This fun little festival takes place over a weekend in Orange, California – about a 15 minute drive away for us. I didn’t take nearly enough pictures but here are some and notes about them.
One corner of it. The middle row of tables on the left were several 486s or early pentiums with all the 90s educational software from The Learning Company and others, like Reader Rabbit, Gizmos and Gadgets, ClueFinders, Oregon Trail, etc. The middle row on the right had some games on a Commodore Pet , some early apples and others.
Some more Commodore’s, like the luggable SX-64.
Some large all-in-one office gear from Minolta – a printer, 2x 5.25″ floppies and a nice keyboard in one!
This is David of Usagi Electric, who restores some quite old and large early computers. He brought a Librascope/General Precision LGP-21 Computer.
Old cell phones. We had one of those flip style ones in the 90’s.
An Osbourne 1 with it’s dual floppies and expandability. An older gentleman walked by us at the time saying he used to program on one of those. Something about a friend programming for oil companies some wave-not-sinking-a-boat kind of software, and he wrote the frontend. What kind of frontend could fit on a 5″ display I don’t know.
That day I learned that TRS-80‘s came in different form factors and models. Neat!
The wife recognized this game so we took a picture to look it up. Haven’t yet.
“For the Love of Q*Bert“! Cartridges for the game were available to play on an Atari 2600 and 800XL, Commodore 64, and Texas Instruments TI-99. Some of these games were way better than the others!
We took this picture for my brother-in-law. A favorite of his, and only $14 for 5 CDs, a map and a manual! Deal!
Sadly that’s all we took pictures of. There were vendors selling all kinds of old hardware, a “learn to solder” area to make a LED and battery powered VCF badge/button, many other older systems, and some presenters on various systems and topics. Hopefully the presentations will end up on their youtube channel at a later date: https://www.youtube.com/@VCFSoCal/videos
The last fun thing was a “free” table, where anyone who had old stuff that someone might want but it was too much a hassle to sell, could drop it off and let someone have it. We saw an atari game system (box only), some random cdroms, some cables, drives, and some non-working systems.
Fun times. Will have to do it next year! VCF’s sometimes happen other places, with the VCF MidWest being a particularly big one. Check it out to find one near you: