[vcf-midatlantic] Trenton Computer Festival Report

[Neil Cherry]

On 3/23/19 6:41 PM, Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> Great day today! Adam Michlin, Neil Cherry, Drew and I hosted a VCF exhibit
> at TCF. We setup an Atari 2600 and 800xl for visitors to interact with,
> along with various Atari related books. Neil also setup his home automation
> demo.
> The exhibits drew a constant stream of curious visitors who asked a lot of
> questions, with a fairly good crowd around the table for most of the day.
> Adam, Neil and Drew engaged them with various technology topics while
> talking up the upcoming VCFe events. Many people asked about VCF and
> hopefully we encouraged them to introduce themselves on the list and attend
> a workshop.

It was a fun day, we talked about all sorts of computers we found out
about a bunch of computers that no longer exist. One gentleman told me
about a 'calculator' the size of our IBM 1602 (in the museum across
from the Navy Computer) he had worked on in the late 1950s. It had drum
memory storage and I think early digital. There were 306 made (none
survived). The gentleman created an assembler and disassembler and
clients would send him paper tape to modify the programs to do what
they needed.

Andy and I had various discussions about programming (I think we agree).
:-)

As Dean noted we had a lot of discussions about VCF East and the
museum. We were a very busy table from about 10am to 3pm. Even during
the talks. I did some talking about the home automation, very little
about CDL and Infoage but a huge amount about the Atari computers that
Dean brought. I also had my Tandy MC10 which a number of folks had
questions about that . Unfortunately my HA demo had all sorts of issues
(I hadn't looked at it for a year) but basically it worked after looking
up my notes. Maybe I'll present at next years TCF.

-- 
Linux Home Automation         Neil Cherry       ncherry at linuxha.com
http://www.linuxha.com/                         Main site
http://linuxha.blogspot.com/                    My HA Blog
Author of:    	Linux Smart Homes For Dummies