Wow! It’s hard to believe that 2017 is already over. This has been one of our busiest years ever with several systems being added to the collection through some generous donations, opportunistic purchases, and trades. We currently have a backlog of machines both in restoration and simply waiting to be showcased and added to the site. We had hoped to be a part of the Vintage Computer Festival East back in April, but were unable to attend as it has been a personally challenging year with unexpected job change and family/health challenges. Despite these challenges, there are several exciting additions and breakthroughs that I wanted to take a moment to highlight here:
Some cool game consoles we added this year include the Fairchild Channel F, Super NES, Atari 7800 and out first pong console Atari Super Pong.
Computers added include Amiga 500, NeXTStation, VAX 4000, PDP11/05, Silicon Graphics O2, Tandy Color Computer 2, Apple IIgs, and IBM 5140 Convertible. Some of these had been on our wish list for many years and we were very lucky to find just the right opportunity to add them to our collection. Nearly all of the systems added this year are great examples of both historical significance and excellent physical condition.
The year started on a high note, with the completion of our Tandy 6000/Model 12 restoration. At the end of 2017, we have several ongoing restorations including Commodore PET, Atari 1200xl, and Atari 800. The Atari 1200xl is very close to completion. This one has taken a long time with the symptom being black screen after power on. After much chip swapping, we finally isolated the issue to be a bad POKEY chip. The only remaining issue is just keyboard related, needing some cleaning and restoration to get some bad keys working again. This is a common issue with the 1200xl. The PET is still in unknown condition and the Atari 800 is waiting for some spare parts to assist in troubleshooting and restoration. We have made improvements to our restoration lab including new test equipment and work space.
Finally, our software libraries have grown across all platforms this year thanks to some local game shops and collectors.
All in all, quite the successful year for VCM! I am grateful for all of the support over the years, and to many of our new donors and supporters that we have had the chance to meet this year. I look forward to VCF East 2018 as well. Thank you for taking time to visit our site and please contact us if there is anything we can do to help advance retro-computing efforts worldwide.
