a blog by Peter Leonard
I spent the 3rd weekend in September out in Lombard, Illinois, at the 6th annual Vintage Computer Festival Midwest. Highlights included a great collection of Bulgarian off-brand Apple ][ clones:
Kids were entranced by a collection of machines based on the 6502 chip:
A rare Canon object.station running its native NeXTStep 3.3 OS:
Rarest of all was a functioning Apple 1:
The show was probably one of the only places you could see an Apple 1, ][ and /// all sitting on the same table working at the same time. Or at least, the Apple /// was working for a little while:
Then this happened:
Apple /// power supplies are infamous for blowing a capacitor — or three. Luckily Mike Lee, owner of this particular ///, had reading materials all ready to go:
Between the Kaypros and the Sun you should be just able to glimpse an Osborne 1:
Computer historian David Greelish recorded a podcast together with Bill Degnan, from the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists:
One of the great things about VCFMW is that it gives you time to sit down with older machines and really try to use them. Even in ways their original owners never did: did anyone who had an Atari 400 ever try to type anything out on this awful chiclet keyboard?:
We also had a whole table dedicated to Rockwell R6500 machines:
Towards the end of the show we were playing around with Newton emulation on modern Android tablet hardware:
