Here in Userlandia, you'll never find a more fascinating hive of geeks and nerdery.

The following post is a transcript of a live, unscripted podcast. It has been edited for clarity.

Hey everybody, and welcome to a special off-the-cuff edition of Userlandia. I'm coming to you today with a post-mortem report for my trip down to the Vintage Computer Festival East, held down in the beautiful Jersey shore in New Jersey. It was a pretty fun show! I had a good time and met a lot of people, saw a lot of neat and interesting old computers and figured it'd be good idea to share some of the experiences of what I felt worked and what maybe could be improved and other fascinating bits.

It was a quite a drive from northeastern Massachusetts. It was a pretty tough drive to go down on a Friday on a long weekend, but I made it there okay. The event itself was held in the InfoAge science center, which is on the old Camp Evans, a decommissioned army base where they've done radio and signals intelligence. It has a lot of neat history all on its own and would probably be a really interesting museum to visit under normal circumstances. But you might be asking yourself, “Dan, aren't there certain current events going on?” Yep, that’s true! Those current events stopped me from going to Vintage Computer Festival East in 2020 when it was canceled because it was being held right around the time that things started happening with the pandemic.

You know how everything else is going—waves my hands at everything all going on in the world. As for myself, I'm double vaxxed, and I wore N95 masks all the time. The folks at InfoAge and the Vintage Computer Federation had pretty reasonable protocols for people and everything else. It is what it is—it’s a fairly small show. I have no idea how many people were there, but I've done my fair share of conventions over the years where I've tabled as a vendor. I would be surprised if there was more than a few hundred people there, tops, but it was still a very fun and interesting show to go and visit. I'd like to give you guys a feel for what it was like to go down and see this as a first timer. I’m hoping to go back there in the future. They’ve got another one scheduled since this is normally a springtime show. VCF East 2022 is scheduled in the springtime, around April or May of next year. We'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll be there with a Userlandia table! You never know.

So why would you want to go down to a show like the Vintage Computer Festival? Well, if you go to their website—which is vcfed.org—they’ve got examples and stuff from all the various vintage computer shows that have been held over the. About a month or so ago, there was VCF Midwest, which a friend of mine who is local to the Chicagoland area went to and had a very good time. Based on what he was telling me and other video reports I've seen on the interwebs, VCF Midwest is the bigger show. There's more people, it's held in a hotel, there’s more exhibits. Well, I’m not sure if maybe more exhibits, but there's definitely more tables and other things. Compared to various conventions I've been to over the years, It definitely has a small convention feel. That said, it was a three-day show with Friday, Saturday and Sunday events.

Friday was mostly what they would call learning exhibits, where they're having people giving talks and other things, not so much vendors or exhibitors or other things going on. Most of those people were still getting set up on Friday. The average person would be going on Saturday and indeed at these types of shows, Saturday is almost always the busiest day. That's when there was the most people, the most exhibits, the most stuff to buy. If you're going to pick one day to go, Saturday is probably going to be it, but there was stuff on all days that you could go see and enjoy.

Exhibits

So what I'm going to do is talk about some of the highlights of the various exhibits and things that are at the show and give some impressions and other things like that, because I really had a good time and supporting the Vintage Computer Federation, which helps keep a lot of these old things alive. They supply knowledge on their forums, they help organize these events for people to buy, sell, trade, and exchange information. I think 90% of this really is just talking to people and giving other people more information about things that you enjoy. So why don't we talk about some of the exhibits and exhibit tours at the show?

Except for the last one, these are listed in no particular order, just things that I thought of when I was driving back in the car and decided to commit to paper. We'll start off with Doug Taylor. So Doug had brought several old graphics workstations that were doing 3D visualizations, graph renders, all sorts of interesting stuff—at least to me. He had a Tektronix workstation, which was awesome. There was a DEC Alpha too. He had a few other things that were running on some simulators doing scientific calculations, plots, charts, 3D graphics, and renders. And I found this to be highly cool and informative because as a computer graphics person, I would've never have seen or used it in real life because it was all before my time.

Watching that Tektronix workstation very slowly paint in a 3D map visualization was honestly one of the coolest things that was at the show. It was old and it was slow and it was amazing because they were trying to figure out at that time how to do Z-axis occlusion to say “don't render and paint the things we can't see; just go ahead and paint the things that actually are going to be visible on the display or on the output.” Today your phone can chew that up and spit it out and you'd have no problem with it at all. But I thought it was just very interesting and fun to see that all in action in real time. You can make a screensaver out of that or something—people probably have. I could just put it on in the background and enjoy it all day.

I've found that a lot of attention given to vintage computers is a bit skewed. It’s not just at shows, but on YouTube and other places as well. A lot of the driver is games, and that's fair because for a lot of people who are producing content today, their experience was with games. That was true for me too—when I was a kid, games were certainly a big part of my computer experience, and that's why systems like the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, even the old Apples have so much of a presence because a lot of people played games and want to go back and play those games again. It's a lot harder to find people bringing back stuff that was done with productivity or things like that. I was very happy to see a lot of stuff that was not just games. There was a good balance of games and other applications running on all of these old computers. And I really enjoyed that quite a bit.

