital heritage [copying up data from old media, using virtual machines to emulate the required legacy operating system, applications and such to access the data formats]

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Lisa 2 for sale
by Adam Michlin 16 Dec '17

16 Dec '17

Hi Everyone, I had previously been asked by my friend to try to sell his Lisa 2 at $2,500 and have convinced him that $2,000 is a more reasonable price. Pictures: http://ceos.io/lisa/ In working condition and not recapped as far as we can tell. If interested, contact me privately and we'll go from there. I can likely to meet for pick up at the VCF museum (maybe even at the upcoming workshop!) or generally in the northern NJ area. Best wishes, -Adam

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Anyone awake?
by Evan Koblentz 14 Dec '17

14 Dec '17

I have an idea that I want to bounce off someone. Who can take a phone call now? It's 12:20am. ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, 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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OT: Surplus LTO Library?
by Ethan 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

Anyone know of a Dell ML6000 style tape library for sale via surplus channels? HP and IBM and ADIC sell the same unit ,all made by some German company. They have a head unit with a LCD on the front and you can keep stacking expansion modules below them to expand them. Looking for a LTO5 one for home to backup NAS server. eBay has a bunch but at high prices, especially when 8TB disks are $150 now. Any pointers appreciated!

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Festivus is officially over!
by Jeffrey Brace 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

Finally cleaned up the place, put everything back, drove home, unpacked and now relaxing. Festivus is a labor of love for me and I love seeing everyone together enjoying themselves. It is the one event where we are just there to socialize, have fun and geek out! Favorite quote from Festivus (Evan talking a selfie with two other guys, a third tries to get in the picture) "Go away. Your not bald enough." Thanks to Herb, Bernie S and Jeff Jonas to help clean up. Thanks to Evan, Ian and Connor for staying late to help finish up. I hope that everyone had a fun time and look forward to the next event which is the January 13/14 workshop. Until the next time, enjoy the holidays! :-D -- Jeff Brace

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Brick Vocational School Tour Today 2017-12-13
by Jeffrey Brace 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

I took the day off work today (at my expense, If I don't work, I don't get paid) to give a tour to Ocean County Vocational school (Brick Township, NJ), which is a vocational high school. Two groups of about 25 students. They seemed to like it, but as always there is never enough time to explain everything or demo very much. They looked at two or three other museums, but asked for ours in particular. It's always nice to educate younger people about the history of computers.

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I visited MOS Technology building today...
by Douglas Crawford 13 Dec '17

13 Dec '17

See the thread. Open issue: A ton of mag tapes are in the basement. Could possibly have C= stuff on them. Any one interested in that? I'll have pictures tomorrow of the site. http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?60872-Gmt-plant-final-cleanout-co… DC

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Please read: Personal note about Festivus + 2018
by Evan Koblentz 12 Dec '17

12 Dec '17

I'm sad Festivus is over. It is my favorite event of the year. Random highlights: - Eight of us arrived Friday night to beat the snow and celebrate Festivus Eve! That was a fun change from past Festivii. - Everyone got their slide rules. Mouse and others watched Youtube videos to learn how to use these. - Alex J. brought HP-9000s and donated a working one to VCFed. He also purchased and will soon give us the correct color monitor for our IBM PS/2 486 (Win 3.1 demo machine). - Jon C. brought ADM terminals and floppy disks (which everyone loved; bought a box for myself). He also brought a very clean and fully working Kaypro II. Nobody wanted it, their loss, VCFed's gain! We made a trade -- the Kaypro for an Intel board. This particular Kaypro is in much better shape than any of our other Kaypro units. - I gave the old MARCH banner to Jeff S. who designed the logo waaaaaaaay back in 2004. - "New Lou": it's always great to meet new members! - There were several surprise visitors: Connor; Tony's friend Ken (who's done a lot of manual labor for us in the past two years); Mouse's colleague (whose name I forget); and Jon G.'s friend Davi. I may have forgotten another person or two. - Festivus Claus is real! He gave Tony the long RCA cable that we needed to connect the Lego desk to the big monitor above our workbench. Tony played the part of a reindeer and delivered it to us. - A non-member brought us a very nice homebrewed version of a Netronics Elf II. I included Herb and Bernie when the benefactor arrived because they both know a lot about 1802. - The final highlight, as posted in earlier emails tonight, was Jeff's idea to donate extra items to a local community food bank. It's one thing to be good citizens in the vintage computing community and the InfoAge community, quite another to be good citizens to the real world! I'd like for us to do more things along these lines. Suggestions welcome. Regarding 2018, I talked on Saturday night about some of the Federation-wise ideas/plans for next year and also sent a long email to this list on Nov. 29. Thank you to everyone who donated so far! Some of the near-term plans include museum updates (displays, technology, maybe lighting); VCF PNW (Feb. 10-11, Seattle!); inventory software shopping; and more restorations. ** Please keep the 2018 donations flowing!! ** There are about 180 people on this list. If everyone gave just $5, that would pay for some museum improvements such as another display case that Corey and I are considering to show things like our blue box, 6501 kit, and so on. If everyone reached deep and gave $50, that would be more than our entire VCFed fiscal year budget from 2016! The link to make a donation is http://vcfed.org/wp/contribute/. As for 2017, "That's all, folks!" -Evan PS. I told a little white lie: that may * not * be all for 2017! There's a cool artifact donation being delivered soon. :) I will announce it when it's actually in our hands. Nebulous hint telling you virtually nothing: this artifact has a special connection to Silicon Valley.

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