Hey, thanks for the great video. I really appreciated your honesty and understanding. This was the first time for us too at such a big venue :) Hope you can make it to the big #20 in 2025!
Thank you for this incredibly thorough coverage of the event! And all credit to the event organisers for taking feedback and criticism on board and adapting to deliver an event that must now seem very enticing for a lot of people interested in retrocomputing.
VCF Midwest was a blast this year, though as with every year I find through other people's post con recaps that I missed a lot of stuff I would have found interesting. I'm sure committing to see everything would require a grueling methodology and would detract from the fun of spontaneous encounters! I've seen some footage of myself across a few videos, but more interesting is you caught the aftermath of one of my favorite moments from the con: at 17:00 you can see the terminal session from when I had been using that Compaq Portable earlier in the day. Your eyes do not deceive you: I dialed into my Linux box back home 500 miles away over the dial-up modem peeking from behind it! The plan was to connect to an IRC channel and post a message, but as you can see I only got as far as typing the first four characters of my username before the connection dropped. As you said, the cellular towers were absolutely hammered, and the con's telephone operator was getting very irritated by having to dial out for me over and over and over again. I took my own photo of the attempt, of course, but it's neat to see someone else caught it.
Thanks for showing us around the show! Not all of us are able to go to these conventions and have nothing similar locally, so this is as good as it gets! :P
Thanks for snagging a great shot of my bald spot during the retro hardware panel hahha great over view of the show! I can't wait to come back next year!
AWESOME! I personally rescued this laptop from our e-waste stream and donated it to the VCFMW19 Charity Auction with the hope that a YT creator would win it and use it in a video. You were bidding against another YT channel who 3d prints cases for them. So to see your video announcing your win and demonstrating that it did in fact work was super exciting and I am looking forward to your future videos showcasing it's new found life. I rescued another, except this other one is in fact a 701C (notice no S). Had I realized the difference, I would have donated the non-S. However, in that case, you may not have won. Who knows. Congrats on your win and thank you for supporting VCFMW! It was a great show and I look forward to next year!
No one would hold it against you for keeping the active matrix one for yourself. But yeah, had the price gone over $400 (I expected an active matrix example probably would've goen for $600) I would've bowed out. Thanks for donating it to the show, I'm not sure I would've been able to get one otherwise! And the money went to pay things forward. I'm actually getting some of polymatt's casings 3D printed so I can build a new battery, replace the PC card door, etc.
Finally had a chance to fully and completely watch this from beginning to end, and I have no words for it other than to say that it's just fantastic. Video quality was great, commentary was great, coverage was great. You managed to find things that I missed, and I helped run the darn show! You have a real knack for these kinds of videos, and I hope you're able to visit other shows and report on them as well. Also: Nice score with the butterfly Thinkpad! I used to have one but sold it when I wasn't able to repair it. I shall live vicariously through you now.
This was my first year going to VCF Midwest. I've always wanted to go since I live in the Chicagoland area, but for one reason or another, I was never able to. It was such a great time, and I can't wait until next year.
Funny that you singled out the Blaster PC there - literally a couple of days ago I was leafing through one of my old PC gaming mags and came across an ad for it, I'd similarly never heard of it before. That one was Creative branded as well though!
Great overview! This was my first VCFMW and it was a blast. The previous vids on previous years made me excited, I do regret missing out but gotta start somewhere. Kept my eyes peeled for me in the background at all in any b-roll shots, nah not once x) Kinda wish it was longer, it's a mad dash to try to see so much all in mostly one day (and sort of the 2nd, bc folks do start packing up etc). Anyways, looking forward to see what they do next year. That line at the beginning was also a chance to pick up a "badge" from that table prior to the doors as well, there was a limited amount of those produced (I think that's roughly how they kept track of attendance, so anything beyond the count they printed wouldn't be counted but at least gave them some rough idea perhaps). Badge isn't needed to attend or enter, but just another nice memento/keepsake as well.
@@userlandia I'm dying to find a Digital Venturis 433sx Computer. It was the first "IBM Compatible" PC I owned. It had a 486sx @ 33 mhz with 4 megs of ram (built in)
I was truly impressed with the size of the show and the deep variety at the different booths, unfortunately I realized I was in the early stage of a cold (I am very confident it wasn’t the human malware), so I had to play it safe and go, but not before unloading what I brought for the free table. Based on how quickly the first box was emptied, I’m confident it all found good homes. Next year!
Great recap! Sorry you missed The Stop Bits, tho! Veronica put a SID chip version of Rip Out the Battery on Bandcamp if that will help ease the pain. 😅
1:10 "It's like replacing a 486 PC with a Pentium 3" Considering the audience and especially considering the examples being shown now I wonder if this is a backhanded compliment and I should get ready for a string of what went wrong and lots of criticisms about the venue change. :o
Yeah, gotta treat these external SSDs for video more like memory cards. What kills me is that it happened while I was already sorting and backing up, but I was using a bad strategy. For SD cards I would normally import them to another place and not touch the SD card until the project is done (and have a backup of the SD card itself just in case).
