Tag: apple

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Vintage Computer Festival East 2019 Recap

A few days ago I mentioned a crazy weekend where all my hobbies had their big events at the same time. One of the events was Vintage Computer Fest East 2019, or VCF East for short.

Suffice to say there are several Vintage Computer Fests that take place around the country world, and you can find a listing of many of them here: http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/. VCF East happens to be the North-East version of the Vintage Computer Festival, hosted by the Vintage Computer Federation, who’s home and museum is at the InfoAge Science Center, an interesting complex that was once an army base, as well as part of Marconi’s original company amongst other things.

VCF East is an annual affair for the group, and helps raise funds for them to further their collection and restore many of the artifacts they have waiting for love. They host a museum space at InfoAge that includes not only your typical 8-bitters like your Tandys, your Commodores, Apples and so on, but some fairly big old iron as well, like a Cray Supercomputer, a WORKING Univac, and more!

The event is typically 3 days (Fri-Sun), with the first Friday being instructional classes on repair, restoration, and use of vintage computers, as well as a keynote speech. Unfortunately I missed Friday’s events in lieu of attending Pinfest this year, so no pics or recap there, but past classes are usually well attended and include a lot of info.

Saturday and Sunday are the show days where 2 large rooms of exhibits on vintage computing are on display, as well as a keynote speech, a consignment room (used stuff), a vendor room (new/reproduction stuff), a maker space where you can both buy and build your own single-board-vintage-computer right on site. other resources. During the show the rest of the museum is also open and included as part of the admission, and VCF’s own museum is open and manned as well.

Each show tends to have a theme, and this year featured large exhibits on the history of Atari Computers, as well as the Unix operating system, with all sorts of Unix flavors including Linux, Unix, AIX, Irix, and other ix’s.

The other room featured various display, such as the GEOS OS for Commodore, a DIY computer exhibit featuring an IMSAI-lookalike with functional switch panel, a display featuring various plotters making live works of art, information on the original ENIAC computer, amongst many more. (I apologize to anyone I missed as I’m typing this from memory.)

The vendor room had vendors selling new parts and accessories for vintage computers, including but not limited to new single board computers, add-ons for the MOS KIM-1, replacements ICs and helpful doohickeys for Commodore 64s and VIC-20s, and even some used stuff.

The show is growing – there were definitely some growing pains this year as the attendance numbers weren’t expected, but next year VCF East will be bigger and better. The Saturday keynote was not only standing room only, but included the outside hallway as well…

Keynote at capacity

All in all, I’m really glad I found the VCF group and the VCF East Event. It’s awesome to attend, and being close to Asbury park there’s other things to do in the area, including the Silverball Museum where you can play all sorts of Pinball and Video games. If you’re near the Mid-Atlantic states (PA/NJ/DE) and into retro computing, its definitely worth the drive (or flight) to check it out!

Did they really run Unix on an Apple Lisa?? Yup!
Atari Computers for days!
If there was an award for the heaviest computer at the show, I’m pretty sure this would have won it.
Fun with paper tape – generated on a Teletype ASR-33.
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The FloppyEMU – Apple Floppy Drive Emulator

Floppy emu in a clear translucent case with 20 pin Apple floppy ribbon cable.

In true Jeff fashion, I finally got around to building my Floppy Emu emulator, only a year or two or three after actually buying it, which emulates many various Apple and Mac floppy drives as well as even some hard drives.

Web Site: http://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

I’ll admit, I’m NOT an Apple nut. I’ve had some experience with them over the years, including picking up various Macs, usually via dumpster dives and curb finds over the years, but they never appealed to me like the IBM compatibles did.

That said, I do have a Apple IIe I got from Craigslist a few years ago, and gave it some love. I had to replace a broken key and switch on the keyboard, and oddly enough, you can actually do so as each individual cherry switch is soldered on. Once I got it working, I had to learn how to use it as that generation Apple is foreign to me. One challenge was that I had zero floppy disks for it, despite having the actual drives, so no way to actually boot it to anything. After some research, I found a VERY neat program called ADTPro that actually bootstraps the Apple via the serial port. It does this in two steps; the first step literally does a dump of assembly language into the built in monitor, runs the code which is really the ADTPro “client”…which then uses the same serial port to request disk images from the server software running on a Windows or OSX computer on the other side of the serial cable. I was thoroughly impressed with this and it worked awesome. I used it to boot up the Apple, then transfer a few disks images to new floppies so I could not only boot it, but do other important things, like playing Oregon Trail. All….night.

Back to the Floppy Emu, rather than needing serial cables and a laptop or desktop to run the ADTpro server program, this little device simply emulates either an Apple floppy drive, or depending on the model of computer, even an Apple hard disk (the ones that connected via the Floppy plug, such as the HD20).

Sadly, my Apple needs a little more love as the monitor seems to blow the fuse often. It likely needs to be capped, so look forward to an article on that some time in the future. Anyhow, I bought the Floppy Emu a couple years ago in hopes that I’d just likely leave it inside the IIe and use it more often, but as always it fell by the wayside and sat unassembled in a drawer. Due to me recently cleaning out my office and finding it again, I finally assembled it as I’ve now decided to try to compile all my various vintage computer tools and gadgets into one big toolkit, so it’ll be used not only for my IIe, but any future Macs or other fruit-based computers that happen to hunt me down.

Lastly, if you’re looking for something similar for IBM compatible computers, there are several out there, including the HxC2001 and the Gotek. I do have a Gotek hiding in a drawer somewhere as well (they’re actually fairly cheap), but I may also buy an HxC as well to round out my floppy emulation gadgets. HxC also makes updated firmware for Goteks to add compatibility and features to them, which you can get for $10.

If your a Commodore nut, you likely already know about the ZoomFloppy, and if not, now you do.

There’s even emulators forSCSI drives, and while there’s only a couple projects in the works for IDE drives, you can find cheap compactflash to IDE adapters or use a modern sata solid-state drive with an ide/pata adapter.

Stay tuned for future articles or videos on actually using the Floppy Emu as well as other floppy drive emulators. For ADTPro, you can find a video of that in action right on their web site or on Youtube.