One thing I found was very amusingwas a fellow named Alastair Hewitt. He was running a project about building a microcomputer out of these TTL chips, which would connect to modern peripherals and things like that. It's actually a very cool project. A link to these will be in the show notes, but what I found most amazing was that the monitor he was using. It was a LaCie Electron Blue. I love those LaCie monitors. When I saw that, I was like, “Heeeey,” because I owned one of those monitors. I worked with LaCie Electron Blue monitors in the graphic arts industry and I bought a 19 inch ElectronBlue III in like 2001 or something like that. That was a $500 monitor in 2001 money. And I still regret giving that monitor away. I should've hung on to it, but whatever. Had I known he would have it there, I would have brought him the hood shade! In production environments CRT monitors had hoods to shade them from ambient light to prevent contamination of the image. And I still have it here in my closet. Like, "damn dude, if I had known you had that, I would have brought that down and given it to you.”

He also had a Be Box, which is very cool because I've never seen a Be Box in person. It does look very cool. I don't know if I could ever be productive on a Be Box, but I just like seeing it all the same, because part of it is just seeing a lot of these machines in the flesh that you might not have actually seen before and actually touching them and using them. It’s kind of like a traveling museum in some cases where people come and bring all of their materials so that other people might have the chance to enjoy them.

Something else that I thought was really fun and amusing and kind of unusual was in one of the exhibit rooms. They had a series of computers all running MS-DOS or x86 emulators that you wouldn't expect to be running them. I think they were calling it the x86 challenge or something to that effect. So you had machines like an Apple IIGS with a PC Transporter and an Apple IIe also with a PC Transporter. There was an Apple Lisa running some kind of SoftWindows type of thing, which I thought was neat. I didn't even care about it running Windows—I’d never used a Lisa before in my life. So that was fun to be able to go and poke around with it. There was also a Iici that had some kind of PC compatibility card in it.

Gotta love rolling shutter capture artifacts.

Lastly, there was an Acorn Archimedes. Yep, the good old Archie. It was my first time actually using a RiscOS/Acorn machine in real life. Acorn had those PC podules for the RISC PCs and they probably had something similar for the Archimedes as well that allowed them to do that. That was just really fun. I enjoyed just having hands on an Archimedes. Those were not popular here at all in the United States. So it's definitely a rare thing. Once again, you can't really see that without going to a show like this. The odds of something like that coming up on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or whatever is incredibly low.

The x86 challenge was really just one corner of one exhibit hall that featured a lot of IBM and other types of things. They had a whole World of IBM exhibit. There were PS/2s of all different kinds: the all-in-ones, the portable PS2s, and my old PS/2, a Model 30 286. I saw them and was all “aw, straight out of my heart.” It wasn't just PS/2s—there were also PC ATs, PC XTs… basically anything that was pre-1992 IBM, they had it all there. They even had one of these giant 19 or 20 inch IBM CRT monitors, which I had never seen before. I'd only seen the kind of very small PS/2 monitors that they had floating around the show. Part of this was OS/2 throughout the years. They had three machines laid out in a row running OS/2 2.1, OS/2 3, and OS/2 Warp. You could go from each of these machines and see the evolution of OS/2 and just the kind of way that OS/2 fell apart. I've used OS/2 in virtual machines, never on actual hardware, because why would I? But I enjoyed it quite a bit.

It was nice to see the actual evolution of it, to see where it went from that 2.X all the way up to OS/2 Warp. IBM had a lot of neat and interesting things. You know, they had their own scripting language, which was REXX, which people might be familiar with on the Amiga as A/REXX. They had their object model programming, which they tried to adapt OpenDoc and other things into. The System Object Model is what they called it. And the GUI was just really nice. It was responsive for the most part. The 2.x machine, unfortunately, didn't have as much RAM as it should have and the exhibitor apologized profusely, but it was still fun to go and pick it up and poke at it and see, “Hey, what's going on in this particular machine?” Maybe it's gotten me willing to try OS/2 to a little more and actually dive into it a little bit. For a quickie 10 minute session of interacting with it, it was nice to see that represent not just Windows and DOS, but the other parts of IBM's computing legacy as well.

That world of IBM stuff was really cool. Unfortunately, some of the machines were having trouble as the day went on. That's kind of the risk with these old computers is that they do break. Back in the day they broke and today they're having trouble on and off again with floppy drives and such. Fortunately people had parts and there were people who knew how to fix things and get stuff back up and running again. But if you're going to be presenting at one of these kinds of shows, say with your own hardware, you just got to keep that in mind when you're bringing it all around.

Some other exhibitors had some extremely cool tech. We had Fujinet, which people have been talking about lately. It started off on the Atari, and it's a kind of network attached intelligence that you can use to access things locally over your own network via the retro computers. They're expanding it to more systems, too. I'm interested in picking up the Apple II version to use with my IIGS, because I think that would be interesting. They had the Fujinet weather display up on the monitor and then you'll find out later that weather was kind of a theme at the show.

