Very interesting on the Lego --> Vintage connection.. Great info Evan!
Thanks! Check out my website at www.mindsbeforethestorm.com and especially the About section + the disclaimer at the bottom of the homepage: you'll see this is all thanks to many of our members. I ran with it :) but many people led me to this point. On Mon, Nov 4, 2019, 9:25 PM John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Very interesting on the Lego --> Vintage connection.. Great info Evan!
On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 10:26 PM Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Friday I gave a lecture at Brickfair on the history of Lego robotics from before Mindstorms (1980-1997). Only 5 people attended, but they were all enthusiastic about the subject. One guy knew about VCF. Another said he came to Brickfair solely because he heard about my topic. So that's cool. IMO the event management did a terrible job of advertising their Friday sessions.
Saturday I demo'd my favorite of the various pre-Mindstorms sets, #9700, using the Apple II platform. I didn't bring the IBM version. The demo worked well until about 4pm. I troubleshooted it as best I could while also talking to visitors. Some of the basic diagnostics between the computer and the interface box stopped working. I know it's not the computer, so this will take more fixing than I can do. I will bring it to the workshop next Saturday.
I told the show managers there was no point in me coming back today without having a working demo. My table was in an island of its own, so they understand and said it's fine.
The show traffic Saturday was pretty good. I had a steady stream of visitors all day, most of which liked what I had to show them.
Lego is an excellent gateway drug to vintage computing. :) Tons of parents my age (40s) came over to reminisce about 8-bit computers. Only one person ever heard of Laser. A lot of people came over and told their kids it's a "Mac II". I enlightened them...
I found out there are several dozen Lego shows nationwide. They experts said Chicago and DC (Northern Virginia next summer) are the biggest. I'll look into Virginia next year. My goal is to have a schematic of the interface box done by then (Nevell agreed to do it) and a working replica made in time.