A short-cut to better captions: Run the video's audio through the openai model "whisper". It produces a subtitle file with timings that is 99% accurate that you can then upload. No need to subtitle manually. 🙂 I look forward to watching this! Show retrospectives are sometimes the only way the showrunners can see what kind of a show they put on.
Whisper is better than YT's alignment but it still requires a lot of tweaking for proper line breaks and timing. It's definitely better than youtube's auto-alignment which doesn't seem to take any kind of punctuation into account. I try to format my captions to broadcast standards, and no auto-tool is quite there yet. So there's still a lot of work even after some kind of auto-alignment. I realize I'm a perfectionist, but I'm not manually inputting every subtitle line, that'd take even longer. Resolve has a decent voice-to-text which is what I use as a base to fix-up and precisely time.
By mid-day Saturday, the parking lot was completely full. Despite no local publicity. Just word of mouth with enthusiasts. I think I found the very last spot. The new venue did lack the intimacy of the Waterford but with the logistics settled, maybe some of that can be restored. One aspect that was missing is the lack of big iron that was present last year. Only the S/36 (and an AS/400 I missed) were present to represent that category. No PDPs, Vaxen, DGs or Centurions were present. When is Usagi David going to show?
Hey, thanks for the great video. I really appreciated your honesty and understanding. This was the first time for us too at such a big venue :) Hope you can make it to the big #20 in 2025!
Thank you for this incredibly thorough coverage of the event! And all credit to the event organisers for taking feedback and criticism on board and adapting to deliver an event that must now seem very enticing for a lot of people interested in retrocomputing.
VCF Midwest was a blast this year, though as with every year I find through other people's post con recaps that I missed a lot of stuff I would have found interesting. I'm sure committing to see everything would require a grueling methodology and would detract from the fun of spontaneous encounters!
I've seen some footage of myself across a few videos, but more interesting is you caught the aftermath of one of my favorite moments from the con: at 17:00 you can see the terminal session from when I had been using that Compaq Portable earlier in the day. Your eyes do not deceive you: I dialed into my Linux box back home 500 miles away over the dial-up modem peeking from behind it!
The plan was to connect to an IRC channel and post a message, but as you can see I only got as far as typing the first four characters of my username before the connection dropped. As you said, the cellular towers were absolutely hammered, and the con's telephone operator was getting very irritated by having to dial out for me over and over and over again. I took my own photo of the attempt, of course, but it's neat to see someone else caught it.
I watched the whole video and feel like I was really at the show. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for the detailed tour of the show! As someone who lives on the other side of the world, I feel like I was there :)
That was no ordinary logic analyzer at 6:21...that's a Tektronix Prism 3002, at the time the world's most advanced logic analyzer.
Thanks for the info!
Thanks for showing us around the show! Not all of us are able to go to these conventions and have nothing similar locally, so this is as good as it gets! :P
Fantastic job! I loved the new venue, so much better. Watching these videos reminds me yet again how many things I missed!
Thanks for snagging a great shot of my bald spot during the retro hardware panel hahha great over view of the show! I can't wait to come back next year!
This is so impressive and well done -- seeing what this has grown into is so inspiring!!
Thank you, this was the most detailed video I've seen so far about VCF Midwest.
Great coverage of VCF MW 2024! Thanks for all the detailed background.
Amazing work as always. One of my favorite videos of the year!
Jeez Dan; I’ve watched several of these recap videos, but you worked hard to include everything! Nice work!
Great coverage as always! Thanks for putting this together. What a show!
Thanks for the great coverage, I was there too and also had a great time this year.
Thanks for mentioning my talk about Nexa!
AWESOME! I personally rescued this laptop from our e-waste stream and donated it to the VCFMW19 Charity Auction with the hope that a YT creator would win it and use it in a video. You were bidding against another YT channel who 3d prints cases for them. So to see your video announcing your win and demonstrating that it did in fact work was super exciting and I am looking forward to your future videos showcasing it's new found life. I rescued another, except this other one is in fact a 701C (notice no S). Had I realized the difference, I would have donated the non-S. However, in that case, you may not have won. Who knows. Congrats on your win and thank you for supporting VCFMW! It was a great show and I look forward to next year!
No one would hold it against you for keeping the active matrix one for yourself. But yeah, had the price gone over $400 (I expected an active matrix example probably would've goen for $600) I would've bowed out. Thanks for donating it to the show, I'm not sure I would've been able to get one otherwise! And the money went to pay things forward.
I'm actually getting some of polymatt's casings 3D printed so I can build a new battery, replace the PC card door, etc.
super useful coverage, thanks! 😊
Finally had a chance to fully and completely watch this from beginning to end, and I have no words for it other than to say that it's just fantastic. Video quality was great, commentary was great, coverage was great. You managed to find things that I missed, and I helped run the darn show! You have a real knack for these kinds of videos, and I hope you're able to visit other shows and report on them as well. Also: Nice score with the butterfly Thinkpad! I used to have one but sold it when I wasn't able to repair it. I shall live vicariously through you now.