I talked with Tom Cherryhomes, who was a fellow there doing the presenting—very affable guy. I heard a lot of interesting things about Fujinet and how they were planning on bringing it to other retro computers. I have a feeling that these types of bridges to the outside world are going to become more and more important when it comes to retro devices—to at least give people a reason to use their old computers other than just to say, “oh, I'm going to boot it up and play a game for 15, 20 minutes and turn it off.” It's a way to try to make things a little more overall useful in a modern context. I applaud them for it and I hope more people pick up Fujinet and then it gets more popular.

Another cool thing was the theme of the show, which was adventure gaming. At some of the exhibits there was a lot of adventure gaming going on. Scott Adams was a guest of honor at the show—he wrote many adventure games. His panel was very interesting, but a lot of other people here were in the text adventure theme as well. You had people playing live text adventures. There was a multi-user dungeon, displays of old Infocom games, things like that. One thing that came up was Ken and Roberta Williams' new game. Another exhibitor to keep in with this theme of the adventure game was Marcus Mira, who was there playing the hype man, as he has been for a little while, for Ken and Roberta Williams is new interactive adventure game.

The details on that game are still a little scarce at the moment. I mean, it's been announced and Marcus himself is doing a lot of work. He's doing 3D modeling and other stuff. Marcus offered to teach me some 3D modeling and, uh, hey, if you can make that happen, I'd be happy to stop by and see. As a regular artist I'm average at best, but sculpting was always my weakest point. So I would definitely be willing to try it sometime. He had an Apple III set up too. There were other things running various Sierra at his table. There was a C128 that Bill Herd signed, which was pretty cool. But most of it was talking about the new game and hopefully trying to get people interested in it.

I was never a Sierra OnLine guy—I was always a Lucasfilm guy because my platforms didn't really have Sierra games. So I never really played King’s Quest or stuff like that when they were contemporary. It was always kind of after they were past their prime. But I'd be willing to check it out and see what's going on. Marcus was very generous with his time and at least within the span of questions that he was allowed to answer gave some pretty good information about what people should expect about a new game from Ken and Roberta Williams.

But I think the exhibit that really stole the show and the one that everybody was just completely 100% on-board with was Smooth Jazz and Stormy Skies. These people had two tables of old vintage Weather Channel WeatherStar equipment. This is the stuff that would produce the images and slide shows and graphics work that you would see when you tuned to the Weather Channel in the eighties, nineties, and early aughts. They had a bunch of CRTs set up basically showing live local weather as if it was the old Weather Channel. It was great. There was some music too—you know the kind of music that you would hear on the Weather Channel. “And now the forecast for Belmar, New Jersey: cloudy with a high of 70.” They would just run that all weekend long.

I have to say a lot of the fun I had at the show was just sitting there and watching the freaking weather. It certainly attracted the most attention out of any exhibit simply because they had a lot of space and they had a lot of equipment. You could come up and see all the various stages—the SGI-based equipment, the Intel-based equipment, their homegrown equipment. Just seeing it on all these old TVs, like an old Commodore monitor that was running the Weather Channel, which, I dunno, something about that just seems very appropriate to me. I would highly recommend checking it out if you have any kind of affinity for the old aesthetic of the Weather Channel or just how weather used to be delivered in the past 30 or 40 years. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

In addition to these sort of exhibitors who are there to talk about various things like the Heathkit computers and such, there were also people there who are trying to sell things. These shows usually have buy ’n’ trades and there was a consignment and free table, but also there were just people there who are dealers selling things, which is cool—they had a lot of interesting things that I hadn't seen before. I think compared to VCF Midwest, there was definitely less stuff for sale. I stopped by and purchased a SCSI external enclosure from one of these fellows who was selling a whole bunch of various cards of different provenance. Things like ISA network, adapters, ethernet, adapters, serial cards, parallel cards, just all sorts of neat doodads that unfortunately were not on my neat do-dads to buy list, but it was still cool to see them altogether.

Another thing to do was taking photos. I took a lot of pictures. I'll post some in the blog post. Mostly it was to take pictures of old computers to be able to use if I ever write blog posts about them, because getting photos that are not encumbered by copyright are kind of difficult, dnd I don't like taking things from people. So I try to stick to public domain or things that aren’t going to be a problem with somebody if I use them. It's always good to ask permission from photographers, but otherwise I try to stick to public domain things that are released instead of going to Google image search, and trying to just right click and take whatever random person's photo. It’s not my photo, it's their photo, and I would rather use my own pictures if at all possible.

Panels and Keynotes

Aside from the vendors and exhibits, there were talks and panels and keynotes. I saw two panels, and the first one was Mike Tomczyk, who was the first marketing executive at Commodore for their home computers. He had a very interesting life story. He talked about his experience in the army and how it prepared him to be part of this computer market that was “business as war,” as Jack Tramiel said. And it kind of prepared him for it, because he definitely knew what war was about because he was in one. Mike talked about how he was in the early computing days, where he knew people at Atari and Apple and so on, and he decided to go with Commodore and he built those early marketing campaigns for the VIC-20.

Mike was part of the William Shatner commercials that everybody has seen. He also was part of getting things in magazines, changing their advertising strategy. Mike’s time with Commodore was until, I want to say, 1985-ish. I believe that was around when he left. And so he was part of those early days where they introduced the Commodore 64. It was interesting to hear him talk about some Jack Tramiel story bits that I hadn't heard before. They might've been out there, but I personally hadn't heard some of them. When he was asked about being in the Nazi prison camps, Jack would say “I try not to live in the past. I try to live in the future.” And for a guy who was in the computer business, I think that was kind of an apt way of thinking about it.

