Panelists: David Greelish (host), Earl Evans and Carrington Vanston.
Topics:
- Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 6.0 / Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention
- Vintage Computer Festival SW 2.0
- IBM PC 30th Annivesary Extravaganza
- Personal Computers: A History of the Hardware That Changed the World
- Tech Survivors: Computer technologies 25 years or older you still use
Retro Computing Auction Picks:
David
- Atari Portfolio computer WORKS + rare promo pin + more
- TI 99/4A Home Computer w PHP 1500 Speech Synthesizer
Earl
- Commodore B128 personal computer
- B128 with display picture
- NOS 8” diskettes on Vintage Computer Marketplace
Carrington
Other Mentioned Links:
- mTCP
- New Epson PX-8 Geneva Portable Computer & Accessories for sale
- Portland Retro Gaming Expo
- The Oregon Trail – Official Trailer
- Capri pants
Intro / Closing Song: Back to Oz by John X – link
Show audio files hosted by CyberEars
Listen/Download:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Hey guys. Got some details on the “Emergency” Commodore convention for you. In the 90s, there were a series of very successful Commodore conventions in Lansing, Michigan which were attended by the midwest Commodore folks. For one reason or another, they stopped doing them and SWRAP started doing them here in Chicago.
After our president got tired of running these shows, I ran the last two or three. It just got to be way too much for us. Things were complicated by the hotel telling us one thing (we’d have access to the expo room overnight) and doing another on the day of the expo. We started looking for another venue, but nobody could find a place we all agreed on, and we had a really hard time finding one that would let us keep the party going on into the night. We decided to cancel the Expo. I think this was 2005.
That’s where Jason Compton stepped up with an “Emergency” convention thrown together in a month. He simplified it a lot, not trying to negotiate on-site food and an all-night hackfest space, but it’s still going. The addition of VCF Midwest kicked it up a notch, and I’m looking forward to this year’s. It doesn’t hurt that it’s 5 minutes from my house.
Hi guys …
I enjoyed the podcast and wanted to help by clarifying a small part of it. Toward the end of the show there was a reference to mTCP and a description of packet drivers. A good way to think of a packet driver is that it is a device driver for your Ethernet card. After loading it your machine is capable of running networking applications. That’s it – not complex at all.
Most older ISA and PCI network cards had a packet driver available, either as an pure open source driver or as a vendor provided driver based on an open source framework. I’ve tested or gotten user reports of cards ranging from the lowest form of NE1000 (8 bit) to modern Intel Gigabit cards working with mTCP, all through their provided packet drivers.
Enjoy your experimenting with it, and email me for tech support when you try your telnet experiments. I’d also like to hear what the test machine is – usually I run on something like a PC 5150 or a PCjr. mTCP is a great example of retro-computing in action – the project only started 5 years ago.
Regards,
Mike