[vcf-midatlantic] Museum update

[Adam Michlin]

Hi Everyone,

The elves have been hard at work and, as many of you may have seen on 
the various social media feeds, we have all sorts of new things going on 
in the museum.

New exhibits include:

A now working (thanks to member Ian Primus!) Soviet Union era Spectrum 
ZX clone called the Orel (not "Eagle" as I incorrectly reported 
recently) donated by member Bill Lange. Working, as long as long as you 
can figure out the unlabeled Spectrum keyboard commands on the 
roman/cyrillic keyboard! Insert your own "In Soviet Russia..." joke 
here. Anyone have a Spectrum ZX Tetris cart they want to donate?

A Timex Sinclair 1000 to match up with the aforementioned Spectrum 
clone. Still don't have the real English ZX working, but one day!

A new office display with a pristine DEC Rainbow 100 and *all* the neat 
toys (beautiful color monitor!) associated with it that boots into 
MS-DOS and runs a DEC branded word processor.

A TI Professional Portable (luggable) running MS-DOS and 123. One of the 
last CRT based portables with an absolutely amazing color screen

A pristine PCJr including a monitor that was in a sealed box (literally 
brand new).

A Panasonic MSX on loan from member Dean Notarnicola adding Japan to our 
growing list in the international exhibit area of the museum.

Speaking of international, a Bulgarian Apple II clone called "Pravetz" 
was also added to the international exhibit area on loan from member 
Tony Bogan.

A very cool and very rare officially branded Osborne monitor for our 
Osborne luggable/portable

A Zorba CP/M luggable that is filling in for the Superbrain QD (which 
was just added, as well) while we get quad density disks (TIL!) up and 
running..

Best of all, all the above are for museum goers to *actively* use.

The modem exhibit is almost complete with several USR and Hayes modems. 
A Telebit modem, an acoustic coupler modem, and an S100 PMMI modem card 
round out as many facets of the modem world that we can fit in one 
display case.

The video game exhibit has been changed for East to feature only the 
6502 (and 65816). Atari 2600 (same one), NES, SNES, and Atari XE with 
carts in the machines and representative retail boxes. Post East we 
might put back the archived "Atari 2600 and earlier exhibit", maybe keep 
this around, or do something entirely different! Suggestions are most 
enthusiastically welcome!

The "All these things on the wall.." exhibit has been archived for 
return at another date and we have begun the CPU exhibit in large part 
due to previous work done by member Jeff Jonas. This Is still very much 
a work in progress and an email will be sent out shortly with what we 
have, what we expect to be getting, and what we need. Our goal is to 
bake the lesson of Moore's Law into the entire museum  (supremely 
important to our mission!) to give more flexibility to the exhibit spaces.

Member Bill Inderrieden has generously taken the lead on restoring the 
Wang 4000. We have high hopes it will be running some time very soon but 
these things, of course, require a methodical approach and patience.

There's an ongoing project to get some DEC equipment running some form 
of VMS for musuem goers spearheaded by member Connor Krukosky.

We're also working on getting the CoCo 3 runnings OS/9 with a solid 
state solution, but would love a donation of a non-working CoCo floppy 
drive so people can see what it should look like.

The Xerox Star still doens't work, but several members are stepping up 
to come up with solutions. Any leads on a mouse would be golden.

A museum by the people, for the people.

And reminder of all our social media feeds:

https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation/ 
<https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation/>

https://twitter.com/vcfederation <https://twitter.com/vcfederation>

https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation/ 
<https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation/>

Best wishes,

            -Adam
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Adam Michlin
Vintage Computer Federation
VCF Mid Atlantic Steering Committee Member