InfoAge Computer Exhibit Walking Tour

My visit at VCF East 2024 - they had a lot of vintage computers up and running, all of which you can play and program.... Enjoy!
Thanks to the Vintage Computer Federation - vcfed.org/
InfoAge Science Museum - www.infoage.org/
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- Music by Fran Blanche -
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[@trainliker100]

I always thought the Commodore 64 was an exceptional bargain when it came out. Very versatile. Terrific for kids wanting to learn at home whether using something like Basic or just Assembly. One amusing anecdote: A local computer store "back in the day" that sold IBM desktops had a nice little IBM provided kiosk with a few buttons you could push, and it would show videos extolling the IBM PC's features. If you pushed a button, it immediately went to that video. I asked them how it worked? They said it had a video disk. I wondered what the setup looked like and opened the cabinet door in the bottom to take a peek. Sure enough, a video disk player. And a Commodore 64 being used to control everything !!!

[@kaasmeester5903]

I feel privileged to have lived through the better part the evolution of personal computing. And back then, there was no internet, good magazines were few and far between (especially here in Europe), almost no computer stores… the computer fairs is where you got your gear and a look at the latest and greatest. This walk around a computer museum with so many working units brought me back to that time… there was a large fair that our dad always took us to, and it was the highlight of the year, eagerly awaited. They sold stuff at the fair but there was a large homebrew section as well, with hobbyists showing off their stuff and exchanging ideas. I loved the sense of pioneering in home computing in those days. My dad had a home built Digital Group (not DEC), then a TRS80, and a C64, and finally an Amiga before we hopped on the IBM type PC train.

[@KeritechElectronics]

So much lovely historical gear! And if you could fiddle with all of them, it's even for the better. I hate all these "do not touch!" labels, because just seeing an artifact is far from enough to experience it like people WayBackWhen did. You have to be able to study its different aspects, form design and construction to user experience and the limitations of what you can do with it. If specialist knowledge is required to operate it, demonstration by a curator would be the must, sadly most museums just don't have the people who know the stuff. Back in my Book Art Museum years, I was probably the youngest of the few people who could operate the Monotype composition casters in my country, and our museum probably was the only one which had two of these in an operational state. And then I hacked a computer control attachment which is pretty simple and elegant, enhances the machine's original functionality and reduces the need for material which is in very limited supply. After I moved to another city, I lost that, but I'm going in a direction of setting my own vintage tech museum, ultimately doing exhibitions IRL.

[@mikeshores8318]

Thank you once again. Your videos speak, demonstrate & give us a taste of the history of the early PC’s to those early learners such as I. 1st Pro job 1965. 1st owned TI99/4A, full system still working. Several 5” & 3” FDD’s working & in PC’s & Atari 800 full system. ZIP & Tape backups, etc. Your videos keep renewed interest of where analog & digital collections began. Allowing todays generation to view, hear & touch our memories & pass on to future generations. Who can only imagine where technology will evolve long after this generation becomes only a memory. Again, please accept our gratitude for excellent programs you bring to your subscribers & friends.

[@mikebarushok5361]

Thanks! I particularly appreciate the analog computers, the toy computers and the trainers that are often overlooked and weren't nearly as likely to be preserved as the "serious" hardware.

[@verdedoodleduck]

Thanks so much! Brings back memories. I worked for Honeywell in the early 80s. Amonst other CAD tools, I wrote some software to autoroute the 'flywires' [engineering patches due to fixes or autorouting failure on the micropak, basically] in the 'micropaks' (previously it was done by hand) used in the newer GCOS systems. Also on another note, I remember being lucky enough when I was a tad to see working core memory at my dad's office (phone switching station) when it was about the size of a pencil eraser per bit. I don't really miss the card decks or paper tape. :)

[@billygamer3941]

At 06:19 is a plastic computer assembly, here called 'Digi-comp'. I received one of these in the 1970s as a gift. I believe it was marketed via 'Scientific American' Magazine. I recall that one could make an R-S flip flop, an OR-gate, and an AND. The plastic components and rubber bands made an interesting learning device.

[@JCWise-sf9ww]

Thank you for the quick tour of the Vintage computers on display, quite a history there of computers. Recognised many of the desktop PCs.

[@robertbass9032]

Glad to see so many familiar computers and accessories I used in my lifetime, from entering data via punch cards to attempting to program via toggle switches. Thanks.

[@trainliker100]

Be sure to click on the link Fran provided for this InfoAge place. And watch their short video. There is a LOT of interesting stuff there.

