Oh boy, this one was a doozy.
VCF West was this weekend (well, kind of, it was Friday and Saturday, 8/2 and 8/3) and it was a hell of a time. To keep this somewhat simple (my brain is still recovering and I probably have some con crud) I’ll sort this by days.
If you want to see photos, they’re on my flickr.
Day 0: Load-in
My exhibit was Game (almost) Over – Return of Apple, which was an exhibit that focused mostly on Apple’s bold designs and Mac OS X, both things that happened under Jobs that brought Apple back from the brink of insolvency. My initial lineup was going to be an iMac (rev D), an iBook, the G4 Cube and the G3 Blue and White. However, Eric of BlueSCSI fame asked if I could represent BlueSCSI at West, to which I agreed, and the iBook was dropped and replaced with a Power Computing PowerTower 200. This was convenient, as hey, the clones were one of the things that led to Apple being weeks away from bankruptcy under Spindler and Amelio, so it kinda fit.
I loaded up my car, I headed for the Computer History Museum. Arrived, I got a cart, and got it all upstairs without much struggle. Thankfully hitting the gym has done wonders for me on that front (last year I was struggling during load in and load out).
Load-in took a while though, mostly because it took them a while to get power to our tables at the far end of the grand hall. So while we could get our stuff arranged (arguably the hard part), we couldn’t turn everything on. Some hours later we finally got power, but they needed to reroute it again to get power over to the Apricot exhibit next to me (which was presented by CelGenStudios, he’s a good guy). The iMac powered on fine before they had to cut power, but when power was restored, the iMac had decided to cash in its chips. It was deader than a doornail. No sign of life whatsoever. Fuck.
This was a bit of a devastating loss, because that iMac was one of the only machines I had that could run the Mac OS X Public Beta, which is something I really wanted to show off. Oh well, back down to the car with you.
(Which kicked off a whole other problem. I had to take a rest for a sec when carrying that iMac out, and I was sweating bad so I took off my glasses for a sec. I left them on a rack of light bulbs behind me at the CHM’s loading dock. I spaced and forgot them, thought I had for real lost them, and…yeah. Resigned myself to having to take a huge financial hit to replace them. Thankfully I found them as I was going to leave for the night.)
I was starting to kind of notice that our side of the grand hall was a bit toasty. I didn’t think much of it because I had been moving stuff around, but this is foreshadowing for later.
The Cube was a fun one to set up because I was going to set it up with an ADC Cinema Display sold to me by a kind fellow in the Bay Area Retro Computing Discord. Had some false starts (and me forgetting that the Cube was running OS X 10.0, which didn’t really have proper support for the Cinema Display or the GeForce 3 that was driving it) but eventually got it up and running great. Got everything wrapped up, and headed out.
The day done, I got home (friend and fellow exhibitor in tow), got out my clamshell iBook (SE/466MHz), popped in the Public Beta disc…and thankfully, it installed without a hitch. I quickly printed up a new card for the iBook, and we were off to the races for tomorrow.
Day 1:
In retrospect, things were weird. From what the event page says, the first day is supposed to start at 10am and run until 6. However…we got there around 7:30, and the opening announcement came a little after 9am. This threw me off for day 2, because I knew one of the days began at 10. Anyway.
The start of the day was interesting, because it started out exactly how I thought it would last year. I had thought that when West had to change to Friday-Saturday (rather than Saturday-Sunday), the busy day would shift to day 2 rather than day 1. But nope. Day 1 started quiet, ramped up a bit, then ramped back down. It did get busy, but nowhere near as busy as day 2 was.
One thing was apparent, though: There was no air conditioning on our side of the Grand Hall. The temperature began increasing on our side, and we were all sweating profusely. From what one of our guys was able to find out, the A/C compressor had catastrophically failed and they would not be able to get it working anytime soon.
The outside temp I think crested at about 80F, so it wasn’t the worst it could be, but it was still a fair bit more toasty than I’d like. A few tables down, some friends of mine (Lucanis and Barry) who were running Commodore and Amiga stuff were starting to suffer heat-related hardware failures (Barry’s 128D turbo dying on the floor, may it rest in peace).
All in all, it was a fine time, short of the A/C being down. I had one guy (Boomer-aged, if I had to guess) come by who kindly told me that, well, the premise of my exhibit is kind of bullshit because Apple wasn’t actually ever going to go bankrupt, and they had billions in the bank and would have been able to continue for years at their then-current clip. To which good friend Garth (who popped by the table some time later, and who was also an Apple employee right after Jobs’ return) said “If Apple wasn’t in trouble, why’d they bend the knee to Microsoft for a cash infusion, then?”
As I’m typing this, I’ve been reading up, and damn near every source backs me up: Apple was weeks, WEEKS away from insolvency. Not years. WEEKS.
But hey. What do I know.
Maybe that guy was the guy who heckled Jobs way back. Who knows.
I also rolled around the floor (mainly to escape the heat a little bit) with one of the table mascots: an orange sea slug that we’ve named Chicken Sandwich (Partially my fault, when my girlfriend bought it, I mentioned it looked kinda like a chicken sandwich from Burger King, and the name stuck). Photos were taken of it being on various tables (and me affectionately telling people they’re getting slug’d). You can see this in the Flickr Album, a LOT of photos were of Chicken Sandwich in various places.
The day eventually drew to a close, but this year there was something different: A social event after the show on the CHM’s patio. We stuck around for a bit, but at the end of the day and after suffering the heat inside, we were beat and I personally couldn’t wait to go home and devour some food.
Day 2 is when things got fun.
Day 2 and the finale
Remember what I said earlier, about how last year I thought day 2 would be the busy day and I was wrong? Well, this year, day 2 ended up being the busy day. It started slow, but toward noon the back of the Grand Hall was PACKED.
Unfortunately, the A/C was still fried, and worse, the outside temps were higher (85-87F) which resulted in the inside temps being worse than Friday. CelGenStudios had a thermometer and I want to say it peaked around 32.5C (so just over 90F). My friend’s G4 Cube a few tables down had suffered the wrath of the Quake Kids (this group of kids who can’t be more than 12 years old who really, REALLY like Quake 3) and unfortunately suffered a bad HDD, possibly due to the heat. My exhibit stayed working, but I had to pop the side of the PowerTower off to keep it cool because the CPU fan had given out.
Speaking of the PowerTower, Zhinu (the person doing the portables and the Lisa in a fursuit) needed to get a PowerLogix G3 card, which I just so happened to have. So we traded, and I got a nice Interware Booster G3/366, which we swapped into the PowerTower live on the floor. That was neat. It also came in the original packaging, which has a fun box with Woz on it. (I’d love to get him to sign it someday. Maybe.)
Jason (guy who was doing Big Mac) went and visited the free pile and scooped up a 17″ ADC Studio Display for the Cube, so that was awesome of him (though it lacks a stand so I couldn’t use it on my table, alas).
I also decided to maybe try and get my G4 Cube updated to 10.2.8 live on the floor so it could actually utilize that Cinema Display I got. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite work, and it rendered the Cube unbootable. Thankfully I kept a backup of the Cube on a Firewire drive, so I was able to reboot to said drive, and SuperDuper everything back over and have the Cube up and running again.
The optical drive was also struggling in the heat, in a way. I didn’t use the exact right belt for it (though it’s a very close match), and the heat I guess was making it expand such that it no longer wanted to eject right (when it worked just fine before). That was fun.
With the heat today being much worse than yesterday, I finally hit a point where I kinda had to tap out. I let my table kinda run itself for a bit, going to the front where the cooler air was. One of the guys in our group eventually bugged the staff about the heat and they rolled out a bunch of tower fans to try and move some air through, but sadly it didn’t seem to do much. They even rolled out a portable industrial A/C unit, but it wasn’t enough to keep the room cool. There were just too many people and too many machines.
Toward the end of the day, though not sure if it was heat related, I saw the guy with the PET systems had the hoods lifted. Wouldn’t be surprised if it were due to heat, hah. Considering a 128D and Amiga died due to heat.
While usually around the end of day 2 I’m simultaneously tired but also sad that VCF is ending, this year I just couldn’t wait for the show to be over due to the heat. This year was off the damn hook, but the A/C problems really did kinda put a damper on my enjoyment this year.
Load out was uneventful save for one thing: There were three Apple Lisas in consignment going for crazy money, including one that was…not in good condition. The owner of the clapped out one just opted to ditch on it, so about a half hour into load out, someone gets on the loudspeaker and announces that there is a Lisa in consignment…for $200.
Seeing some of the exhibitors drop everything to run to consignment was a sight to behold.
Not sure who ended up getting it in the end, but it was a fun occurrence to cap off West.
We got loaded up in my friend’s car, got my girlfriend, and got some Mr. Chau’s as a victory dinner for surviving the heatwave that was VCF West 2024.
So, what’s next?
Currently, next year is very much a tossup. Considering Quake 3 was such a hit for 2023, I’ve been wanting to do a dedicated Quake 3 exhibit, and I think I’m going to do it with my Windows boxes next year. I’ve got a Windows 95, 98, XP, and Vista box on tap, and I feel like it’d both be a nice thing to see Windows (as Windows wasn’t very represented in any of the years I’ve exhibited at West). I’ve also considered just watching the world burn and taking Windows 7 to West (and having all of the people tell me 7 is not retro, when it kinda is. Software support is dropping off hard, and 7 will be 16 years old next year), partially because I also have a mostly complete Windows 7 Party Pack. Remember those? When Microsoft really tried to hype up upgrading to Windows 7?
But there’s also a good chance I might not be able to exhibit next year. There’s potential chance we may be moving around this time next year, depending on finances and other factors. A lot of things happened this year (mostly losing our roommate) that put a huge strain on our finances, so next year’s VCF shenanigans will depend heavily upon whether I have the time or the finances to make it happen.
This year’s VCF alone already put my finances in the red, I spent more money than I wanted to (and hey, if you like what I do, I’m going to shill myself here and ask you to maybe consider hitting that Ko-Fi link up top and leaving me a tip. No pressure, though). I’m probably going to have to ramen diet it for a bit, but West is always worth it. Even if we have to suffer the hell fire when the A/C goes out. It’s essentially my birthday present to myself (since my birthday is later this month. Yay).
I just hope next year has functioning A/C. Please. Please.