Earlier this year, I inherited a bunch of old Macs and computer parts, including the PowerBook 520 pictured above. And, for the past three years I’ve been trying to visit VCF Midwest up in Chicago, where there’s this odd blend of old computers, radio, broadcast gear... Honestly, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is.

And I also had no idea how overwhelming the two-day event would be. Overwhelmingly awesome, that is.

I saw vintage tech YouTubers like LGR, The 8-Bit Guy, Macintosh Librarian, BigBadBench, Dave’s Retro Video Lab, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Action Retro, Mac84, and, well, too many people to list here.

I spent time at booths looking at an ESP32 drive emulator for the Apple Lisa (pictured above), a guy walking around wearing a 486 on a helmet playing DOOM, because—of course. An IBM Wireless LAN prototype card from before WiFi existed, and even a cool experimental Pico-based PCMCIA card that can emulate a bunch of other cards, by yyzkevin.

Since it has kind of the spirit of a more organized swap-meet, I brought some of the old Macs I inherited. It’s better for them to find new life with a collector or have someone get them back up and running for another 40 years than for them to just sit on a shelf here at the studio!

Besides selling a couple of the more valuable Macs to buy an SE/30 and a couple BlueSCSIs, I put a couple boxes in the free pile. And I kid you not, everything except for a book on how to use Microsoft Word 6.0 was gone within minutes. The free pile was fascinating to observe through the weekend.

Video

I published a video today covering all the same content as this blog post, but with more visuals. If you want to watch, that’s great. If not, read on!

Overview

It’s hard to be anywhere for more than a minute or two before your eyes wander off to another area. And for me, that meant a couple times probably ending a conversation a bit awkwardly as I felt a bit like Dug from Up

But there were a few things that stood out.

Custom CRT Analog Board

Everything on the right side of the box above is a custom, open source CRT analog board design. That means if you have a tube, even if all the control circuits for it are shot and the analog board’s destroyed, you could revive it with this.

Even the flyback transformer is new hardware—apparently they still make these parts in Asia to keep old arcade machines alive.

I learned more about how CRTs work in 10 minutes talking to Thomas, who designed the board, than I did from years reading blog posts and watching YouTube videos about CRTs.

That’s one of the best things about the event. I know of old tech. But the people I met know how it works intimately, and sometimes are even the people who built the original tech! For example...

Meeting John Calhoun

I was looking at the old PowerBook display at the Ron’s Computer Videos table, and noticed the PowerBook 180c—which was my favorite laptop in that era, mostly because I inherited my Dad’s old one, and I used it until the display went dead. Then I revived the chassis, upgraded it, and used it in ‘clamshell mode’ until the CPU went dead!

But I noticed the PowerBook 180c at Ron’s table had Glypha II running on it. Someone nearby started playing, and I struck up a conversation about PowerBooks...

And then I noticed his badge said John Calhoun—a name I remembered from the thousand times I had opened up Glypha and Glider as a kid! He wrote those games!

One of the shareware kings of the Mac universe, and he was just taking in the sights and sounds, just like anyone else.

It’s great to talk to people online, but there’s a totally different connection when you meet face-to-face. VCF is perfect for that.

Cursed Input Device

But not all the tech at VCF is nostalgic in a good way.

In the modern era, we have things like the Humane AI pin that were so bad, you wonder how they got to the point of mass production. It wasn’t any different in the 80s, though. Mac84 had a Personics Head Tracking Input Device, and I mean... it looks like a good idea, on the surface.

You can control the mouse movement on your Mac with your head.

But think about that for like 2 seconds—unless you have to use your head because of a disability, there’s a good reason it’s not used as a typical input device. I tried out the demo, and it took all of 10 seconds to have a sore neck, especially leaning over in a standing position.

Meshtastic on a C64

This is a Meshtastic radio in a custom Commodore 64 cartridge; there’s a LoRa radio inside, and there’s even Meshtastic 64, custom software to make it all work.

I tested it by sending a message over the show’s channel. Apparently the software was being tweaked right up until Saturday, so I found a bug: my node showed up as ??? (since it hadn’t been previously discovered by the software), and the first letter of my message was eaten up as a result.

