I had a blast staffing VCF's exhibit at the HOPE conference on Friday & Saturday. Many thanks to Doug, Dean, Jeff Brace for carpooling and making such an engaging exhibit. It was perfectly on-target for the audience, limited by what fits in one car. I was in my element, meeting folks I know from Unigroup (NYC Unix/Linux professional society), NJ Linux group and other circles of friends. The exhibit started with the Discrete Transistor 555 and a breadboarded 555, showing how the first chips were only dozens of transistors. The Bell & Howell chip trainer's flip-flops were wired as a binary counter next to a single chip counter doing essentially the same thing. That got a LOT of attention since it vividly illustrated how the building-blocks of logic gates makes for larger useful elements. Then the microprocessor trainers: 6502, 8080, 8085. Folks adored running the ROM demos via the hex keypads and 7 segment displays. The Apple 1 replica got a lot of attention, particularly with the SD-card cassette emulator instantly loading games and such. Some folks really enjoyed using the WOZ monitor and peeking/poking into RAM. The PET, GRID and others got a lot of love too, particularly the GRID's plasma display. Some folks were into display tech, thus the geeking out over Doug's VFD and LED demo. A really great outreach opportunity. -- Jeff Jonas