Mike didn't gloss over the problems at Commodore. He was willing to talk about Jack's sometimes self-destructive short-term gain at the expense of longterm-ness that went through Jack's way of doing business sometimes. As he said, business was war and cutthroat, and there are positives and negatives to that. I thought it was just really interesting hearing sort of a guy on the inside perspective from that, because I was never really much of a VIC-20 guy, and they talked about how it was important to get something that was cheap and inexpensive.

One thing that was prevalent in what Mike was talking about was how he believed in making computing affordable for everybody. He wanted the VIC-20 to be under $300. They had to have arguments with engineering about changing designs and other things like that. To be fair, a lot of engineers that he had were willing to work with him on that. They produced the VIC-20, which compared to the Commodore 64 is definitely underpowered and has a little bit of problems. But the VIC-20 was a pretty popular machine. It brought in a lot of revenue and kept Commodore going. It would have been nice to have heard some of these Jack Tramiel anecdotes before I went and did my Commodore episode a couple of weeks ago, but c’est la vie.

Following Mike was Bill Herd, one of the designers of the Commodore 128 and had worked on the Ted series of machines, like the Plus/4 and the C16. Bill was wearing a MOS Technologies t-shirt, which was nice to see. Now, I kind of knew what to expect going into Bill's panel because he has done some of these panels before. I think one thing that really makes him a good public speaker is that he kind of knows that some of this stuff is greatest hits material. It's been on YouTube, he’s done talks before. He's talked about how he put certain things together on the 128 or the Ted machines in the past. Here, he did it in such a way that it wasn't the same as how I've seen him talk about these things before. He knows how to mix things up, he knows how to play to the crowd a little bit. For something like this, where some people here have probably heard him say these things before, you don't know what kind of level the audience is at when you're giving these kinds of talks. So for him to be able to go through and say, “Hey, this is what we did at Commodore. This is what I did. These are the machines I made. These are the troubles that we ran into,” and still keep it fresh and interesting is a real skill.

And that's probably why people enjoy Bill so much because he has a candor that some other people don't have. He's willing to say, “Hey, you know, this is where we did things, right. This is where we might've screwed up a little bit.” It's a honest appraisal of what they were doing back in the day. You can go watch the livestreams that are on the Vintage Computer Festival YouTube channel. They'll probably divvy them up into separate panels eventually, but the livestreams are there and you can go and check them out at your leisure. That's pretty much what I did on Saturday—it was going to those panels, going to all the exhibits, buying stuff, going around and seeing other things like that.

Hanging Out on Sunday

Sunday was a much quieter day. I spent most of it just kind of wandering around, seeing what was going on in consignment and hanging out with various people. So in one corner of the exhibit hall they had the Mac shenanigan zone, which was anchored by some YouTubers. We had Steve, AKA Mac84—you might've heard him before on the Icon Garden. There was Mike from Mike's Mac Shack and Sean from Action Retro who were all in this corner with their prototype Macs and a MUD running on a Quadra 950 server, some clones, and all sorts of interesting things. I hung out with them for the most part on Sunday afternoon. It was cool to hang out and put some names to faces and talk to people in person.

Yours truly on the left, Steve on the right.

We had a little bit of shenanigans there themselves because Sean had accidentally torched his G4 upgraded clone by trying to boot it with a Leopard disc. We wound up having to do a little bit of on-the-show surgery to reset something using a spare video card from one of Steve's clones. You never know quite what you're going to get. It was neat to see the prototype iMac G5 with the compact flash slot, which was deleted in the shipping model. We've heard of and seen these things in pictures, but it's nice to actually see them in person. I would recommend you all subscribing to these guys’s channels—they’re all good. They all talk about old Macs. If you're interested in those kinds of old things, they're cool guys to know and hang around with.

Like I said earlier, if you're interested in seeing the majority of stuff in the show, you're better off going on Saturday than Sunday. But one of the nice things about a Sunday at a show is that there's less people and it's more relaxed. It's easier to hang out with people when there's less people around. You can just break off into smaller groups and just chit chat or whatever. It's also easier to do a little more negotiating if you're interested in buying stuff on a Sunday as well. By then I had already done all of my purchasing.

My Big Get: A NeXTstation!

And speaking of purchasing, a thing that I bought was a monochrome NeXTstation. That's right, a NeXT slab—I now own one! I was thinking really hard about buying the color one, but the problem was, would my monitors work with it? I had to think about it a little bit, but unfortunately, hesitation was a problem because by the time I said, “wait a minute, one of my monitors has RGB BNC connectors,” the color workstation was already gone. So I wound up buying the monochrome NeXTstation for 75 buckazoids. Doesn't have a hard drive in it, but the machine otherwise works. So I just have to put a SCSI2SD or something else into it. I can wire up some way to hook it up to a monitor, and I have accessories that can work for keyboards and mice. So I'm looking forward to giving that machine a shot. Plus I've always wanted a NeXT just to have in my collection. It's a pretty good example of one, and it's in very good shape. So even if it's just a display piece, I'm all for it.

