Swap meet and workshop experience

[W. Bryan Caudle]

As a noob to both the swap meet and workshops, I wanted to take a moment to express my thanks to the VCF team, volunteers, and participants for creating such a successful weekend.  I truly had no idea what to expect for either event, but I was impressed with the turnout and enthusiasm that everyone shared.  As others have shared, I am looking forward to future events.  As far as suggestions go for the swap meet, I overheard conversations about having food trucks next time, and I agree with that effort.  I also think including the HAM radio folks was a good move.  I would encourage additional outreach to other similar audiences, one in particular might be the retro gaming community.  I know that some folks might have a different opinion, but I think gaming and computing are inexorably linked as both sides have driven innovation on the other side.  I also know that game collectors are passionate as well about their systems and many crossovers exist between gaming consoles and 8/16 bit micros in particular.  Perhaps engaging some local retro game shops could help with promotion of the event, and maybe they might even want to participate as vendors to liquidate some excess inventory.  I’m sure there are other ways to engage this community as well.  I managed to sell some games and know other vendors did as well, so there was some level of demand and/or nostalgia at work there. Just something to think about.

For me personally, I may not have sold as many items as I had hoped, but I had a variety of things and didn’t always have the best price points on certain items.  I learned a lot from this and will be better prepared for next time.  I was happy to pick up a couple of things (Apple IIc and Magnavox Odyssey2) along with some software and small bits from the free bins 😊.  I could still see out of my car for the drive home so I’d call it a success.  While this was my first computer swap meet, I am experienced with vendor fairs in other genres, and have sometimes found it to be helpful when the organizer tracks the vendor spaces.  They can be assigned spaces, but don’t have to be.  Just assign each vendor a number/sign/tag for their vehicle or space so that questions like “who was that commodore guy” can be more easily answered.  

For my workshop report, again I was overzealous in my expectations and brought along 3 projects.  Thankfully I was able to make progress on one system, the Commodore Pet 2001.  With great help and advice from Ian and others, it went from totally dead and disassembled, to a working power supply, working CRT, and mainboard that initializes and boots (with a corrupted display).  Hopefully replacement video ram will correct that and leave me with a working pet.  Again, the opportunity to work alongside others and share ideas was amazing and is such a nice change from doing these projects in isolation.

It was good to see some familiar faces, and to make some new friends.  I look forward to another event in the future, and thank you guys for giving a reason to get out of the house after being home for the past year!