[vcf-midatlantic] Museum Report for Sat 2/25/17

[Douglas Crawford]

The museum had some good activity today.
I was pleased to have Chris Fala come along for the day to co-docent.

Vistors:
1-  A couple that used to work for Bell Labs came through and seemed to 
thoroughly enjoy the tour and exhibits.
      They related their experience using TI Silent 700s and Unix PCs, 
particularly regarding using Unix command line
      tools and toiling with iteratively with nroff/troff trying to get 
documents.
2- A man with a European accent took the entire tour and had history 
with installations of IBM 1130,
      He relayed a story of an installation in... I think he said 
Turkey... where a practical joke was played on the installer
      by a coworker. They switch two of the control buttons leading the 
installer to believe his installation wasn't running
      properly. This kept him spinning for two full days.
3- Two young women visited after getting the Radio Museum tour.
      Turns out one had no computer background at all and one used a 
computer
      only for gaming.  But despite giving them several opportunities to 
bail if we were telling them things they
      didn't want to know, they insisted it was all very interesting and 
they really took in the whole tour.
      Chris demonstrated how the early home machines were operated in 
BASIC via the C64.
4-  At the end of the day a final man visited who didn't spend too much 
time but was quite interested in
       early computer and communications history and was working hard to 
get his head wrapped around it,
       taking notes and asking questions.  We didn't get past 1969 
before he had to bail...

I'm still getting my footing on gathering peoples background and level 
of interest before I turn on the
fire hose... its a good learning
Chis may have some other observations to pass on.
Go ahead, Chris!