Crusty, the Macintosh SE

Crusty was found in a scrapper's yard, having sat out in the rain for quite some time. It was rescued from that yard, and was pretty damaged internally, rusted and not great. It was neither worth repairing, nor had anything to salvage to repair other machines, minus a stick of RAM. Hard drive was seized up, motherboard wasn't great, etc.

Surprisingly, it didn't take much to get it to run 2 years ago at VCF East in 2021. Seeing as there was nothing to lose, the owner then buried in the dirt for a year, excavating it just before VCF East in 2022. It was brought to the show, cleaned off enough to see what was going on, and miraculously, it ran again! Following the event, it was then unceremoniously kicked into a lake where it sat for 8 months, before being extracted prior to the first freeze that could have destroyed the picture tube. It sat in a barn until VCF East this year.

What you see here is how it arrived at the show, followed by the crowd of folks who gathered to watch this chaotic repair attempt by a friend of the owner. It was cleaned slightly, then signed by a number of youtubers, before an attempted diagnostic and repair was attempted. Sadly, the power supply was beyond saving. A donor supply was attached, but it too was broken.

Crusty will return at VCF Midwest later this year, to be repaired at the show with the right replacement parts.

Centurion Rebranded Terminal - Usagi Electric’s Old Stuff – David Lovett - VCF East XVIII

Paper Tape – Corey Cohen - VCF East XVIII

Visitors could punch some text on the Apple II to be printed on shiny gold and green mylar paper tape in big letters.

A beautiful example of a SOL-20 - VCF East XVIII

PDP-8 ASCII Art Photo Booth – David Gesswein - VCF East XVIII

People really liked this one, which hasn't been seen for a few years. This PDP-8/E was setup to take portraits using a vidicon tube camera in black and white, which would then be digitized slowly (as fast as the PDP-8/E can go), line by line vertically. The image is then available either as an ASCII art printout on a large chain drive line printer, or in tricolor separation, which could then be emailed to you after the show. I went for the monochrome portrait printout. The PDP-8/E in question was having some difficulties on the first day, and needed to be debugged at the show before it was ready to run, but once it was running again, it was a hit!

Behind the Screens – Genericable - VCF East XVIII

Round 3 of really cool broadcast technology, from weather channel stuff, to character generators, to broadcast descrambler examples.

Living Books : Interactive Animated Stories – Peter Fletcher , Heather Fletcher - VCF East XVIII

I never played these myself, but I remember seeing them. They've all been recently ported to modern touchscreen devices, among other things. Cool stuff!

DEC in Education - Ethan Dicks - VCF East XVIII

Apple I, clear case Macintosh, 20th anniversary Mac, and some other Apple stuff - Totally Normal Computing - VCF East XVIII

Jeff Salzman leading a Commodore 64 assembly programming class - VCF East XVIII

The Novasaur and Gigasaur TTL Retrocomputers - Alastair Hewitt - VCF East XVIII

My gallery of photos from Vintage Computer Festival East XVIII is available here: https://www.commodorez.com/VCFEXVIII/

A Love H8 Relationship – Glenn Roberts - VCF East XVIII

Kennett Classic - Bill Degnan - VCF East XVIII

Usagi Electric’s Old Stuff – David Lovett - VCF East XVIII

Motorola M88k processor based systems – Maki Kato - VCF East XVIII