West Coast Sinclair show

The West Coast Sinclair Show was held in Union City, CA, on 5 June 1999, one week after the East Coast Sinclair Show. Most of the European attendees arrived the Monday before the show and spent the week visiting San Francisco.

The day before the show was by Bar-B-Q at my house before the show a trip was made to a local regional park to show the Europeans a little bit of California nature. Luckily the side trip was enjoyed by all.

The attendees at the Bar-B-Q were: Simon Goodwin and his girlfriend Chris Lyle, Tony Firshman, Roy Wood, Jochen Merz, Marcel Kilgus, Dietrich and Inga Bruder, Jim Hunkins, Don Walterman, John Rish and Jack Boatwright. As evening fell, Simon, Chris, Tony, Marcel, and I hopped in the hot tub for a bit of a soak.

The day of the show I loaded up the station wagon QL stuff, picked up a few folks at the local motel and headed for the venue.

As this was the first show I’ve organized, I was not too sure on how big a place to get the venue as, shall we say, nice and cozy. There was enough room for the vendors, but not really enough for a lot of milling about.

The vendors were Tony Firshman with his ever present QL controlled LEGO robot, Roy Wood demoing software on a Q40. Jochen Merz and Marcel sharing a table with their wares. Jack Boatwright was selling the last of the stuff from RMG John Rish (the sole US QL, Z88 dealer) had mostly Z88 stuff on his table. Don Walterman had a Spectrum 128 set up for all to see. Simon Goodwin tinking on a QL (one of two) that had been given as orphans looking for a new home, by a QLer who had upgraded to Mac.

Ken Harbit drove from Fresno to pick up some T/S 2068 stuff and went home with one of the orphaned QLs. Bill Miller and Terry Greenlee (formerly of the Pennisula QL Group) made a surprise visit to the show

The key visitor to the show was the renowned author Stan Kelly-Bootle, writer of many computer books, including the “Devil’s DP Dictionary”, and the holder of the first post-graduate degree in Computer Science (from Oxford).

Simon Goodwin has been a reader of Stan’s work for a number of years (so have I) and considers him one of the few that have really mastered the English language. When I mentioned to Simon that Stan was coming to the show, Simon’s jaw literally dropped. Simon got to spend a few hours chatting with Stan, smiling the whole time.

There was no organized demonstrations or talks, just a whole lot of Sinclair talk going on. Since I was the organizer, I was not really relaxed enough to truly enjoy the show.

When the show ended at 5:00, there was a debate on where to have dinner held. Originally, Tony and Roy were leaving for the airport right after the show. Unknown to me, their flight was delayed 4 hours and they had time for dinner after the show. Luckily everyone agreed on a place for dinner and the restaurant easily handled a group of 13.

We are talking about plans for next year. We have just discovered a local “Vintage Computer Show” that would be the right audience to advertise our show, Hopefully we can generate more local attendees next year.