Hello from Nerd Central!

This weekend we participated in the Vintage Computer Festival Southwest, a huge event held at the University of Texas at Dallas. People travel to this thing from all over the United States and the world. Doc went last year as an attendee, and this year we got a booth to show off some of our cool Apple gear that we’ve collected over the decades.

It was a lot of work and we are pretty wiped out after three full days of being “on” and in salesperson mode, talking all day to hundreds of people, and hauling equipment all over the place. However, the whole experience was pretty great for a number of reasons:

• There was a ton of cool old equipment to see and play with.
• The community at this show is incredibly kind and generous. The guy with the booth across from us bought donuts and distributed them to all the nearby tables. The kids at the table next to us sold 3D printed “fidget gadgets” made of clicky key caps. This morning I tried to buy one from them and they insisted on giving it to us for being cool table neighbors all weekend. (Of course I got a second one which they did let me pay for.)
• Everyone there is extremely excited about their passions, and they want to talk at length about what they love.
• A rather large percentage of the community were LGBTQ+ (as indicated by pronouns on nametags, rainbow and trans flag t-shirts and jewelry, etc.) which absolutely delighted me. I was super glad I wore my Pride flag necklace all weekend. I love to show my support!
• There was very valuable stuff absolutely everywhere, and as far as I know, no theft or anything shady occurred at all. Vendors would wander off and leave their tables full of vintage equipment, seemingly unconcerned about anyone stealing anything. And that basically proved out. Some vendors even left “honor system” signs instructing people to take what they wanted and to just Venmo the money to a phone number. About the worst thing that happened all weekend was an announcement over the show’s PA system that someone had plugged something incompatible into the network and it was in the process of taking the whole network down, and could they please unplug whatever it was.
• It was just plain fun to be around some fellow nerds!

We sold quite a few items, including a graphite G4, a Newton, a Mac Plus, a QuickTake 200 digital camera, a rare Power Computing “Fighting Back for Mac” poster (from MacWorld 1997), a bunch of vintage Mac games and software, some TI99/4A game cartridges, video cards, a Knox Street Apple Store grand opening t-shirt, a Think Different original iMac t-shirt, and a number of random goodies like an iMac desk clock, a “Hello (again)” iMac keychain, a CueCat that Wired magazine and the Dallas Morning News randomly sent me decades ago when they thought that the next big thing would be people scanning barcodes as they read the morning paper, Blip: The Digital Game, and more.

The star of our show was a fully working Apple Lisa from 1983! Doc got it for $25 from a warehouse at his office some time in the 1990s, as it was supposedly not working…. but once he realized there was a third-party glare screen behind the front cover plate that had activated a kill switch, he took it out and it booted right up. It has a working (original) hard drive, a working floppy drive that reads and writes, functional video and audio, and an original keyboard and mouse. The guy who bought it took it over to the “Lisa experts” at the show, who opened it up, replaced a broken gear that was preventing the floppy drive from ejecting, took it from Mac OS back to Lisa OS, and exclaimed about how amazingly clean and pristine it was both inside and out. The best part is, you’ll be able to visit our Lisa at a new computer museum opening in Austin in 2026.

I was surprised that nobody ended up buying this complete set of the bonus software CDs that came with the MacAddict magazines. Also, here’s a view of some of the fun stuff on our table.

Jamie enjoyed helping set up Doc’s not-for-sale Radius 81/110 each day with a welcome message and the “Oogachaka Baby” video for people to play with (which Doc described as “the Skibidi Toilet of the 1990s”). And here’s a couple of other photos of me and Doc at our table.