I think that retro computing clubs and events should be documented because it's better to do it now then later. We are starting to lose people and all those stories will be lost forever. I have many photos but those of not from the original years. On Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 12:09 PM Jeff S via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I think we should film a Pirates of Silicon Valley style documentary/drama film describing the founding of MARCH. It can be done in all ASCII, and displayed in the same fashion as the Star Wars Telnet movie.
On Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 9:28 AM Thomas G via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Bill - Thanks for the input! I'd like to embellish a bit more into the detailed history of MARCH - probably on its own page entirely, or somewhere in the wiki. The current list of 'founders' is boiled down to 3 for the sake of brevity, I would like to give proper kudos to everyone who was there at the beginning - Dave Gesswein, Bryan Pope, Claude Kagan, Jim Scheef, Herb Johnson, etc. - once I get things a bit more fleshed out. I in no way wanted to detract from the efforts of everyone else who made MARCH a real thing! And MARCH/VCFMA/MARCH has been around in some form or another for over 20 years now, there's a lot of ground to cover...
-Thomas G.
On Sun, Feb 23, 2025 at 1:18 AM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> 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