Chicagoland Commodore Convention/VCFMW 9.0 Report with Pics

[c64man]

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/15253259601
https://www.flickr.com/photos/97024820@N00/sets/72157647219084667/

[Rabbi]

I wish I could've been there.  I live in Chicago, IL.  Unfortunately, I had more important things to do that Sunday.  Saturday is my Sabbath, so there was no way I would've been there either.  When is the next scheduled event?  I can't do Saturday events ever.  I've got an A4K with a GVP 060/Fast SCSI, Picasso IV with all its daughter cards, MP3@C64, Deneb USB with a USB card reader in the other floppy drive knockout slot, CatWeasel (latest) FastATA controller, Vortex Golden Gate 486 SLC fully populated with the co-processor, FDC, & RAM chips, IBM AT video & network cards, and the rare Monitor Master dangling out the backplane; a couple A12Ks, OS 3.9, 1 with a Blizzard 68060 CPU, Subway USB, PCMCIA network (both wired & wireless) cards, MP3 in the parallel port & the other with a Blizzard 68030 CPU, both have the SCSI daughter cards; a couple of A2Ks, 1 with the DKB WildFire060 accelerator, another with the C= 68030 accelerator & SCSI card with the Amiga tape drive to run Unix, a Toaster, TBC, a bunch of other plug-in cards, a SCSI card reader; & 5 A500s, all upgraded to plug-in 68010 CPUs, OS 3.1, 2 MB of Chip RAM.

Other C= gear include the Madison Electronics CP/M board (unpopulated) for the C= Pet, no boot disk, sadly.  I've also got an AVT for SSTV and other assorted Amiga peripherals.

Other non C= stuff includes my Timex/Sinclair 1000s, a whole bunch of h/w peripherals for them, such as all the Memotech add-ons, a ZX-99 cassette controller, a h/w clock, a Westridge 2050 modem or two, a LarKen disk board with a 5.25" floppy drive; a T/S 1500 with the T/S 1510 cartridge reader; a couple of T/S 2068s, a video digitizing board from the Milwaukee, WI T/S group, a Centronics i/f, the Portuguese 3" CF2 flippy disk system 2 of my 3 FDD3000s bit the dust, 1 still works & I run CP/M 2.2 on it as well, a Sinclair Spectrum cartridge for emulation, & tons of commercial s/w.

I also have Sony's first computer, a CP/M 2.2 thing with a couple of its add-ons & its monitor.