Have you ever been to a Vintage Computer Festival? Have you ever wanted to? Well, they’ve been around for a long time, starting with the first west coast VCF in 1997, then the VCF Europa in 2000, then the East in 2001 and many others. Our special guest in this episode will tell us more about the shows, a change in organization, and more.
David and Jeff interview Evan Koblentz, Cofounder and President of the Vintage Computer Federation which is a 501(c)3 educational non-profit. VCF organizes the Vintage Computer Festival conferences, hosts the Vintage Computer Forum discussion site, incubates and assists regional user groups, and fosters collaboration between computer museums including the official VCF museum co-located at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall, N.J. Find out more about Evan at http://snarc.net/.
On today’s show, we’re continuing our coverage of the 32-bit GUI computers. We’ve covered the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, Atari ST, and now we move on to what some say was the ST’s bitter enemy, the Commodore Amiga.
Wikipedia reports: “The Amiga 1000 was officially released in July 1985, but a series of production problems meant it did not become widely available until early 1986. The best selling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 and became one of the leading home computers of the late 1980s and early 1990s with four to six million sold.”
David and Jeff are just two collectors looking at things from that vantage point. Here, we take an informal look at personal computing history through the lens of eBay auctions. We’re joined again on today’s show by our special guest, Chuck Hunnefield!
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On today’s show, we’re covering the Atari ST, a “GEM” of a computer that helped spark an interest in music and MIDI.
From Wikipedia: “The Atari ST is a line of home computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The first ST model, the 520ST, was released in June 1985. “ST” officially stands for “Sixteen/Thirty-two”, which referred to the Motorola 68000’s 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals. The Atari ST is the first personal computer to come with a bit-mapped color GUI, using a version of Digital Research’s GEM released in February 1985. The 1040ST, released in 1986, is the first personal computer to ship with a megabyte of RAM in the base configuration and also the first with a cost-per-kilobyte of less than USD$1.”
Jeff & David, along with our guest co-host Chuck Hunnefield, a former user and salesperson of the Atari ST line of computers, discuss the system, along with personally selected eBay favorites.
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On today’s show, we’re covering the Apple Macintosh, Steve Jobs’ publicly acknowledged attempt at delivering the Graphic User Interface to the general public.
From the last show – Wikipedia: “Contrary to common belief, it was not the first personal computer to offer a graphical user interface in a machine aimed at individual business users. Development of the Lisa began in 1978. The Lisa sold poorly, with only 100,000 units sold.
From Wikipedia: “The Macintosh (branded as Mac since 1997) is a series of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple, Inc. Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh computer on January 24, 1984. This was the first mass-market personal computer featuring an integral graphical user interface and mouse.”
Jeff & David, along with our guest co-host Adam Rosen of the Vintage Mac Museum in Boston, MA, discuss some of the philosophies about the above statements, along with personally selected eBay favorites.
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On today’s show, we’re covering the Apple Lisa, Steve Jobs’ attempt at pushing the Graphic User Interface to the public.
From Wikipedia: “Contrary to common belief, it was not the first personal computer to offer a graphical user interface in a machine aimed at individual business users. Development of the Lisa began in 1978. The Lisa sold poorly, with only 100,000 units sold. In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, he joined the Macintosh project. The Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between the systems. The final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.”
Are these two “facts” correct? Jeff & David discuss.
