[vcf-midatlantic] The Swap Meet was great!

[Herb Johnson]

I also attended. It was the first event I've been to, since March 2020. 
Of course, my last hamfest was the end of the 2019 season.  I was 
pleased that everyone wore masks and mostly kept distance. A lot of 
people were glad to see me. I'm surprised sometimes, at who remembers 
me. Of course I was glad to see my VCFed friends there.

Most of the tech was vintage computing from about 1980 forward, not much 
earlier. On older comp tech: one person showed me a DEC PDP-11 with an 
RX02 (8 inch floppy drive) they 'scored' that day, for a price too low 
to mention. A *single* S-100 card, a UVPROM burner, for too much money.

Otherwise a mix of C64, Atari, Apple (II and Mac), and that class of 
stuff; a lot of ISA (Pentium and earlier PC compatible) and some PCI 
stuff. A little Sun SGI stuff. And a good amount of 10-25 year old PC 
stuff; plus IBM PC XT boxes. There's usually older stuff of my 
interests, buried amongst the PC stuff. a good number of CRT monitors 
from the Apple/Mac world. VCFed had a bunch of stuff to offer, excess 
vintage and some modern-donated items. I grabbed some Mac and Apple II 
class items. One TI 99/4A called to me, for its keyboard.

Not very much test equipment, there were a few vendors. Usually at a 
hamfest, one can grab some older but useful and cheap test equipment. I 
grabbed a little modern stuff, a several year old AMD mobo with RAM and 
proc. Actually had trouble, finding a medium tower case for it.

About embedded computers. Someone obtained an ISA-class industrial 
computer, a rack-mount box with passive backplane, about the size of a 
small air conditioner. *That* was industrial computing in 1995. There 
were a good number of book-sized embedded PC's, with flash-drive OS's, 
mostly to run some kind of service delivered by the Internet. Some micro 
ITX thingies. I grabbed a few of them  to mess with.

So I had a good morning there. I didn't linger to chat at length. That 
will come later. I'll make a Web page of the experience, with some photos.

Regards, 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 comcast DOT net