Author Archives: Earl Baugh

November’18 meeting this Saturday!

Monday, 05 November 2018 16:42
Earl Baugh
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It’s that time of year again… gobble, gobble!  While there will be no free Punch n’ Pie at this November meeting – I know, more people will come if you say there will be free Punch n’ Pie – there will be plenty at the December Holiday Party next month.  But never fear… there will be plenty of festivities at this Saturday’s meeting on November 10th.  Check out the calendar links for information about the meeting location and times and the North Atlanta HamJam 2018 happening in the morning.

I’m sure there will be many treasures hauled in from both the morning’s HamJam and last weekend’s Stone Mountain HamFest.   I (Alan) will be giving an overview presentation on this website’s Word Press system and how to use it.  Hopefully we can get more folks contributing content to the site.  And there will be the usual free pile, socializing, and David’s insane project of the month.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Five things you can do with old computer equipment

Wednesday, 31 October 2018 06:00
Earl Baugh
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skeleton-beige-computer

Happy Halloween all! So – you have the vintage computer equipment, which seems to stretch as far forward as a circa 2003 PC. What can you do with that equipment? Several things, a few of which are listed below:

  1. Run older software on the machine it was designed for
    1. WordStar – several authors including George R. R. Martin and Andy Breckman still use it today
    2. Borland TurboPascal, Microsoft Visual Basic 6, FoxPro/Visual FoxPro are all still in use today, and that is not even mentioning the mainframe computers still almost literally powering our civilization
  2. Repurpose it to run some self-hosted tooling
    1. This one only applies to machines that are only ‘vintage enough’, like workstations produced after ~1995
    2. A good list for ideas would be this link
  3. Teach your juniors about the wonders of (retro) technology
    1. This one is a bit of a ‘preach to the choir’ moment, but it bears repeating. Many young people today only know smartphone apps, nothing of the electronic circuits, motherboards, cartridges and DIP switches of computing past that we used to create those smartphones
    2. Before all of our computers got super slow from all of our software bloat, they were quite snappy at times. Text-based interfaces can be faster to operate for expert users as well
    3. How many of the vintage equipment can access non World-Wide Web internet resources? Gopher, Usenet, & BBSes may not be mainstream any more, but they sure do impress!
  4. Play some games
    1. If the success of http://GOG.com is anything to go by, those retro video games are still quite fun even in their golden years, though most likely, you have the original discs/cartridges/tapes rather than requiring a download from the internet
  5. “Max out” the equipment
    1. Take whatever RAM and upgrades that the machine could handle in its prime and apply them. Sure, your Apple ][ may not be in its prime any more, but feed it an accelerator card like a Zip Chip II and you might see up to 8 MHz out of that puppy!

For those Kaypro fans out there!

Wednesday, 02 May 2018 11:02
Earl Baugh
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https://blog.hackster.io/man-writes-a-graphical-game-for-and-on-a-35-year-old-kaypro-2-84-9ec06fbfe93d

A new game recently ported to the Kaypro!  Gets a whole 3 FPS!

April Meeting: Date and Location

Friday, 13 April 2018 20:32
Earl Baugh
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April’s meeting will be at Christ the Lord Lutheran Church in Lawrenceville, GA. More information can be found on our events calendar.

The address 1001 Duluth Hwy, Lawrenceville, GA 30043. We meet in the side building, to the left of the main entrance, if you’re facing the front.

VCF Pacific Northwest 1.0

Tuesday, 13 February 2018 20:06
Earl Baugh
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Kyle and I just returned from the Vintage Computing Festival – Pacific Northwest after also spending the better part of a week hanging out with a gaggle of PDP-8 and general DEC enthusiasts in the Portland area.  It was a great time and a fabulous show.  I look forward to returning next year.  Here are some photos of the event, the Living Computer Museum where it was hosted (including some behind the scenes) and some travel pics of the Seattle area.

VCF-PNW Show: