"The Verge video crew took a weekend trip to get some hands-on experience with as many vintage computers as possible.
Over a weekend in April each year, the InfoAge Science and History Museums in Wall Township, New Jersey host the Vintage Computer Festival East, which welcomes hundreds of attendees to a former army base to check out a bunch of vintage hardware — not only on display, but also currently in working order."
It was a lot of fun. The venue is quite interesting (a former US army base by the edge of a sea inlet), and the separate Radio, Computer and Radar museums and the maker space are worth a visit. There were ospreys nesting in the old fire station, but I may have been the only attendee to notice.
We drove down from Toronto in a huge RV with the entirely suitable licence plate S100 BUS. Josh, RV owner and JAIR S-100 8080 CPU Board designer, was running the RCA1802 display. Accompanying us was Lee Hart, designer of tiny Vintage Microcomputer Project kits and Jorge Abreu, expert on the home computers of Argentina.
We spent a lot of time with Joyce Weisbecker, who wrote her first games for the RCA Studio II (1977) and is still advocating for and mentoring indie developers. Joyce spoke about the PIN8 music language for the RCA VIP system (1977). Two add-on cards provided two channel music plus drum machine: pretty impressive for the time.
The venue, split across several smaller buildings, made the event very different from the barn-like hall that VCF Midwest was held in. While there was often a crush around peak times, you could still learn a lot from exhibitors, all of whom were keen to show off their machines and projects.