#vcfmw20

Want to flip through my entire gallery of VCF Midwest 20 photos?

Please Do Not The Computer

The VTEL had a hardware issue, so I whipped up a sign in Corel Draw! 5 on Vega, and printed it on the dot matrix. Seems it made people laugh, so I saved it.

Start Me Up: 30 years of Windows 95 - @commodorez and @ms-dos5

Highlights of the exhibit this time around included a whole gaggle of kids who enjoyed drawing on the machines, playing Snood, and oh yeah... using the telephone! I never expected to see so many kids excited to use the phones at our exhibit.

We also had a gentlemen who had a pile of 5¼" floppy disks, which he wanted to convert over to 3½" disks. He asked to use the Intertel tower to make the conversion, and we were happy to oblige. He let us have the 5¼" disks when he was done, as he no longer had need of them. I can always use spare high density disks!

We didn't have a single blue screen of death the entire weekend, if you'd believe it. Instead, we had atleast one hard freeze that I was aware of, plus a weird situation where the monitor on the VTEL machine wouldn't default into a video mode that matched the capabilities of the display. Didn't know what to make of that, but I eventually got it sorted. There was also a flaky cable on the large Dell monitor on the right, but @regretsretrotech got it sorted with clever use of a hair tie.

There were fewer printouts made at this event, but there was one really funny one drawn up which I printed and gave away: an award for "brought home e-waste". There was one other sign, but that will have to wait until the next post...

I tried connecting up the iomega igrabber video capture card to a composite feed coming from the Weatherstar exhibit, but sadly it wouldn't correctly stabilize so the video was garbled.

Apparently one kid loved the Logitech Kidz Mouse so much that he tried to walk away with it! His dad made him put it back.

I'd say that the whole exhibit came together spectacularly, and I especially appreciate the help of @traceamountsoftimetravel in packing up the exhibit when it was all said and done. You should check out his exhibit photos, they're among the best anyone took of our exhibit's finer details, and really highlights just how much effort was poured into what we brought to display.

Thank you to all who came by the exhibit, and took time to play a game, draw a picture, or otherwise explore Windows 95.

Start Me Up: 30 years of Windows 95 - @commodorez & @ms-dos5

30 years ago, Microsoft introduced Windows 95 and set the standard for graphical user interfaces that is still in use today. We will be displaying all major versions of 95, from one of the Chicago Beta releases, through the final update from 1997, on a wide variety of hardware from a number of prominent manufacturers. Come experience what made Windows 95 a household name, play some games, and see what made computing accessible and easy for everyone.

Round 2 of our exhibit celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of one of our favorite operating systems. We had 18ft of table space to work with at VCF East, but at VCF Midwest we had 24ft!

All of the desktops made a return, but we did change up the laptops somewhat. The faulty Compaq LTE Elite was replaced with a Fujitsu Biblo, specifically an FMV-Biblo NC13D with a passive matrix display to highlight that it wasn't always so nice to use a 90s laptop display. The Thinkpad 760E had some technical issues and was swapped for another model of Thinkpad, this time a more powerful 560Z.

This time around, @regretsretrotech supplied the bulk of our 1990s VGA CRTs for the weekend, with a few supplementary units from our friends nevets01 and Avery. We thank them for their assistance!

We added a copy of Windows 95 Special Edition presumably from the launch party 30 years ago, along with a few more games like Snood and Jill of the Jungle. Floppy disks and some of the other software boxes were pared down a bit too, but the focus remained on celebrating 30 years of Windows 95.

@regretsretrotech's exhibit: Divisive Dells, celebrating the 2000s clamshell series Dell computers that were ever-present at the time

Avery and his rare Zenith Phonevision head end equipment. This was how the Chicago area experienced an early form of paid, scrambled, television with a set top box. He had it working by Saturday afternoon

Cheese Car Systems? It must be Nevets01's robot arm exhibit!

The Unimate Puma 200 robotic arm is controlled by a PDP-11 (on the right), and was programmed to toggle an entire program into the front panel of an Altair 8800.

Forgotten Machines always has a massive exhibit but it's easy to find