--- title: "Vintage Computing Festival MidWest 2026" id: 71565 type: "post" slug: "vintage-computing-festival-midwest-2026" url: "http://localhost/timex-sinclair/vintage-computing-festival-midwest-2026/" markdown_url: "http://localhost/timex-sinclair/vintage-computing-festival-midwest-2026.md" published_at: "2026-09-22T23:25:15+00:00" modified_at: "2026-09-22T23:58:08+00:00" author: "David Anderson" featured_image: url: "http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0522-Large.jpeg" excerpt: "Eight of us from the Timex/Sinclair Online User Group took three tables at VCF Midwest 21 in Schaumburg on September 12 and 13. Joe VandeZande, Jeff Fetta, Peyton Bratton, Carl Miles, John Mark Mobley, Mark Martin, Evan Wright, Stewart Newfeld, David Green and me, plus assorted spouses and children who put up with us for…" category: - name: "Blog" slug: "blog" taxonomy: "category" url: "http://localhost/category/blog/" - name: "Timex/Sinclair" slug: "timex-sinclair" taxonomy: "category" url: "http://localhost/category/timex-sinclair/" post_tag: - name: "Byte-Back Co" slug: "byte-back-co" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/byte-back-co/" - name: "K-2 Electronics" slug: "k-2-electronics" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/k-2-electronics/" - name: "QL" slug: "ql" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/ql/" - name: "TS 1000" slug: "ts1000" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/ts1000/" - name: "TS 2068" slug: "ts2068" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/ts2068/" - name: "William Stewart Systems" slug: "william-stewart-systems" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/william-stewart-systems/" - name: "Zebra Systems" slug: "zebra-systems" taxonomy: "post_tag" url: "http://localhost/tag/zebra-systems/" model: - name: "Sinclair QL" slug: "sinclair-ql" taxonomy: "model" url: "http://localhost/model/sinclair-ql/" - name: "Sinclair ZX80" slug: "zx80" taxonomy: "model" url: "http://localhost/model/zx80/" - name: "Timex/Sinclair 1000" slug: "ts-1000" taxonomy: "model" url: "http://localhost/model/ts-1000/" - name: "Timex/Sinclair 2068" slug: "ts-2068" taxonomy: "model" url: "http://localhost/model/ts-2068/" indiv: - name: "Bob Swoger (K9WVY)" slug: "bob-swoger" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/bob-swoger/" - name: "Carl Miles" slug: "carl-miles" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/carl-miles/" - name: "David Anderson" slug: "david-anderson" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/david-anderson/" - name: "David Green" slug: "david-green" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/david-green/" - name: "David Spinnett" slug: "david-spinnett" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/david-spinnett/" - name: "Don Crawford" slug: "don-crawford" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/don-crawford/" - name: "Evan Wright" slug: "evan-wright" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/evan-wright/" - name: "Gary Grimes" slug: "gary-grimes" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/gary-grimes/" - name: "Jeff Fetta" slug: "jeff-fetta" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/jeff-fetta/" - name: "Joe Vandezande" slug: "joe-vandezande" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/joe-vandezande/" - name: "John Mobley" slug: "john-mobley" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/john-mobley/" - name: "Jon Becker" slug: "jon-becker" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/jon-becker/" - name: "Josef Jelinek" slug: "josef-jelinek" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/josef-jelinek/" - name: "Mark Martin" slug: "mark-martin" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/mark-martin/" - name: "Peyton Bratton" slug: "peyton-bratton" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/peyton-bratton/" - name: "Stewart Newfeld" slug: "stewart-newfeld" taxonomy: "indiv" url: "http://localhost/indiv/stewart-newfeld/" --- # Vintage Computing Festival MidWest 2026 Eight of us from the [Timex/Sinclair Online User Group](http://localhost/tag/timex-sinclair-online-user-group/) took three tables at VCF Midwest 21 in Schaumburg on September 12 and 13. [Joe VandeZande](http://localhost/indiv/joe-vandezande/), [Jeff Fetta](http://localhost/indiv/jeff-fetta/), [Peyton Bratton](http://localhost/indiv/peyton-bratton/), [Carl Miles](http://localhost/indiv/carl-miles/), [John Mark Mobley](http://localhost/indiv/john-mobley/), [Mark Martin](http://localhost/indiv/mark-martin/), [Evan Wright](http://localhost/indiv/evan-wright/), [Stewart Newfeld](http://localhost/indiv/stewart-newfeld/), [David Green](http://localhost/indiv/david-green/) and [me](http://localhost/indiv/david-anderson/), plus assorted spouses and children who put up with us for a weekend. The show was bigger than last year; they opened out another wall unit in the convention center to fit it. [![Image](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_4895-Large-edited.jpeg)](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_4895-Large-edited.jpeg)Friday night setup. Photo by Jeff Fetta. ## What was on the tables A TS 1500 I bought off eBay that, to my surprise, mostly worked the first