[vcf-midatlantic] Introduction

Herb Johnson hjohnson at retrotechnology.info
Tue Aug 14 15:07:12 EDT 2018


Adding my welcome to Nicholas Fiore, who makes a point about his age 
(18) and his Apple/Mac collection and future interest in "vintage PC and 
Commodore stuff". I know little about Commodores and there's many 
members already encouraging you about those; so I'll say nothing about 
that. I'm considerably older than you, so "vintage" means something 
different to me, I'd guess.

I was going to elaborate, but that ended up being a lecture on the 
history of personal computing. That's too long and wasn't called for. It 
might start a fight on "what is vintage" or "what is a PC". So I'll make 
it simple - a short lecture, he he.

Nicholas, I see your list is mostly computers after the late 1980's; 
your oldest machines are the Apple Mac SE and 512K, from the mid-1980's. 
And you have some 90's or later Windows-class computers. That's fine - 
in fact I think it's good that people are starting to collect and 
preserve those. I say "those", because as an older person, 1) I think of 
"vintage" as 1980 or earlier, often MUCH earlier and 2) I myself don't 
associate "PCs" with "personal computing" in general.

Age kind-of speaks for itself. If you are 60 today, you'd be your age in 
1980. So computers before 1980 would be kind of "normal"; now they'd be 
vintage, like *me*. That's simple.

To many of us old people, personal computing began in the 1970's, with 
either experiences on minicomputers from an earlier time, or with the 
CP/M, S-100 and Apple II and other computers available before (and 
after) the IBM PC of 1981. Also: many of us have industrial or academic 
computing history. In 1980, those institutions were using 
mini-computers, from DEC or IBM or HP or a host of other brands nobody 
even remembers now. Those are refrigerator-sized computers; still, some 
people own them today. Fewer of us, even have some "mainframes" around.

The 80's and 90's also had some industrial desktop computers; SUN, SGI 
and other brands. Those became desirable "vintage" computers in the 
2000's for their graphics; then IBM-type PC's became faster and cheaper 
with better graphics and those lost favor. I think interest is coming 
back now, just because they are old.

There's a lot of kinds of vintage computers; this is just a taste. But 
not all "PC's", were Windows or MS-DOS (or Mac OS); vintage goes pretty 
far back in computing.

The points I'm making, Nicholas, are two. 1) don't worry much about 
"being allowed to join" because you are younger that most in this list. 
That's fine with me; you will have more interest in stuff *I'm* not 
interested in, it's "too new" - that's good! You will preserve it while 
I work on something else. 2) Give some consideration to even more 
"vintage" stuff than what's in your experiences, and on your list. That 
old stuff, led to the stuff of interest to you. So we both have good 
reasons, to support each other. Welcome aboard.

Herb Johnson

-- 
Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA
http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net
preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing
email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com
or try later herbjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT info


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