Thanks, Jim. I can’t make videos without a show and you guys really did step it up this year. Here’s to a big 20 year celebration next time!
This was my first year going to VCF Midwest. I've always wanted to go since I live in the Chicagoland area, but for one reason or another, I was never able to. It was such a great time, and I can't wait until next year.
Great to hear that you had a good time!
Interesting video, thanks 👍
My favorite overview of the show I've seen so far! Great job!
Knocking it out of a park as usual, Dan!
Funny that you singled out the Blaster PC there - literally a couple of days ago I was leafing through one of my old PC gaming mags and came across an ad for it, I'd similarly never heard of it before. That one was Creative branded as well though!
Great overview! This was my first VCFMW and it was a blast. The previous vids on previous years made me excited, I do regret missing out but gotta start somewhere. Kept my eyes peeled for me in the background at all in any b-roll shots, nah not once x) Kinda wish it was longer, it's a mad dash to try to see so much all in mostly one day (and sort of the 2nd, bc folks do start packing up etc). Anyways, looking forward to see what they do next year. That line at the beginning was also a chance to pick up a "badge" from that table prior to the doors as well, there was a limited amount of those produced (I think that's roughly how they kept track of attendance, so anything beyond the count they printed wouldn't be counted but at least gave them some rough idea perhaps). Badge isn't needed to attend or enter, but just another nice memento/keepsake as well.
Fantastic video! I saw you there a couple of times but you looked to be in serious B-roll mode so I didn't want to disturb! 😆
Don't be afraid to say hi!
Thanks for the awesome coverage!
Thanks for the Super Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
What a Great video. Thanks for the hard work. It was nice to see all that old stuff. Keep rockin'.
BTW was there a Digital computers section ?
There were only a few DEC machines on display but I did see a decent amount of DEC gear for sale and trade.
@@userlandia I'm dying to find a Digital Venturis 433sx Computer. It was the first "IBM Compatible" PC I owned. It had a 486sx @ 33 mhz with 4 megs of ram (built in)
I was truly impressed with the size of the show and the deep variety at the different booths, unfortunately I realized I was in the early stage of a cold (I am very confident it wasn’t the human malware), so I had to play it safe and go, but not before unloading what I brought for the free table. Based on how quickly the first box was emptied, I’m confident it all found good homes. Next year!
Gotta love butterflies. In the east, some believe they carry the souls of people. I'm sure it carries the soul of a computer.
Great recap!
Sorry you missed The Stop Bits, tho! Veronica put a SID chip version of Rip Out the Battery on Bandcamp if that will help ease the pain. 😅
Funny enough I did see it on bandcamp yesterday so I could take a listen!
@userlandia Nice! We are actively working on official recordings. They (I hope) will be available soon!
1:10 "It's like replacing a 486 PC with a Pentium 3"
Considering the audience and especially considering the examples being shown now I wonder if this is a backhanded compliment and I should get ready for a string of what went wrong and lots of criticisms about the venue change. :o
Not to spoil anything too much, but I was playing it straight with that simile.
I believe the S-100, COSMAC ELF, and RCA 1802 display was created by Josh Bensadon and Walter Miraglia.
Yeah, that's the Big Lesson: the first thing you do at the end of the day is make backup copies (that's plural) of your raw video files.
Yeah, gotta treat these external SSDs for video more like memory cards. What kills me is that it happened while I was already sorting and backing up, but I was using a bad strategy. For SD cards I would normally import them to another place and not touch the SD card until the project is done (and have a backup of the SD card itself just in case).
A short-cut to better captions: Run the video's audio through the openai model "whisper". It produces a subtitle file with timings that is 99% accurate that you can then upload. No need to subtitle manually. 🙂
I look forward to watching this! Show retrospectives are sometimes the only way the showrunners can see what kind of a show they put on.
Whisper is better than YT's alignment but it still requires a lot of tweaking for proper line breaks and timing. It's definitely better than youtube's auto-alignment which doesn't seem to take any kind of punctuation into account. I try to format my captions to broadcast standards, and no auto-tool is quite there yet. So there's still a lot of work even after some kind of auto-alignment. I realize I'm a perfectionist, but I'm not manually inputting every subtitle line, that'd take even longer. Resolve has a decent voice-to-text which is what I use as a base to fix-up and precisely time.
By mid-day Saturday, the parking lot was completely full. Despite no local publicity. Just word of mouth with enthusiasts. I think I found the very last spot. The new venue did lack the intimacy of the Waterford but with the logistics settled, maybe some of that can be restored. One aspect that was missing is the lack of big iron that was present last year. Only the S/36 (and an AS/400 I missed) were present to represent that category. No PDPs, Vaxen, DGs or Centurions were present. When is Usagi David going to show?
Hello.