time I plugged it in. Attached to it was a [Timex Sinclair 1526](http://localhost/product/timex-sinclair-1526/); not a Timex product but [David Spinnett](http://localhost/indiv/david-spinnett/) and [Don Crawford’s](http://localhost/indiv/don-crawford/) modern one, a horizontal reworking of the OpenSpand in a 1510-style case, with the SD card riding in a cartridge that plugs into an edge connector in the middle of the board. David Green brought the CRT it was running on. Next to that sat a [VOTEM](http://localhost/product/votem/), the Ray Mills and [Alger Salt](http://localhost/indiv/alger-salt/) analog-to-digital converter that reads voltage and temperature through the cassette input. My own 2068 with its custom keyboard ran a [TS-Pico](https://andertone.com/product/ts-pico/) and [PicoVideo](https://andertone.com/product/picovideo/), cycling through [Jon Becker’s](http://localhost/indiv/jon-becker/) *[ECMview](http://localhost/computer_media/ecmview/)*: his own extended color mode images alternating with a set of *Blade Runner* stills [Josef Jelinek](http://localhost/indiv/josef-jelinek/) converted for me. Jon’s port of *Berserk* ran on the same machine. Behind the monitor was a 2068 signed by [Gary Grimes](http://localhost/indiv/gary-grimes/), and above it three of Grimes’s January 1983 design worksheets for the machine, the ones where he has drawn an arrow to one of his own concepts and written that it looks too much like a TI-99/4A, and where a corner of the third sheet compares the case size to an Epson HX-20. In front of all that lay a bare, unpopulated 2068 board, which somebody long ago started to solder an SCLD onto and then stopped. Carl took it home to scan. There was also a [TS 1050](http://localhost/product/ts1050-carrying-case/), the plastic carrying case Timex sold to hold a 1000 or 1500, its manual, its power supply and four cassettes, with a fold-out handle and clasps for a shoulder strap, in case you wanted to look like a man carrying important business to the office. [![Image](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0488-Large.jpeg)](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0488-Large.jpeg)Gary Grimes’s 1983 worksheets. One note reads that the concept looks too much like the TI-99/4A. Joe VandeZande brought a carload and sold most of the vintage machines he came with in the first few hours. The centerpiece was a genuine Timex [in-store demonstrator](http://localhost/product/eprom-store-demonstrator/) for the 1000 running its demo program. The demo asks your name, then offers to scale a recipe for however many people you plan to feed. John Mark Mobley, who grew up in a home and school with about a hundred children, answered 100, and the 1000 duly told him how many eggs he needed. Joe also had a 1000 out of [Bob Swoger’s](http://localhost/indiv/bob-swoger/) collection that somebody in the early eighties rehoused in hand-cut plexiglass with a keyboard built from Radio Shack push-button switches. There are only three rows of keys; a three-position toggle switch under the handle selects whether the top row acts as the numeric row or the third row, with off in the middle. In the corner is a Radio Shack bar-graph chip driving an LED bar, with a little black line inked on at the level its builder found loaded tapes reliably. Joe also showed a rehoused 1000 he built years ago with a surplus Texas Instruments keyboard, its keys spray-painted white and the legends printed on an early laser printer, Sharpied red where red was needed, lacquered, cut out and glued on. Then the one Joe built for the show: a 3D-printed keyboard wired with wire-wrap wire into a ZX81 case already too damaged to feel bad about, with a [ZX-Wespi-V](https://github.com/holmatic/zx-iot-video) and a small screen mounted externally so the whole thing is portable, the lot screwed to a board to make it one piece. Out of the back runs a [Byte-Back BB-1](http://localhost/product/control-module/) control module (eight relays, eight TTL inputs) driving a 3D-printed *Timex Sinclair Team* sign lit with 24-volt LED strip, flashing TIMEX, then SINCLAIR, then TEAM, then everything at once. Joe only needed three bits for the sign and lit two more anyway, on the grounds that more blinking lights are better than fewer. A [William Stuart Systems SP0256 speech synthesizer](http://localhost/product/speech-synthesis-unlimited/) sat behind it talking at passers-by, which took Joe several hours of coaxing to make intelligible. Stewart Newfeld brought several [OpenSpands](https://codeberg.org/NollKollTroll/OpenSpand/src/branch/main) he had assembled. Adam Klotblixt’s design is open source and Stewart is building units to sell through [Zebra Systems](http://localhost/tag/zebra-systems/), tuning the 3D-printed enclosure and rewriting the documentation as he goes. What has him excited is not the SD card storage but the video: the OpenSpand watches memory and impersonates the ULA’s display generator, putting out a clean composite signal. A stock ZX81 or TS 1000 has RF out and nothing else, and getting a usable picture on a modern display has always meant opening the case and installing a composite modification of some sort. The OpenSpand means any working 1000 can be plugged in and used as it is. One of