[vcf-midatlantic] vcf-midatlantic Digest, Vol 34, Issue 5

[Neil Cherry]

Wow, do we recall the 'Junk yard' (meant lovingly) with rose colored glasses?

I'll venture a guess that I started going to TCF in 83, though I did hear of it in '80.
I remember all the good junk (hence the junk yard moniker) and recalled drooling over many
things from terminals to complete racks of PDPs and the spare parts were incredible.
But each year more and more of the retired equipment dwindled and eventually retired equipment
was sold to retired equipment businesses who sold it back to those who retired it in the first
place because some of the systems couldn't be replaced*. Say late 80's

By that time the PC revolution had taken over and everyone had to have a PC. I think my friends
and I must have purchased 12 complete systems from parts and spent the rest of the weekend
assembling them for others. By this time the Junk Yard became the Scrap Yard as the rest of the
good stuff wasn't showing up as TCF had become more PC centric.

And as others have noted most of the good stuff was traded/sold before things really opened up.

Then TCF moved to MCC (Mercer) for a while (got a nice Z80 starter kit and Applied Micro Z80
emulator for $10). Then it moved to MCC (Middlesex) then Ken Gordon (?) took over, then back
to The College of NJ (College name changed in there somewhere). Now it's mostly the talks and
a really small swap meet.

Now having bad mouthed history I do thing that VCF could do something like this with VCF East
(or West or xxx). Won't be the glory days of the late 70's and early 80's but it would be
a yearly pilgrimage for the faithful. :-)

I have a lot of fond memories of TCF. Even a time when waiting in line an some bruiser went
on a rant about waiting in line behind these 'geeks'. I threatened to adjust his criminal
records for minor park and speeding to felonies and them losing the records. That shut him
up, And no I couldn't do any of those things but society thought I could. ;-)

* - A concrete company retained DEC, DECnet terminal servers and LAST until the mid OO's,

-- 
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