Thanks guys for being the Philadelphia contingent of VCF! It's great to spread the word of VCF to other areas! It sounds like you had a lot of fun there too! On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 9:05 PM, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 1/3/2016 7:50 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Fresh off demoing at the Young Innovators Fair
Big thanks to you, Chris F., and Todd G. for representing us there! Generally speaking how did it go?
The YIF a huge success. Attendance was close to 30,000 people! A very nice affair. In my opinion, not necessarily "high tech" in a lot of regards. I believe their definition of Innovation is quite broad, including many art, craft and fabrication products. Well that's probably healthy and appropriate for the ages. But I was astounded that probably 90% of the kids coming through had not even HEARD of "Arduino". And I'm not sure I saw ONE exhibit featuring Arduinos, though I did only rush through it quickly. This was contrary to what I expected. There was a great Raspberry Pie development product, however, I'll mention in a new thread.
BUT just the same, our exhibit was a SMASH much like at NY Maker. We garnered a ton of exposure for VCFederation and especially for VCFEast and even InfoAge. Lots of folks photographed our signage and our computers and expressing they really wanted to come to VCFE. Three of us were kept busy non stop and there were people there till the last minute of the show. And Todd, Chris and I had a great time.
I'm making a IMGR album and will be gathering our photos together: http://imgur.com/a/Ntc8T
Now for some details:
The signage i made did the job. I'm looking forward to having a really large nice banner made. We also need to have some good signage for the exhibits to tell what folks what they are looking at. I think it would make the exhibit a bit more interesting and educational, especially for the casual looker that we don't get to talk to.
We used risers for a double-decker layout. It worked for us, but limited the access to the upper machines - because of shoulder space, not height interestingly enough.
Here is what we showed: C64 running Ms Packman and Donkeyking carts with Chris's great home made arcade quality joystick. In my opinion, that kind of joystick is REALLY GREAT for public exhibition, for durability and sheer joy to use. Yes it put the joy in joystick. :) Vic20 running Space Invaders cart Osborn I running basic programs. Everyone loves the quirky little tube you know. IBM PC with the lovely long persistence monochrome tube running Mummies (character Berserk) and Train layout simulator ... but the PC also booted to a menu that allowed them to also run QBasic (popular!) and VisiCalc Kaypro II running Catchum Lawrence Livermore Labs Trainer - billed as a 1976 vintage "Arduino", about a half dozen particularly interested folks entered a thirty machine language instructions to make the display count in hex and LEDs count in binary. The loved it. TRS-80 Model 4 running Model III mode, StarTrek displays, Invasion Force, and Dancing Demon. MAC SE-30 running Lemmings, Crystal Quest, and MACMAN (Yes, that makes three version of PACMAN on three different platforms) and.... a fan favorite for the event... A Sears SuperPong with 1980's color TV.
In retrospect, we should have had an Apple II there. Perhaps instead of the Kaypro. My bad. I would have run Prince of Persia if I thought of it. We had only one casualty, my Kaypro II drive system conked out. That was it. Everything else was flawless.