I bought the NeXT from Matt Goodrich of Drakware. He was also selling some other things like ADB to USB converters, SGI to USB, NeXT to USB, basically just ways of using modern keyboards and mice with older computers. There's still plenty of ADB things out there, but sometimes you just want to use a nice new keyboard and mouse. Those things did what they said on the tin. He had a nice old Mac SE connected with one and it worked. I’d have no complaints if I needed one. He also had a complete NeXT cube, with a SCSI2SD, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. He listed it for a thousand dollars, and somebody bought it for a thousand dollars. Good for you, man. I'm glad that NeXT found a home. It was too rich for my blood, even though I would love to have a full NeXT setup. But a thousand dollars was well out of my budget for big ticket items. I said, “well, I would allow a $250 big ticket item,” and I didn't even spend that much. The NeXTstation was much cheaper than I thought it would be.

Final Thoughts on VCF East 2021

So after I got home, what would I say about the show overall? I enjoyed it a lot—it was a fun time. If you like old computers, you'll definitely have a good time there. I saw somebody with a nice Wang professional computer, which was nice to see as somebody who lived in the shadow of the Wang towers. There was a lot of just unusual things like the Heathkits. I have no attachment to those Heathkit machines, but it was nice to see them and actually play with them. And hopefully it gets some other people involved to say “Hey, now I'm interested in collecting and restoring these.”

I really enjoyed my time at the show, but I hope that we could have some improvements for future ones. I can definitely tell that this show is a labor of love. It's run by volunteers as most all of these conventions are. But I think something that could be improved is how they're handling the consignment section. Consignments would open up at nine o’clock, and if you were not there on time you could miss out. And I will say the pickings were slim half an hour after things opened—you could definitely tell that a lot of things just got picked off very early. It's very hard to survey what was available, and you might not even have known something you wanted was there.

I don't really see how they can improve that in an equitable way without other knock on effects. What I would do is say the consignment hall is allowed to be open at nine o'clock for people to browse and be able to bring stuff in and set up. But people would only be able to purchase after, say, 10 o’clock. That way people at least have a chance to know what was coming. Yes, there was stuff that came in at various points during the day, but you would have had no idea what was coming and going unless you hung out in that hall all day. Truthfully, for a lot of the day it was kind of empty. There was stuff that came and went kind of slowly, but you would have been in there for an hour and you've been okay, I've probably seen enough.

Unless you had like some kind of notification system to know when things were going on sale, you would’ve had no idea as to when to check it out to even be able to buy something. So I didn't get anything in the consignment hall. I was actually going to put a G4 in there, but fortunately somebody contacted me before the show and I was able to trade it for a PowerBook G4 and I didn't have to worry about any of that. My other stuff that I brought with me was specifically to give to Steve: a Power Mac 8100 with a G3 card and a beige G3 tower. Hopefully we'll be seeing that on his channel in the near future.

Something else to improve would be the handling of the VIP guests. I know they had some people out in the front foyer at times, and at the end of Bill’s thing, someone said “you’ll see him in the cafeteria." I'm like, well, where's the cafeteria? Is that the staff room where they're having the lunches and stuff or what? Is that in the consignment area? It wasn't really clear. Most conventions usually have dedicated tables for like the guests of honor and things like that. I think that would have probably made sense here. I had no idea where to find Bill or these other people. Maybe they didn't want people to come by and talk to them. Maybe they just want to walk around and have fun. And they did. I mean, I saw Mike Tomczyk hanging around at various tables, but it's just one of those things where if I was running things, I would probably try to figure out a way to make those guests a little easier to find. I'm not saying they need to be chained to the table the entire show, just more to say, “Hey, Bill Herd is going to be at X table at Y time during the day, come by, buy his book, shake his hand.”

A thing I think they did really well was that even if you weren't at the show, you could still see everything because they livestreamed the keynotes. So if you wanted to see the Bill Herd talk or Mike’s talk, or Bill Mensch, or Scott Adams, you just go on the VCF YouTube channel and watch them, which I think is very fair. It’s tough for people to go to these things and to give them the ability to see it without having to be there is a smart move. Maybe they have other people living in the house that are maybe higher risk. I'm a single guy—there’s nobody else living in my house. So my exposure risk is probably lower than other people's. I think that was pretty smart of them to do something like that.

So the question is, will I be back in April? The answer is maybe. I enjoyed it a lot. I do have a feeling that I would be seeing a lot of the same stuff. If I went back in April, I don't know what they're going to do for more guests or things like that. It is kind of a long drive. Normally if I go to New York city for things, take the train. I don't like driving through there, and even just going around New York City is a pain. Even if you go over the Tappan Zee and take the long way around, it's still a five to six hour drive. For a long weekend, that’s doable, I’ve done it before, but it’s still a slog. Also, getting to the show requires a car. If you want to take the train, there is one that goes from Penn station down to Belmar. Then you'll need to take a lift from the local station or arrange some other transportation to get to the show. It might still be a good idea to bring your car anyway, just because if you decide to buy something, you need a way to lug all that stuff home.

