Another Vintage Computer Festival Midwest and Chicago Commodore Convention is in the history books
Lombard IL
September 13th and 14th was the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest which coexists with the Chicago Commodore Convention.
Friday night consisted of arrival and seeing old friends, and of course going out to Aurelios Pizza in Addison IL. Excellent pizza, then we took over the hotel lobby, played video games, drank beer and just bs’ed and visited with friends. I ran Amiga Demos on the AmigaGO Laptop on the hotel lobby’s big screen TV and played some games on it.
Saturday was show day
Lots of neat machines showed up this year and the vendors were great. Saw a VAX the size of a fridge. Some cool DEC Gear, got to put my hands on a PDP 8 machine. Saw an Apple I computer which is very rare, few are known to exist in the world today. The neatest machine I saw was the Altoids tin computer, it ran off 2 AA batteries.
On the commodore side there was some awesome stuff. The Anarchy Underground BBS made its first appearance at the show Thanks to Chris537. Dan Mackey got an Amiga 500, and I found him a matching monitor to go with it. Leif Bloomquist’s powerglove was fun to play with. My find on the commodore side was a very nice Amiga 3000, I had sold my A2k before the show and just had to hand it off at the show to its new owner, So I bought the Amiga 3000 from the original owner, Its minty and runs great.
There was this young kid at the show, loved old computers, I brought an Apple //e with me, And because he was so into it. I just told him he could have it. Ive never seen a kid so excited in my entire life
I sold alot of stuff, and thinned my collection down greatly. And came home with the following
Amiga 3000 with 16MB Fast RAM 2MB Chip RAM 1GB SCSI Hard Drive. And some accessories for it, a SCSI PCMCIA reader so I can use compact flash cards in the 3000, just need to put it in an enclosure
DEC VT420 Terminal- Been wanting one of these a while
Compaq Portable III 286 Luggable with the red gas plasma display.
Sun Ultra 1 workstation.
Couple of 5.25inch Drives, SCSI card for my beater PC to prepare Amiga Drives.
2 Huge SCSI arrays, 1 with 12 18GB SCA Drives, the other with 4 18GB Drives.
Parallel to ethernet adapters so I can put the Portable III online
Here is links to pics of the show
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mobygamer/sets/72157647192484607/http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/eccc-2014/https://www.flickr.com/photos/127863807@N06/https://www.flickr.com/photos/chiclassiccomp/with/15253259601https://www.flickr.com/photos/97024820@N00/sets/72157647219084667/