[@xd3viant]

Hi from the two weirdos you ran into on the boardwalk at midnight Saturday night! We showed up to VCF late on Saturday afternoon. So we decided to walk to the pinball parlor hoping to make some friends. We met you. Afterwards, Josh and I acquired a tarp and slept on the dunes that night. It was really cold. The next morning, after thawing in the convention center bathroom, we got free pork roll sandwiches and coffee for breakfast from a church @ Heck St, then we began walking back to InfoAge. I stuck out my thumb (never expecting it to work) and a very nice, old man gave us a lift from in front of the hospital to the front gate of InfoAge. Later in the day, we met and had a conversation with Jeri Ellsworth, who now knows I exist. It was totally worth it.

[@FranLab]

Pleased to meet you both!

[@goodun2974]

Considering it's a vintage computer exhibit, "the two weirdos you met" doesn't exactly nail it down!😉 It would have been even weirder if I was there, but I'm not really a computer enthusiast, so it's not exactly my cup of weird.... but the part about sleeping in a tarp on the dunes caught my eye because I spent a couple nights sleeping on the beach in Mytilini/Lesbos, and another night on Crete, in August of 1983 when no hostel or hotel rooms were available, and man, it was *cold*.

[@highshelfrich]

Great walk through and it was nice to chat with you at VCF East this year!

[@danielhastings3167]

Wow! This sure brings back memories. Thanks for sharing!

[@hotpuppy1]

Neighbor back in the '80's had a Commodore 64 with the accessory cassette drive. My brother bought one of the IBM PC's through a program at his job. It had the two 5 inch floppies and NO hard drive. He's a CPA and showed our accountant dad what it could do with Lotus 123. Dad said if he was younger (he was in his 70's) he would love to have had one. In high school (class of '81) the science club had an Apple II. It was the first PC in the school. The office used a small mainframe for payroll. Used a Trash 80 in community college as well as IBM clones running DOS and feeding dot matrix printers. The computer programming classes used the mainframe. It's nice seeing these old dinosaurs again.

[@smk242]

I loved watching it, thank you Fran!

[@guygfm4243]

Amazing collection of computers

[@goodun2974]

At 1:44, I used to have about 3 dozen of those Philbrick plug-in modules (they were brown bakelite with octal bases); most of them came with a pair of Telefunken 12AX7's in them but a few had a pentode like a 6CM6 or something like that. I sold them all for a pretty penny on flea bay!

[@j.lietka9406]

Droid s - B - Us!! Holy Mentats, Batman!! It's an incredible tour of ancient technology! Thank you Fran! 🥰👸🌹💕❤️😘

[@cosmiclettuce]

Wow thanks for the tour! Did I miss seeing any Z80-based computers there? Rumors true that the Zilog Z80 no longer going to be produced? That'll be a sad day.

[@scottgfx]

At around :19 is a Sinclair XZ80 and ZX81. Later is the Kaypro. The DEC VT-100 probably has one. I had not heard about the end of the Z80.

[@cosmiclettuce]

@@scottgfx ah, ok thanks. I missed that the first time through.

[@Cinemagic77]

Thank you, Fran. Cool tour. I occasionally have dreams where I'm discovering vintage tech like this, like in this museum.

[@scottthomas6202]

It's on my bucket list to attend at least one of these conversations....

[@57dent]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane (I think)!! Neat to see but a harsh realization that everything from the teletype machines that I first used in high school to the Osbourne suitcase computers where I first worked are now exhibited as ancient museum pieces!!

[@Xeddyhime]

So, I think RGB LEDs in computers has been done to death... but at 0:30 that C=64 in the clear case with the rainbow LEDs got me. Well executed!

[@croquis24]

so many memories of my childhood tank you

[@00Skyfox]

Yay for the Commodore 64 setup! Actually, yay for every setup because every computer had its own important place in computer technology history.

[@evanrhildreth]

I loved developing for older systems that lacked a hardware abstruction layer, because it involved learning and exploiting the hardware. Modern software languages (e.g. Javascript) and frameworks (e.g. React) are so far abstracted from the way the underlying hardware functions, they have layers of what is essentually emulation that chews up megabytes of RAM and millions of CPU cycles to perform simple tasks! Computers are fundamentally proceedural machines, they are not object oriented by nature, and they are certainly not declaritive!

[@Bata.andrei]

Amen! That is why I never managed to learn any programming language other than basic and some assembler for older CPUs. I just can't get my head around high level languages....

[@johnpenner5182]

thx for the detailed tour fran - nice closeups of all the interesting bits! 🤩

[@tedmich]

cool stuff! 😍

[@newportshapwick]

Was that a slide rule I saw? My college class was the very last to use only slide rules and trig/log tables even though simple electronic calculators had just become available - very expensive though (showing my age!) Great video though and brought back great memories - many thanks!