Next year I'm definitely going to try to go to VCF Midwest, mainly because I know people in the area and it would be fun to go with other people, and it is a bigger show. Will this show grow? I don't know, but if you have any kind of interest at all in these old computers, or even just computing in general, there's other stuff to see there at the InfoAge as well. They have a World War II museum. They have other things are going on there as well, which would certainly interest you if you had a family or young kids. I saw a pretty decent amount of teenagers and other people who I could tell are getting into this because it's a fun thing to get into.

I hope that winds up bringing more people into the fold, because these machines are getting older, and the reality is, is we’re all getting a little older. So I'll close out saying it was nice to see some people and see some new things. And hey, now that I've got a NeXTstation, maybe I'll be able to make some more stuff about NeXT. Thanks for listening and check out the Vintage Computer Federation. See if they have an event in your area. They have VCF East VCF, Midwest and VCF Eest, which is in Portland, Oregon. So make sure to check it out if you're at all interested in old computers and old tech.

Here in Userlandia, a timeline of computing, through the lens of one person's life—mine.

Over the course of four decades I’ve owned many computers, used many more. Most of them are ordinary. Some of them are legendary! These are Computers of Significant History. The timeline starts in October 1982, when the Commodore 64—my first computer, and maybe yours too—was released. I came along six months later.

The Classic Breadbin Commodore 64 - via Wikipedia

Writing about the C64 is always a little intimidating. There’s an ocean of blog posts, videos, and podcasts out there about the world’s best-selling eight-bit micro—and even more will come next year in celebration of its fortieth birthday. Programmers, geeks, and retro enthusiasts across the globe credit the C64 for giving them their starts. Its sales totaled twelve to seventeen million units depending on who you ask, and with that many out there it’s easy to find someone with ties to the Little Computer That Could.

Commodore founder Jack Tramiel could count the Vincent family among the millions who bought one of his computers for the masses. You can say a lot about old Jack—not all of it nice—but he was right about the power of computing in the hands of the everyman. My lower-middle class family couldn’t afford an extravagance like an IBM PC, so affordable microcomputers like the Commodore 64 gave us an opportunity to join the computer revolution. When I was a small child, my dad taught me commands to load Frogger from the READY prompt. I was four and had no idea what "load star comma eight comma one" meant, except that it was a fun game about crossing the street. Shades of my four year old nephew playing Crossy Road on his mom’s phone. With over a decade in our home, it was like part of the family. It let me play games, print greeting cards, make my homework all tidy, and did my parents' taxes, whatever that meant. It hung around for all that time because of our inability to afford an IBM PC, a Macintosh, or even an Amiga. We accumulated various C64s and accessories over the years—our home seemed to be a dumping ground for retired units. This came to an end in 1997, when my uncle gave me his Compaq 486. A Windows machine meant no more need for a Commodore, and I tossed the C64 aside like Monty Burns ditching Bobo the bear. And like Burns, I’ve also realized the error in my ways.

The Commodore 64 wasn’t the only computer in my youth, of course—but it was the most influential. A C64 was just enough computer to let a curious user learn just enough to be dangerous. It came with a built-in BASIC language interpreter in ROM, and there’s color graphics and sound capabilities, and it’s got enough IO to interface with pretty much anything. That doesn't sound like anything particularly amazing today, but its more expensive competitors needed add-in cards for some of these features. They were also easy to fix and maintain, which, regrettably, was something they needed rather often. If that wasn't enough for you, its expandability meant that the massive userbase was able to generate some truly legendary add-ons, allowing it to do pretty much anything. All the ingredients to entice your hidden—or not-so-hidden—geek.

If packaged software didn't fill your needs, you could always try The Scene, with a capital S. My neighbor up the street ran the local Commodore Users Group, and every now and then, my dad would go to a copy party, and bring home amazing loot. Scenesters were trading diskettes at local user groups, downloading kickin’ SID soundtracks from bulletin boards, and watching—or writing—mind-blowing demo screens when launching cracked games. By the time I was old enough to know about The Scene, Commodore was in its death throes. If ten years is the minimum for something to be retro, then I was a retro enthusiast in 1994 when I discovered my family’s multi-year archive of Compute!’s Gazette. Long past their sell-by dates, those magazines were nevertheless still gripping reads for an eleven-year-old hungry for anything to do with a computer. I even tried my hand at compiling some of the programs included in the magazines. Since we didn’t have the magazine’s optional floppies, this meant typing every line of printed source code from the magazine into the computer. Thanks to bugs or their limited utility, these type-in programs usually ended with type-in disappointment. Old mags wouldn’t sate the hunger for long—I discovered Macintoshes with CD-ROMs later that year, and every trip to the library resulted in a bigger pile of books about IBM compatibles and Macs. Pretty soon I was buying PC/Computing magazine at the drugstore and fully able to explain the benefits of Windows 95. I hadn’t just kept up with the Commodore—I left it in the dust.

Today, the C64 is undergoing a bit of a revival. You can buy new software and hardware accessories for a computer that’s spent more years being obsolete than useful. SID emulators are available as plugins for major digital audio workstations to generate smooth retro grooves. Thanks to bloggers and Youtubers creating step-by-step fixit guides, once-forgotten machines are being restored to their former glory. You can even buy a plug-and-play mini-C64 to get an eight-bit fix on a modern TV without the complications of decades-old hardware. Commodore may be dead, but the machine lives on.

