╭┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈╮
│ │ All right,- it happened!! The vintage computer
│ │ festival midwest - is over. All the terminals,
│ V C F M W │ mainframes, commodores, atari's, sgi's, sun's,
│ a retrospective │ etc, etc have been packed up, hauled home, and
│ │ some time has passed for backs to heal from the
│ │ lugging around of many-a vintage pile 'o metal.
╰┈┈┈┈┈┈┬┈┈┈┬┈┈┈┈┈┈╯
╭╯ ╰╮ This year was my first year actually hosting a
└┈┈┈┈┈┘ table, so I decided to write a phlog post about
the whole experience.
The preparation.
================
We'd leave for VCFMW on friday, but I took the week off to prep.
I was planning on selling all but one of my sun ultrasparc machines
so I wanted to go through them, assess what state they were in, and
make sure they all still worked. The E450 was in a lot worse shape
then when I had last looked at it, as the plastic foam within used
for insulation and air filtering etc,... had started liquifying.
This apparently is a common issue in these things. After cleaning
Most of that up, and booting it, it looked like it's prom had gone
bad as well. Another common problem. It also had a fan warning that
I didn't think anything off, but I should have - When I opened the
case the second time, I found the cpu's plastic housing had started
to melt because the fan assembly was unplugged - argh. So the rest
of my day was spent cleaning the CPU assemblies, and enabling each
CPU individually and make sure it still works. Thankfully they all
still did. These machines are something else. If a CPU fails, it
will simply disable that cpu and happily keep running. It also just
allows you to override fan warnings and safe-guards, to the point
where it will literally melt itself down. Neat. Not that E450's are
that unique or rare, or particularly well-built, if the foam and
prom issues are any indication, but they are still cool.
Meanwhile I was also working on PCB's for my nuclear keyboard which
I was also going to demo at VCFMW. I'll post more about that later.
In any event, fast forward a few days and it was time to go. The
problem was now, how am I going to get all this stuff in the rental
SUV? There's no way I can lift that E450 and E250 by myself. The
plan initially was that a friend of mine was coming along, but he
couldn't make it unfortunately, but with that also went the extra
lifting help. Thankfully some other friends were able to help me
lift it all in on thursday night.
Friday
======
The drive itself was fairly uneventful, we've done the trip to
Chicago a few times before, it's only 2 hours away, and the hotel +
convention center was the same one of VCFMW2019 so we've been there
before.
╭┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈╮ Upon arrival we pulled into the back
____||_| |_| │ vrrrrrrr lot as instructed in one of the few
(=╭┈╮ . ╭┈╮│= ~ ~ emails sent by Silent700, and I then
╰┈╯◆╰┈┈┈┈┈┈╯◆╰╯ started unloading, everything but
the E250. Because I now had the same problem,
but in reverse. I did not want to unload the heavy thing by myself
or I would have surely dropped it. Thankfully I found a random
victim^HH^H^H^Holunteer. I don't remember his name, but whoemever
you are, thank you! - The rest of the day was spent getting the
table all set-up, and getting everyting working. There was a few
logistical issues; for one, there was no ethernet connectivity to
the internet. There was supposed to be, according to the emails. I
went and hunted down Silent700 and asked about it, and he said it
all depended on someone that was going to run the network to arrive
- but as far as I know, he never did. Thankfully I had a backup
plan. I brought a cheap-o home router thing, and I had an rpi to
hook the nuke keyboard up to. So what I ended up doing was I
configured the pi to connect to the hotel's WiFi, and set it up as
a router, and hooked it up to the home router thing, which I just
used as a switch, and hooked everything else to that as well. But
it did take me until Saturday morning to get all that working. Then
I also had an issue with the nuke keyboard's USB cable having to be
able to reach the rpi. Unfortunately I brought a very short cable,
which meant that it was back further on the table, which in the end
meant that a lot of people missed it / looked over it, inspite of
the poster I had up. But more on that later. In the evening we all
went to a local pizza place to eat pizza with the rest of the
exhibitors. There was a LOT of people, and this is where I think I
was most nervous with respect to COVID concerns. Up to this point,
everyone was wearing masks, but to eat, they'd have to remove them
albeit temporarily, and there was a huge crowd. The event room they
had reserved had overflowed, and they had to put people in another
additional area. I did wonder how the restaurant could possibly
deal with this sudden influx of people, but they actually did
great. Our food came out in a reasonable amount of time, and it was
quite delicious. This was our first time being 'social' like this
at vcfmw. I mean, I did talk to people previous years, but only
briefly. Me and my wife tend to be people-shy. But here we were, at
a table with random strangers, having conversations about random
things - it was OK! It went quite well actually. It was fun!
