The meeting opened with a recap of VCF East at InfoAge in Wall, NJ. The consignment room had an Otrona Attaché sitting a few feet from a row of Kaypros. A second Otrona turned up at the other end of the same table. The HeathKit room had an H8, several H19s and H89s, and an H11, the LSI-11–based machine. An Apple I was on display, real or reproduction unclear.
Joseph Weisbecker’s daughter Joyce was at the 1802 table, credited as the first woman to design commercial video games. Stephen Fry from the Dayton Microcomputer Association set up next door with a relay-based computer — the same neighbor the Timex table had at VCF Midwest last year.
On Sunday afternoon the building was evacuated for about two hours after a swatting call brought in police, dogs, and at least one M16. The bomb-sniffing dogs apparently couldn’t smell anything past the radar tubes.
Ingo gave a long update on the Kilo Zed. The STLs and Gerbers are very close to release — he’s been printing prototype cases, including one in pastel mint green, and fine-tuning fits with threaded inserts and the new Wespi carrier mount. A Kilo ZE is in the works as well: an emulator-only keyboard with USB, mappable keys, and a buffer to fix the dropped-keystroke problem when typing outruns the Z80.
The keycap Kickstarter wraps up in about a week. Backers are now getting four bonus caps: a ZX81-style Rub Out, a New Line, a ZX81 badge key, and a “Zed-Head” key. White ink is being applied bolder than the original — less authentic, easier on older eyes.
Ingo is also hoping to make VCF West at the Computer History Museum on August 1–2 and is looking for company.
David showed the disk-recovery app he’s been building with Claude to browse the hundreds of 5.25″ disks Joe has been imaging — Larkin, Oliger v1 and v2, Aerco, even some QL disks that turned up. The app pulls out custom fonts, Pixel Print icons, and the loose binaries referenced by BASIC programs, and exports fonts as TTF.
Jay Mundy is joining the 1068 v2 troubleshooting team. Ricardo is sketching a new TS-Pico spin built around the RP2350, which could let programs be written straight into 2068 memory instead of going through the load routine. There’s also a ZX Spectrum paint studio out of the Czech Republic worth demoing — David is going to see if the author will join the group.