I’ve got my share of C64 hot takes, for whatever that's worth. Its sound chip, for instance—the SID. Revered for its power, flexibility, and quality, its creators went on to found synthesizer powerhouse Ensoniq—but I wouldn’t rank it as my favorite synthesizer of the 8-bit era. If I never hear a generic modulated SID square wave again—you know the sound—I’ll count myself lucky. Not every C64 game was blessed enough to have a Rob Hubbard or Follin Brothers masterpiece for a soundtrack. The SID had its fair share of pedestrian and clunker tunes just like the NES, and forgettable music tends to be, well… forgotten. I think I prefer the aesthetics of most NES soundtracks, and that’s not accounting for carts with add-on sound chips. If push came to shove, I’d have to side with the NES.

Now that’s a classy computer. Via Christian Hart.

Another controversial preference is my fondness for the revised 64C over the classic breadbin design. I remember liking the feel of typing on the 64C’s keyboard, though I admit I haven’t punched a key on either in years. Keyboard mechanics aside, the 64C is just a better-looking machine. If there is a design language that came to define Commodore, it’s the wedge. Starting with the Commodore 128 and reaching perfection with the Amiga 1200, the wedge brought some much-needed style to Commodore products. Now, Commodore didn’t exactly invent the wedge—computers with integrated keyboards were popular at the time. What set Commodore’s wedge apart was the two-tier design—the keyboard slope was taller than the back half of the machine, creating a multi-level arrowhead profile. Of all the wedges, the 64C hits the Goldilocks zone. There’s just enough height for comfortable typing, the rectangular part is not too deep, and the proportions of the keyboard to the case itself are perfectly balanced. Most appealing to me is the particular shade of almond beige shared between the 128 and 64C—and yes, I do hear myself saying these words. It’s a soothing, pleasant shade that I prefer over the brownish tint of the breadbin. The choice of a 64C or a breadbin is like deciding to buy a Chevy Camaro Z28 or a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. They’re largely the same car, but the Pontiac’s style will sway me every time.

Yet what bothers me more than differences between chips and cases is an attitude bubbling around the retro community. I keep seeing posts by people—usually from Europe or the UK, but not always—proclaiming the “superiority” of home computers over game consoles, or more precisely, the owners of those consoles. “Why, those sheltered Americans with their Nintendos didn’t know what they were missing! Micros just weren’t a thing in the States, you know. Besides, consoles couldn't teach you how to program. Anyone with a C64 or ZX Spectrum could code in their bedroom and make the next big hit! Oh, by the way, have you heard the good news about the Amiga?”

Now before I’m pelted with a hail of DIP chips, I know that’s an uncharitable characterization. I’m sure most people across the pond don’t think that way, but I’ve seen enough comments like these that I start to worry. I don’t think they’re being malicious—but they are oversimplifying the complicated reality of both markets. Home computers of all price points existed here in the States! Millions of computers sold by Apple, Radio Shack, Atari, and more just don’t count, I guess. Commodore was an American company, with products designed by American engineers, manufactured and distributed worldwide. Some Europeans seem to think that the American demoscene just… didn't exist. Lastly, Eurogamers loved consoles just as much as we did. Sega’s Megadrive—known as the Genesis here in the States—was immensely popular in Europe.

1983’s video game market crash gave Americans a healthy skepticism of both console and computer makers. Computer companies weathered the crash largely on the back of productivity applications. Americans were obsessed with computers being Legitimate Tools for Businesses to Business™, even though demand for computer games was a shadow driver of hardware improvements. Companies like Commodore had strong graphics and sound capabilities that could benefit markets like professional video or desktop publishing, but they feared what would happen if the Amiga was labeled as just another video game machine. Ironically, this fear kept them from advertising the Amiga’s multimedia prowess, a costly mistake that squandered a decade-long head start. Nintendo had no such fears and their American subsidiary gleefully kicked the stumbling Atari into its waiting grave. The Nintendo Entertainment System brought legitimacy back to video games thanks to hit franchises with a cool factor that computer makers like Commodore lacked, fueled by dumptrucks full of money poured into the maw of an unstoppable marketing juggernaut.

When your competitor is able to license their hit franchises out for toys, Saturday morning cartoons, and even breakfast cereal, you’re not just in different leagues—you’re not even playing the same game. Atari’s time in the limelight had passed. They just couldn't recover their pre-crash magic, and Commodore never had any to begin with. By 1988, when the NES captured the hearts and minds of American video gamers, the fight was over. Computers wouldn’t capture the mainstream American gaming spotlight again until affordable multimedia CD-ROMs and id Software’s Doom upended the PC gaming narrative.

That said, computer gaming in America didn’t just disappear for a decade after 1983. Americans still had computer games, just like Europeans still had consoles. After all, there’s plenty of veterans of computer and console wars that raged on American soil. It's the same old partisan mentality that you can still find rehashing decades-old arguments in the aisles of computer shops. There's a lot of memory wrapped up in these computers—and I don't just mean what's inside them. When questions like “why wasn’t the NES as popular in Europe compared to America” or “why was the Amiga exceptional” come up, people want to argue about made their systems special.