Saturday
========
8AM -Saturday... Way too early to my liking. This is the time I get
up every other work day, and I don't like it. I'm more of a night-
owl under normal circumstances, but society has forced me to be
awake at times unnatural to me. But at least, this time it's for a
fun reason - one typical hotel shower and breakfast later, we were
back at the show. The doors would open to the public at 9AM, and I
got back to my table at exactly 9 - there was already a lot of
people there, so I went and turned everything back on, and thank
goodness everything still worked as I had left it the night before.
I soon had finished the network configuration, and then ssh'd into
SDF on the honeywell terminal, which was hooked up to the pi, and
started com to allow people to chat in 'roof`. It took me a while
longer to get the panasonic hooked up to my Sgi Octane to play nice
but eventually I also ended up hooking that one up to com. One dumb
issue that plagued me throughout the entire show, acrross all the
computers, was screen blanking. The honeywell terminal has built-in
blanking, and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so whenever
the roof chatroom was idle too long, the screen would turn off, and
when the screen was off, everyone would just ignore it, figuring
the machine was off. Eventually jwh suggested I put it in the
anonradio room, since it has pretty much guaranteed activity since
a message is posted every time a new song plays, and that ended up
being a good suggestion. In the end I had the panasonic luggable in
the 'roof' room, as it did not have screen blanking issues, and the
honeywell in the 'anonradio' room, and that worked out well. Alas,
the pi was still having screen blanking problems. I had the pi
connected to a shitty small dell lcd, and I also had the nuke keyb.
connected to that, the idea was to allow people to browse gopher
using the nuclear keyboard+trackball - but due to the frequent
blanking, and the keyboard being back so far on the table, there
were very very few people that actually did so (maybe 1 or 2). It
did result in baud.baby ending up in a few prominent youtube
video's, like LGR's vcfmw video,- so at least I made cat famous! ;)
In the first hour or so of the show opening, some younger kid (well
- maybe he was in his early 20's) asked if the E450 was really for
sale - I'm like yes- and he seemed very excited. I had printed a
list of everything I found was wrong with it, including the icky
foam, bad prom, and some instructions on how to get it to boot - I
also left in an old cd of debian sparc in the drive so a new OS can
quickly be installed from scratch. Anyway, he didn't seem bothered
by all the problems I listed. Between the E450, E250 and sun Ultra1
I only had 1 video card, so I kind of wanted to sell the whole lot
in one go - so I listed all of it for $100 - which really kind of
an arbitrary price. I did not want to haul all of it back home. In
any event, the kid only had $30 on him, and I said that was fine :)
He seemed extremely happy! and that made me happy in return. I saw
he posted about it on reddit shortly after the show. It's always
fun to see younger people interested in older machines I think. It
gives me some hope for the future, hah :) It was also great because
now I didn't have to find more victims to load the E450 back into
the car come sunday. Sunday evening, some other friends of ours
arrived, that took over the hotel room we had ordered for the
friend that originally was supposed to come with us.
Sunday
======
Sunday was pretty much the same as Saturday, but around 14:30 it
was already time to start cleaning up, so much shorter. Silent700
seemed a bit nervous about people not packing up early enough, he
clearly wanted to make it home in time, so I ended up packing up a
bit earlier than I normally would have, although in retrospect, I
think he was more worried about some of the bigger displays and
vendors.
Final thoughts
==============
It was really fun to meet random people involved in the hobby as
always. I didn't get to walk around as much as I normally do when
just being a visitor, as I mostly tried to stay with my table, but
I still got to get some 'debug-random-obscure-thing' time in with
AJ Palmer, who was hosting the booth across from me. He brought a
bunch of beautiful rare Entrex and conexant terminals and machines.
I emailed back and forth with him a bit after the show, and it kind
of makes me want to make an emulator for one of these.
Sitting behind a booth for 2 days like that, gives a lot of people-
watching opportunities. Some things I noticed is that people are
primarily drawn to things they already know and are familiar with.
The imac running sim-tower was far more popular than the keyboard
from a nuclear missile silo for instance, even though the imac is
something way more common. I suppose that's normal human nature. It
is an interesting lesson learned. I think next time I will try to
do better to make the exhibits more interesting.
Pictures
========
My pictures of the event can be found here:
gopher://gopher.linkerror.com/1/vcfmw2021
or
http://linkerror.com/vcfmw21