Five things you can do with old computer equipment

Published on Wednesday, 31 October 2018 06:00
Written by Alex Neumann
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!

Photos from VCF Midwest 2018

Published on Saturday, 13 October 2018 16:41
Written by Mauricio Vives

Check out some photos from the 2018 Vintage Computer Festival Midwest!

https://flic.kr/s/aHskKvcLsj

For those Kaypro fans out there!

Published on Wednesday, 02 May 2018 11:02
Written by Earl Baugh

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

Published on Friday, 13 April 2018 20:32
Written by Eric Lyons

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

Published on Tuesday, 13 February 2018 20:06
Written by Alan Hightower

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:

 

Vintage Computing Festival Southeast 6.0: April 21-22

Published on Sunday, 11 February 2018 21:00
Written by Eric Lyons

Join us for a public celebration of computer history and nostalgia on April 21 and 22 in Roswell, GA!

Read more at the Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 6.0 webpage.

Moving meeting locations for Feb -> April

Published on Tuesday, 30 January 2018 23:32
Written by Alan Hightower

Due to on-going construction at the Computer Museum of America, we are returning to our old meeting location for the months of February through at least April.  It will be at Christ the Lord Lutheran Church in Lawrenceville, GA.  More information can be found on our events calendar.  The address is : 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.

Weather update – December meeting cancelled!

Published on Friday, 08 December 2017 12:30
Written by Alan Hightower

Even in my area in west Cobb, the forecast does not indicate it will stop snowing until 6am tomorrow morning.  I’m sure there are those of you who live in areas with much higher impact from what most Northerners would call a ‘light dusting’ that will have a worse situation than I tomorrow morning.  Remember it’s not the people who know how to drive on wet/icy roads, it’s those who do not.  Better safe than sorry so let’s cancel the December meeting tomorrow.

Be safe, drive save, watch out for those who don’t, and have a fantastic Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year, or vintage computing anniversary you are nerdy enough to know!  And remember, Baby Jesus’ first computer was definitely a Tandy.

Thanks,

Alan Hightower

Web site migrated

Published on Tuesday, 14 November 2017 10:33
Written by Alan Hightower

Our domain host migration is complete, however there are still some features of the old site that are not yet working – such as Google+ and Facebook comments.  We are working toward resolving those by next weekend.  Stay tuned for updates.

Also our monthly Meeting for December is at the normally scheduled time of Saturday Dec 9th from 1pm to 5pm.  It is our Holiday meeting which means two things, bring a pot-luck dish and your favorite retro-gaming systems for all to play.  There will also be an orientation session on the new web-site and an active attempt at recruitment to get more club members sharing vintage computing content here.  See you there!  

Pardon our dust…

Published on Monday, 06 November 2017 20:25
Written by Alan Hightower

During this week, the Atlanta Historical Computing Society web site (atlhcs.org) will be moving web-hosts from a hosted account on WordPress.com to a independent server.  The site address will not change.  However some legacy features may break both temporarily and permanently.  If you are subscribed to email updates for blog posts, you should consider joining our Yahoo Groups mailing list temporarily as this feature will not be migrated.  WordPress.com does not provide your email addresses to us due to privacy concerns.  We will re-introduce this blog update feature soon, but subscribers will need to re-opt-in for blog updates.  Keep watching the site for details.

Some feature migrations will be delayed for about two weeks.  Users will be able to login to our new WordPress site to post comments using Facebook and Google+ accounts.  However our current ETA to reintroduce this feature is Nov 18.

Don’t forget our November monthly meeting is at the Computer Museum of America at the new location.

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AHCS can use your support. Contributions allow us to continue bringing you exciting events and give you the opportunity to meet like minded people who share an interest in Vintage Computing. We would greatly appreciate any contributions.