(Full disclosure, some of the following is plagiarized and/or paraphrased from e-mails that Chris and Doug sent to me. Figured I'd throw it all together and touch it up a bit for the list's enjoyment.) As previously mentioned on the list, Doug Crawford, Chris Fala and I set up a booth/exhibit on Sunday, September 11 (last weekend) at the Lehigh Valley Festival of Art, Science and Technology at PPL Center in Allentown, PA. The event was presented by the Da Vinci Science Center and Make Lehigh Valley. The facility is awesome, it's a hockey arena that is normally the home of the Lehigh Valley Phantoms. They had a ton of space for everyone to get their science, art and technology on! The event was very high quality, well organized and really cool, lots of freebies/handouts, kids were painting things, dying coffee filters, launching bottle rockets, flying drones, etc. I actually didn't get as much of a chance to walk around and take it all in as I had wanted. Our booth was too busy! The vendors and exhibits were very well designed and gave the kids a lot of attention, a good experience and taught them something. The were not just pushing merchandise like seems to be a trend at some of the science events. Very refreshing. Make Lehigh Valley had tremendous participation in their solder classes. The event appeared to be a smashing success. It was free for attendees, and the final count was 4,236 visitors. There were over 50 exhibition booths staffed by over 100 people and there were an additional 100+ volunteers mostly from local high schools helping with the event. They also had roving Storm Troopers and other Star Wars characters, the Penn State Nittany Lion was there, and apparently there were a number of other mascots wandering around throughout the day. We set up our booth with a similar approach to what we used for our Commodore exhibit at last year's VCF. For those of you not familiar, we used metal shelving to convert our table tops into three-tiers where we could present retro computers. We had two 8-foot tables available for use at this FAST event. Our booth was busy from start to stop. Kudos to the team! We only had one stoppage when we blew a breaker. Too much retro fun condensed into a small area. Apparently our 30+ year old computers aren't power efficient enough. :-/ Hahah. We had two processor trainers/SBC's set up (An HP 5036A and a Lawrence Livermore Labs MST-80B), a Commodore VIC20 (running Space Invaders), SX64 (Running Chris' very cool power control program/hardware that switches AC outlets on and off via Joystick control), a Commodore 64 (Running Ms. Pac Man), a TRS-80 Model III (?) running Galaxy Invasion, a Commodore PET running an awesome Space Invaders clone and an Atari 800XL running Ms. Pac Man or Donkey Kong (depending on the time of day and what I booted on it). We also had a few things I threw together to let kids print out a souvenir on vintage dot matrix equipment. First was a Commodore 64 running a new program I wrote that prints banners on an old Epson dot matrix receipt printer (kids were writing messages, etc. and printing them out, letters print about 1" or slightly wider, about 2.5" tall, effectively unlimited message length (well, 255 bytes in a string), and it tagged each banner with "Vintage Computer Federation" and the web address. Fun, cheap and really fast. I had also configured The Print Shop on a Macintosh Classic and plugged it into an ImageWriter II. I also converted the VCFed logo to MacPaint format and The Print Shop format so we could have some fun printing the VCFed logo on a dot matrix printer in crazy low resolution. We printed quite a few signs as souvenirs as well. It takes time to create and print a sign with The Print Shop, if I were to do this type of presentation at another event, I'd definitely bring two (or more?) complete setups to decrease the wait time. Maybe run it on other vintage gear aside from a Macintosh? I think the biggest challenge here is ribbon availability, as some of the dot matrix printers are much easier to find ribbons for than others. The Epson receipt and ImageWriter printers that I had for this event are easy and cheap to find fresh ribbons for. I also had another Epson receipt printer set up with an Arduino and a big red button that printed a VCF "business card" when you hit the button. Had our group name, web address, Twitter and Facebook links. I gave these out when people asked for a way to contact us, or how to participate with the group. Virtually unlimited almost-free business cards. :-D In a future version of this Arduino program I want to have it print our logo and a QR code, but I ran out of time for this event. I already have a working QR code print routine (it doesn't calculate the QR code, just prints it from previously calculated hard-coded data). Sadly, the ImageWriter was a bit too quiet to hear over the noise in the facility, but the Epson printers were doing a good job of being absurdly loud and attracting people to our booth. :-D The printers got a lot of action. It might have been the noise and the uniqueness of dot matrix printing, but one adult observer theorized that kids simply really don't get to produce printouts at home. We definitely considered this a crowd pleaser. We had the trainer computers there to show people what prototyping and electronics/code experimentation was like 30 years ago, we compared and contrasted it with Arduino/Raspberry Pi for anyone who was interested. The kids at the event were probably largely in the 1st and 2nd grades, definitely elementary school ages. Some may have been a bit too young to grasp exactly what we were tyring to show off with certain portions of our booth, but they definitely had fun with the games. It was mentioned that this event attracted a lot of low income families and was an attempt to generate an interest in the sciences giving these kids access to people and things they might not normally have in their daily lives. Next time, we'll lower the shelf the monitors were on during setup and maybe get some step stools to have at the booth to assist with the shorties. A few of them couldn't properly see the keyboards the way we had things set up due to being vertically challenged. We heard a few things loud and clear, we need to bring an Apple II (tons of requests for this), Timex Sinclair (no lie, at least 3 people asked me alone), had two requests for a Commodore 128 and a few people even wanted Pong! One of our goals at these events is not so much to convey the computer history as it is to give a bit of fun mental break from the serious learning experiences, show off some technical curiosities, and to some extent walk down memory lane for the parents. Additionally, we hope to get the kids interested in programming and technology, and show off how far technology has come. The hope is that something they see will spark an interest in Code, Technology, Math, Science, etc. We also met quite a few adults who had interest in the "hobby". They took pics of our signage, grabbed a "business card" or chatted with us about how to find out more about the group. This is a tertiary reason we attend these events, but definitely one that is not to be ignored. Doug heard a story from a lady there who's husbands grandfather worked for the army and had commissioned decommissioned an ENIAC, apparently she has the Remington Rand Eniac name plate and a family member has some portion of the control panel. We made sure she has VCF's contact info. We invited them to get involved and perhaps exhibit the pieces and the grandfather's story. All-in-all it was a fun day! I had talked with one of the Da Vinci Science Center folks (I didn't catch her name/title) who was very impressed with what we had put together for the event. Unfortunately, we neglected to get a good picture of the table once it was all set up (and before we broke it all down at the end of the day), but I did throw some pictures we did take into an Imgur album for your enjoyment. http://imgur.com/a/MM46y Also, the event website has a video... http://www.davincisciencecenter.org/public-service/festival/ . There was another gentleman filming at the event, but I don't see his video online yet. Thanks! -Todd