[vcf-midatlantic] Museum Report - Sunday 2/18/2018

[Douglas Crawford]

We had two sets of interested visitors that both enjoyed the exhibits.
Chris Fala was co-docent for the day. We car pooled on the way.
Its way more fun to docent in pairs, folks!
Also- a bonus for us- Tony Bogan dropped by in the afternoon for continuing
MAC restoration work and stayed with us till closing, and also helped 
docent
while our two sets of guests had a period of overlap.

Tony also told us about the changes that had been made to the Apple II
and showed us how to start the disk slide show from the integer ROM prompt.
He also showed us how to get the NeXT started and properly shut it down 
without
logging out. (So no login is needed on the next power up, which is nicer)

The first visitors  were a couple that had been in the industry and had 
operated
punched card equipment.   They didn't stay really long but were very 
appreciative
of what we had to offer.  They mentioned they might have a photograph of the
two of them back in the day, at their job with the computer equipment, that
they may share with us.

The second visitors were a father/son who spent a long time
The boy was about 12 years old and was captivated by the 80s micros.
It was clear he had been exposed to a lot of vintage tech on the web and 
knew that
the C= 1541 was an intelligent device that could (his words) "handle the 
work of
the drive management itself compared to the 'UNintellegent' Apple drive
that tied up the computer while disk reading and writing"    :O
I think Tony was out of earshot for that unfortunately    :)
Impressive.

In all fairness though, I told him how Commodore had botched the 
communication
to and from the drive making the accesses still slow.  And HE asked a 
great question-  if there
was a fix- and told him there were products from other companies that 
replaced the
ROM code and greatly sped up the transfers.
He got to write a little bit of  BASIC on the C64.

The day went smoothly and we had a nice time working together.
Docenting is rewarding.  You never know who will walk through the
door and what they have done.  Its not unusual for folks in the industry
drop in and tell you interesting things they have done.

If you live within a few hours of Wall Township
consider doing it once a quarter.  And keep in mind, if you don't
docent, its really nice to have club members drop by and visit.
Its yet another opportunity to meet face to face with your vintage
computer colleagues.