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

[Jeffrey Brace]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 1:04 PM, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

>
> 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!
>

Definitely! The problem is that we are so short on docents that I'm happy
just to have *one* docent there.


> 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.
>

Yeah Tony is great working on the Macs and being docent in an emergency
(which we have had a lot of).


>
> 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)
>

I'm hoping that Adam will put back some more software on there. I don't
know much C programming, but I remember doing it in college and love to
make the "Hello World" program from the Unix prompt just for fun.


>
> 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.
>

Smart kid! I have to meet him! ;)


>
> 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.
>

I wish I was there to show him the uIEC and JiffyDOS.


>
> 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.
>

Yes, Evan and I can tell you stories about random people that show up that
worked in the industry. It's fun for me to learn from those with mainframe
or mini backgrounds to see how they were actually used.


>
> 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.
>
>
Yeah! Everyone is always welcome to visit. And yes we need more docents.
Evan and I are working on a more thorough docent manual as well as training
new docents.