But modern LoRa networking on a 40-plus year old computer, how cool is that?! Jim_64 has a whole post up about it on his blog, if you want to learn how it was done.

ADTRAN Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) demo

Nearby, my timing senses tingled when I spotted an oscilloscope with a clock signal on it. And not just one, but two clock signals!

I spent some time talking to Tom about his massive array of Adtran hardware, and he had a full setup showing how Time Division Multiplexing, or TDM worked, and how clocks and synchronization were important in getting an efficient network.

His demo showed a WAN and LAN implementation, and how clock timing signals would cause errors if they went out of sync (with the traffic displayed using IO Ninja).

It was so fun to see, especially because I remember helping my Dad manage dozens of ADTRAN boxes for ISDN and T1 lines in radio. Talking to someone with a lifetime of telecom/datacom experience was especially enlightening as I’m deep in a timing rabbit hole right now.

BlueSCSI Initiator Mode Recovery Attempt

I also had a side-mission at VCF: my Aunt’s old hard drive (out of a Mac Classic) worked a couple times, but stopped working after maybe the 5th boot cycle, after years in storage.

BlueSCSI was present, and offered a free ‘back up a SCSI drive to SD card using Initiator Mode’ service. I brought my drive and gave it a try... but unfortunately, the drive reported ‘Hardware Error’.

I brought my iFixit toolkit in preparation for such an event, thinking maybe the read/write heads were stuck (apparently old Quantum drives had this happen due to rubber breaking down inside). Upon opening the drive, however, I was greeted by this:

Hard disk platters should be nice and shiny, but these were not that. That stuff you see is whatever happens to rubber when you spin coat a hard disk platter with it.

This thing’s not coming back.

So much more...

But there were so many things to see, I didn’t even have time to mourn the loss of that old data.

Like the Dayton Computer Museum brought a relay-based binary digital computer. Conmega was there with a massive 70-pound hard drive, IBM’s 3380 HDA, which I believe was the first gigabyte drive. It had two sets of read-write heads, and it was so big it needed an external motor and a belt drive to keep it spinning.

And there was Shadytel, providing analog and cell phone service for everyone. And Initech, a make-believe corporate network straight outta 1999, with a PowerBook G3 ‘Pismo’ to match. And Protoweb, where I got to relive the early Internet, and even hold a boxed copy of Netscape Navigator 2.0 (the first web browser I used).

And there was an entire Weather Channel setup across multiple tables where I got to trigger an Avalanche Warning using EAS. These things all take a serious amount of effort to reverse engineer, and that also reminds me of Analytics Lounge’s working Scanning Electron Microscope!

They built a replacement voltage control board using a Raspberry Pi Pico, but what was more amazing was people could just walk up and use an electron microscope, and mess with all the knobs and buttons—where else can you do that on a random Saturday morning??

Two more honorable mentions: Juicy Crumb Systems showed me some Pi Pico prototype boards they used to build PCBs that are saving hundreds of old iMacs from the trash (since Apple doesn’t allow for them to be used as ‘dumb’ displays otherwise).

And finally, I talked to Avery about the Zenith Phonevision, a literal one-of-a-kind prototype for paid broadcast TV, designed in the 30s and tested in the 50s and 60s (before the Internet was even a dream).

Zenith was trying to get people to put set top boxes in their homes with an early form of analog DRM (I guess that’d be ARM?) that kept a running tally of charges for programs watched.

The transmitter and receiver are being reverse-engineered piece-by-piece, nearly a hundred years later. The idea behind encrypted, paywalled broadcasts also seems to be back on the table, at least if ATSC 3.0 Encryption passes FCC muster.

Conclusion

There are hundreds more things I saw at VCF that I didn’t include here. And I’m not even including the many presentations—only two of which I could attend due to being constantly (and happily) distracted in the exhibit hall.

VCF Midwest was an amazing experience.

Meeting people in person is the best part. It’s a shared passion for technology—it’s like the anti-AI. Instead of having computers take away human interaction, we all came together. No social media, no screen names. We shared what we loved.

I really hope more people see the benefit of retro computing. I think modern engineers can learn a lot about what makes a product truly good by looking at what hardware from back in the day is beloved, and what things are forgotten in the dustbin of history.