But not being part of the scene or not creating your own games doesn’t mean your formative gaming experience was illegitimate. The suffering we endured from our old, slow, and sometimes unreliable computers didn’t make us superior. My skills as a programmer are subpar at best, and I loved both my C64 and NES. Fact is, they both cemented an enduring enthusiasm for video games and technology. There’s enough room in our computing lives to let consoles and microcomputers coexist on their own merits. As enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic learn about each others’ histories, I think we’ll find out that we have more in common than we realize—like our shared love for the Commodore 64.

I don’t think the C64 itself was the only possible trigger for my love of computing—my hunch is that if we were an Apple or Atari family I still would have been curious enough to learn more about computing, although barring a time machine we'll never know for sure. If not for where I was born, my fondness for the NES, Super Nintendo, and C64 might be for the BBC Micro and the Sega Megadrive. The Commodore 64’s bargain price created new opportunities for me and for millions around the globe. You see the same spirit today in products like the Raspberry Pi—small, inexpensive computers built for simple tasks, easily expandable, with a barrier to entry so low that children can master them.

Years after our C64 shuffled off to the old computer’s home, my curiosity turned to Commodore’s history. I learned about young Jack Tramiel’s life as a holocaust survivor—how he endured the Nazi occupation of Poland, joined the US Army after being rescued from a concentration camp, and parlayed that Army experience into a typewriter business called Commodore Business Machines. From there it went on to calculators, and eventually computers. Jack’s one of the few who managed to get one over on Bill Gates. Tramiel negotiated a deal for BASIC that was so lopsided in Commodore’s favor that Gates retaliated by inserting passive-aggressive easter eggs in Microsoft’s BASIC source code.*

*A note from future Dan: it turns out that the story of Bill’s easter egg is much more complicated, and this story might just be myth. Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has a great video on the origin of the egg. Spoiler alert: Gates put it in BASIC before Commodore made their deal. Of course, this wasn’t available at the time I wrote this, but I’d like to correct my mistaken repetition of common myths.

But even in good times, Jack Tramiel’s leadership style was best described as slash-and-burn. Commodore’s culture during the C64’s heyday was chaotic because Jack always tried to squeeze more out of less. Commodore didn’t have many friends, and products seemed to succeed in spite of Jack’s leadership, not because of it.

Jack wasn’t the only catalyst for Commodore’s successes or failures—the show still went on even after he left the company in 1984 after an explosive boardroom fight with Irving Gould, Commodore’s chairman and financier. He found a new home later that year at Atari. With or without Jack, it was clear that Commodore’s worst enemy wasn’t Apple or IBM, it was itself. Amazing engineering accomplishments by Chuck Peddle, Bill Herd, Dave Haynie, and more created innovative products that changed the world, but good product and engineering accomplishments can’t save you from bad marketing and management. For those in the upper echelons of Commodore, it seemed like selling computers was just a means to an end—and they didn’t agree on what the end was. Apple and IBM wanted to change the world. Irving Gould only wanted to fund his private jet and lavish lifestyle. And Jack—well, Jack cared about quality products, but wasn't willing to pay what things actually cost. On the other hand, Commodore continued driving into this wall even after he left.

Being outside Silicon Valley and the west coast computer circle also blunted Commodore’s impact on popular culture. Both its MOS foundry and company HQ were located in West Chester—not Westchester—Pennsylvania. Nestled in the provincial fields west of Philadelphia, Commodore had more in common with the Rust Belt than with its competitors in Silicon Valley or Route 128. This explains so much about Commodore and its products—its fall mirrored the decline of the northeast’s industrial base. That “get it out the door no matter what” manufacturing ethos sacrificed long-term customer satisfaction on the altar of short-term profit. As the eighties turned into the nineties, desperation and malaise seeped into a slowly failing enterprise, polluting its culture like the Superfund site around the MOS foundry. Questioning Gould or his lackeys was a quick way to get shoved out the door.

Commodore kept pushing the 64 until the day it shuttered in April 1994, mirroring small-time celebrities who kept coasting on their fifteen minutes of fame. Even though the Amiga had been the headline driver for Commodore in its later days, the eight-bit machine kept overstaying its welcome because it was easy money. It was a sad death—the 64 should have had a proper retirement, with new products to carry the mantle of “computers for the masses, not for the classes.” If Commodore had addressed the managerial bankruptcy that allowed the 64 to still be sold as a new product in 1994 while the Amiga’s proposed AAA chipset starved to death, maybe they could have avoided actual bankruptcy. Today, Commodore’s intellectual property sits in limbo, slowly withering as various companies squabble over the rights to various bits of Jack Tramiel’s legacy. But we’ll always have the games, and the memories, and the accomplishments from people inspired by Commodore products. A computer is just a thing—it’s what we do with it that matters. So long as technology is accessible to the masses, the spirit of the Commodore 64 lives on.

The Vintage Computer Festival East 2021 Report

Exhibits

Panels and Keynotes

Hanging Out on Sunday

My Big Get: A NeXTstation!

Final Thoughts on VCF East 2021

The Commodore 64 - Computers of Significant History, Part One