The Great Trailer Incident -- ECLIPSED !!!

BTW, the rest of VCF East 5.0 this weekend was awesome. Very strong exhibits and a very strong lecture schedule this year. Ya'll missed the talk by Bill Mauchly, in which he brought along some of his father's hardware. Another of our speakers, Bell Labs vet Claude Kagan, brough Pres Eckert's engineering notebook. So we quite an ENIAC celebration this weekend! David Gesswein's PDP-8 exhibit won best-of-show, with Mike Loewen's SAGE exhibit runner-up. All weekend there was a full exhibit hall and the VCF corresponded with the grand opening of our computer museum (previously existing only in a limited "demo" mode). Major fun this weekend! I'm really looking forward to the pictures, and we also plan to post some exhibit hall video on YouTube. - Evan -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2008 11:00 PM To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: The Great Trailer Incident -- ECLIPSED !!! Many of you may recall The Great Trailer Incident (tm) of 2004, in which cctalk owner Jay West ventured from St. Louis to Boston for VCF East 2.0, only to encounter a flat tire, incompetent police dispatchers, poison ivy, and -- according to rumor on the VCF show floow -- arrest, fire, crashing, computer tragedy, possibly death, and/or an encounter with a minicomputer-hating wild boar. Okay, so the part about the minicomputer-hating wild board MIGHT not be true, but personally I think that's what really happened. Jay's version of the story is here: http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2004-July/045851.html I'm simultaneously proud (and fucking ASTOUNDED) to share the news tonight that Vince Briel, this weekend at VCF East 5.0 in New Jersey, ** BEAT ** Jay's adventure!!!!! Vince's weekend began ordinary enough. He packed his car and left Cleveland on Friday morning for the 8-hour drive to central New Jersey. He arrived in the late afternoon / early evening. Just like the other exhibitors who arrived Friday for the Sat./Sun. event, Vince unpacked his car and began setting up his table. Then he came to me after an hour and said, "Evan, there is a problem." He looked extremely distraught. I know Vince pretty well, so I figured either there was a real problem, or (more likely) there was a punchline to follow, perhaps at my expense. Vince was scheduled to run a replica-building workshop this morning. What he revealed Friday night was that he forgot to pack the replica kits. No boggie. Just cancel the workshop, and people will understand that it was a simple mistake, I told him .... but Vince would have none of that .... in the dark and in the pouring rain and clearly tired, Vince decided to DRIVE BACK TO CLEVELAND TO GET THEM. I and others tried to talk him out of it, with no luck. Vince got home to Cleveland, slept for just 2 hours, then made sure he had the kits this time and DROVE BACK TO NEW JERSEY -- for a total of 24 hours of highway driving in about a 35-hour span -- much of it in the dark and/or rain, and much of it on increasingly little sleep! Quite frankly, I wouldn't want to have been the cars near him, especially on the second trip to Jersey yesterday morning. His workshop this morning was a huge success. Then a few hours later, after the show ended, he (of course) drove home (again) to Cleveland. In total that's 32 hours of highway driving, much of it in the dark and/or rain, much on little/no sleep, spending hundreds of dollars on gas, all a three-day span, just because he's a dedicated, hard-core, loyal, and (apparently) clinically insane VCF supporter. THE GREAT TRAILER INCIDENT HAS BEEN BEAT. Vince is god. - Evan