Bill, Thanks for the capsule history on MARCH. I joined the list/group/club/whatever it could be called back then around that time. I vaguely recall it was Evan who had found my email address, added it to a bigger list and reached out to us announcing that MARCH existed. I can look it up on my old AMD K5 PC I'd built over 20 years ago if I would just pull the thing outta a dusty corner and bring it back up (I never toss anything out or recycle which I've discovered is a big problem for me now :-) ) I did occasionally post on the classiccomp list in the mid-late '90s/very early '00s, so that may be where he found me from my "Jamestown, NY" address. I don't think he realized Jamestown is at the farthest western end of NYS and not near NYC ;-) Being I was/still am a minor computer collector/historian of mainly commercial/industrial/business computers and never any gaming or the early 'home' computers unless they were 'freebies', I felt that was a fantastic opportunity to be in at least loose contact with some of my ilk. That was despite me being virtually the same distance from Wall, NJ as Dave McGuire and perhaps a few others in our group. I had very much mostly 'lurked and learned a lot' but now that I'm retired a have my own schedule I may be a bit talkative about gear I'm restoring or in search of parts or info, etc. Wish we lived a lot closer to northern Jersey. So, big congrats to all of us 'grey beards' of the group for the past 20 years! Best to all, -Chris F. On 2/23/2025 1:18 AM, Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I think it’s fair to say MARCH was originally founded by Evan, Andy, and a number of other people, myself included kind of spontaneously. It was Andy who asked on vintage-computer.com “where my Jersey boys at?” At which point Evan reached out and with Andy did the leg work to organize our first meeting, a vintage computing exhibition in a racketball court at the 2005 Trenton Computer Festival. I had been talking to Evan months earlier about getting together to create some sort of group as well, and he called me about the Trenton Computer Festival, as our opportunity to make something happen was going to happen. Very exciting because this early in the hobby and we thought we were into something. So that’s how it started. At some point Evan became president, Andy and I co-VP’s and Jim Sheef was the first treasurer. We had a few more events at my house, Mike Loewen’s and a swap meet in Wilmington, Del. The first Holiday party was at my house and the 2nd at Bryan Popes apartment. At little after that Evan secured a few rooms at the InfoAge science Center and MARCH gained the home we have today. The first artifacts were from the Grabbe collection, but soon we collected a large inventory that was piled up in the three original rooms. The first Festivus was holiday party #3. There are many additional details, others may have more/corrections but thats the basic story. If it wasn’t for Evan Koblentz none of this would have happened.
Bill
On Sat, Feb 22, 2025 at 9:43 PM Thomas G via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hello all,
As part of our re-establishment of MARCH, the creation of a new, MARCH-specific website became a priority. In keeping with our shared hobby, I felt the new website needed to be something that even the most paleolithic web browser could reasonably handle - so I used the most paleolithic web authoring suite I could scrounge up - none other than WebMagic from SIliconGraphics (later rebranded as Cosmo Create), which was the first WYSIWYG html editor to be sold, circa January 1995. It's roughly styled after the original MARCH site, though the font and colors are a bit different! I have tested this site to be functional with Lynx, Netscape Navigator, NCSA Mosaic, and even the accursed Internet Explorer. It's currently served over plain http, though https will come along in time to stop modern browsers from whining about security.
Without any further ado: http://midatlanticretro.com/
Some of you may notice the different TLD - the original MARCH website was a .org. Unfortunately, that domain is currently registered by someone else - last I checked it was redirecting to some Japanese company. But no matter - the .com TLD granted me the ability to do some very stupid wordplay...
Of course, the new website is nowhere near a finished, set-in-stone work. Wording, content, layout, etc. is bound to change in time - this is just what I've thrown together thus far!
Let me know if you see anything factually incorrect or confusing so I can correct it!
Thanks, -Thomas G. Chairman of the MARCH Committee
-- ================================================================ Christian R Fandt Jamestown, NY 14701
Electrical/Electronic Collector & Historian: Radios, Early Computers, Test Equipment Radio restorations: Pre-1970s Automotive & Home radios Retired engineer/consultant on electrical/electronic contact physics
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