Time for a little Sinclair news from the West Coast. I attended the 5th
Vintage Computer Festival, held at Moffet Field, CA (in the heart of
Silicon Valley). I exhibited my Sinclair collection (ZX80, ZX81, T/S 1000,
T/S 1500, T/S 2068, Spectrum, Sprectrum+, QL, and Z88). I had a display
board that covered the history of Sinclair Research Ltd and the various
systems. In front of each system I had a card that described the hardware
of each system (CPU, Memory, I/O, etc). The attendees (regular, exhibitor,
and vendors) all voted for their favorite exhibit.
You'll be happy to know that my display won third place. Second place went
to a gentleman with a whole bunch of Mac's and Mac portables. First place
went to a gentleman displaying Xerox 8065 workstations.
I did get a lot of complements from folks. Some were interested because
they had used a ZX81 or T/S 1000 years ago. Others were interested in
seeing systems like the QL that they had not seen before. Most were
puzzled over the Microdrive cartridges. One guy even said that the size
reminded him of those new IBM hard drives, called .. Microdrives.
There was an attendee from the UK who brought over a number of UK systems
(Acorn, Dragon, & Sinclair). One UK QL went for $75. A 48K Spectrum went
for $40.
One of the organizers is from the former East Germany and organizes VCF
Europe in Germany. The next VCF Europe should be this Spring. He even
asked me about getting some Sinclair folks (like the Q60 developers) to
come to the show. At the VCF shows, the more odd and unusual the computer
is, the more interest people have.
At the show I met Peter Jenning, who wrote the first Chess program
microcomputers (on a Kim-1). His company went on to become Visacorp, who
ruled the market with Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program. He said
that for 5 years his company was bigger than Microsoft and that the two
companies almost merged. I also met Mr. and Mrs. Jolitz, who did the first
work on porting BSD Unix to the 386 chip (and published in Dr. Dobb's
Journal). There also was a guy who helped develop the Amiga and had the
design breadboards for some of the customer Amiga chips.
Now I have to figure out what to do next year to win first place. :-)
Tim Swenson