Joe’s 81s had an OpenSpand on the back and a Zebra Systems [light pen](http://localhost/product/light-pen/) on the front, Stewart’s own product from the early eighties, its sensor mounted in a felt-tip pen barrel, running the *Concentration* game that came with it. You hold the pen against a white square and wait while the program flashes its way along the row. [![Image](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0483-Large.jpeg)](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_0483-Large.jpeg)OpenSpand and a 1980s Zebra light pen on the same ZX81. Jeff Fetta brought a white 3D-printed ZX80 reproduction of his own making, a placard about the Z80 with an oversized printed Z80 on it, and an 81 carrying a compact flash storage board he designed. Because the interface is IDE it needs only a handful of TTL parts and a patched ROM, it gives the machine a catalog and fast loading in much the same way the OpenSpand does. He also turned up with a commercial point-of-purchase video display, the kind that loops a clip above a grocery shelf, rescued from his local group’s free pile, refaced to read *See the Sinclair ZX81 Story*, and loaded with a YouTube documentary he had figured out how to get onto the thing. One of Joe’s machines had the an iteration of Carl Miles’ TS 1510 command cartridge reproduction, carrying an EEPROM larger than the original and a set of switches to pick among four images. Behind it ran an Aerco board whose LEDs report which bank of memory is being accessed and latch the last one on a crash, a machine-code debugging aid in 1983, and a perfectly good blinking-light generator in 2026. Behind that, one of Stewart’s Zebra keyboard beepers and a TS 1016 RAM pack. From my collection, a [K-2 Electronics](http://localhost/company/k-2-electronics/) [Kradle](http://localhost/product/kradle/). It is a steel enclosure that swallows a ZX81 or 1000 whole, still in its own case, and gives it fifty calculator keys with a real space bar, 64K on a board underneath, Atari joystick support, tape-loading circuitry and two expansion slots for RS-232 and parallel. The keyboard connects through the expansion card rather than the computer’s own keyboard connectors. Mine has a ZX-Wespi-V in it that I built, wired to the ULA’s video output and to the ear jack: you type LOAD, a small loader arrives, and you pick what you want off a menu, in VGA. Peyton Bratton came to hang out and help, and did a great deal of both. Mark Martin set up at the far end with his Sinclair QL gear, including a Q68, a QL-compatible module with considerably more power than the QL sitting beside it and a fraction of its bulk. Evan Wright had the table beside ours, showing [Lantern](https://textadventure.net/), his text-adventure authoring system and cross-compiler. You build an Infocom-style game in a GUI with a four-word parser and a C-like scripting language, test it in a built-in player, and export it to a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe, a BBC Micro, a TRS-80, CP/M, DOS or a 48K Spectrum. We met Evan at VCF Midwest last year, and it took a while for the rest of the story to come out. In the spring of 1982 a New Haven teacher named [Chris Baldwin](http://localhost/indiv/baldwin-chris/) put an advertisement in a school newspaper offering to help kids build ZX81 kits at $150 apiece. He expected six replies and got twenty-eight, most of them ten- and eleven-year-old boys who had never held a soldering iron. Ten two-hour sessions later, more than half the machines worked the moment they were plugged in, and most of the rest were repaired by the children who had built them. [Ross Williams](http://localhost/indiv/ross-williams/) wrote the workshop up for *[Timex Sinclair User](http://localhost/tag/timex-sinclair-user/)* in July 1983 under the title “[The Great Connecticut Kit-Building Experiment.](http://localhost/article/the-great-connecticut-kit-building-experiment/)” Evan is in one of the photographs, at the back of the class. [![Image](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Evan-Wright-computer-camp-240x300.png)](http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Evan-Wright-computer-camp.png)Evan Wright, back of the room, in *Timex Sinclair User*, July 1983. A few feet further along was Nick of [Wyoming Retro](https://wyoretro.com/) with a [Memotech](http://localhost/tag/memotech/) display . He had the whole lineup from the advertisements: MemoCalc, Memotext, the MemoPak, the serial and Centronics interfaces, the high-resolution graphics module, the 64K module, all in their extruded aluminum cases, plus two MTX machines. Elsewhere in the hall: [American Retro](https://americanretro.shop/) from Long Island, who have built a business out of test equipment, replacement membranes and reference oscilloscope traces for retro machines; an electron microscope a few aisles over, on which John was taught to focus and zoom and spent a while at 2000x on a wasp wing; a man wearing a full-size 3D-printed Pip-Boy; and enough ADM-3As and VT100s to furnish a movie set. The free pile required multiple visits from Joe, who had said he would not *buy* anything at VCF and kept that promise exactly. A chip off a modem he pulled out of it went into fixing one of Stewart’s machines.