[@poofygoof]

2:50 novachord! worth searching for recordings, it's got a twilight-zone vibe that's similar to early combo-organs but some sounds that are outside the standard farfisa / hammond sounds we're familiar with.

[@EC5ABG]

Gracias por compartir, buen trabajo👍😍

[@flamencoprof]

Those analogue machines looked interesting. I only learned about physical analogue computation. Never seen an electronic one.

[@tiga31]

Thanks for this nice vintage tour :)

[@nkronert]

1:16 I have one of these cute l ferrite core memories at home 😎

[@petecorbin9606]

Ohh a Tandy 1000, we had the 1000sl for our first computer. I think it is still up in the attic

[@camilosoveral7294]

Excelente Museu.

[@douglascrawford2563]

Guided tours given Wednesday, Saturday, Sundays 12-5, InfoAge, wall township, nj.

[@JasonTHutchinson]

We had an IBM Personal Computer, and a bunch of others not shown. I remember some of the newer ones when they came out.

[@NiftyMCD_Australia]

oh the good (bad, really bad) days of CLOAD and waiting to load the OS. Multiple tapes for when they fail, usually from corruption probably from stretching of the tape. Oh the memories!

[@normalizedaudio2481]

This was back when computer jobs were good and you could get what job you wanted. Say what you want about the technolgy; but, I like it a lot more than Windows 95.

[@mrbusdriversir]

So amazing to see some of these systems again. Thanks for sharing. Yes, I am that old. 😊

[@alanhall2795]

used punched tape and some of these old computers myself. Now I fancy I should be in a museum.

[@Appetizer76]

Maybe I missed but did not see the name of Janos Neumann (John von Neumann) at the ENIAC. Hmm, hmmm, hmmm.....

[@paszTube]

Should you ever visit The Netherlands, check out the Home Computer Museum in Helmond, and Bonami in Zwolle. Similar vibe to what you see in this video.

[@scottgfx]

Wonderful! Now if we could only find the F1 Super Foonley…

[@byterock]

Hey did you run into Curios Marc and his crew while you where there ;)

[@talfacprez]

Nothing from NCR? My father worked for NCR corporate teaching computer repair of NCR Book Keeping & Banking Computers which started in the mid 60s into the mid 70s.

[@jackwt7340]

glorious history🦄 But when did Armstrong land on the moon?Did he take a C64 to pass the time on his trip to the moon?

[@ArnaudMEURET]

LSI ADM-3A: “What am I to you ? A paperweight!? Look at me, I was ‘Sexiest Terminal of the year ‘76 AND ‘77” !

[@htmagic]

Fran, I saw no Coleco ADAM computers there. Boo! The Z80 chip was faster than most at that time! My ADAM had CP/M and that's how I learned DOS.

[@CandidDate]

You couldn't pry my knowledge of BASIC out of my working memory with a nuclear bomb! It's like a second language to me now.

[@filepz629]

❤️‍🔥

[@douglasjohnson4382]

That Tandy was clearly superior.

[@richardbrayshaw570]

Thanks Fran! That was a trip down memory lane.

[@naderhumood1199]

Lovely memories ....lovely machine.....thank you you very much indeed.

[@Greywolf831]

Why does it gotta be in New Jersey though?

[@BooXdk]

The core memory on that Wang is 🤯🤯🤯 so beautiful 🤗 Thanks for sharing enabling the Dane here to experience some of it, now that I couldn’t go there 🙏

[@paultracer3787]

Ah the sweet smell of Bakelite...

[@grapsorz]

i have a dusin of those systems ;)

[@jamesblackwell8121]

Where is this?

[@FranLab]

Links in the description.

[@bburroughs]

Very cool, even though they misspelled “Burroughs” on one of the signs 😊

[@douglascrawford2563]

Thanks! I'll fix it!

[@kc0lif]

1970s tech.

[@eltronics]

Thanks Fran, from all the geeks out here.

[@nasunorahl]

I watched and waited to see a TRS-80. My beginnings. And you "Trash 80" it? I almost unsub. Edit: J/k don't believe everything you read on the internet. The disdain in your voice tho.................

[@FranLab]

Yes I did - and my first programming experience was on the Trash-80. Leave now if you must.

[@GothGuy885]

YA I was kinda bugged by that too. I always wanted one as a teen. didn't get it tho...

[@nasunorahl]

@@FranLab LOL NO I LOVE YOU. THANKS!