Report from Dayton Hamvention

With so many things going on around the house, I was only able to really do Friday of the Hamvention this year. Even so, it was a good day, even if I wasn't able to find much of what I went shopping for. Among my better buys were: o A Verbatim 8" cleaning diskette with four 10-packs of moist diskettes plus a 8" library case for $3. o A Heathkit 5017-based clock with incandescent filament 7-segment displays for $5. o Enough laptop parts to build a spare for my daily-drive machine (OT) for $30. o Box of 10 Leviton designer X-10 wall switches for $40. o Cisco 1900 managed 10BaseT hub for $8. o Spare cell phone with batteries, charger, etc. for $5 (mine has a design defect that requires repair/replacement of the phone from wire damage at the hinge - on my 3rd body in 5 years). o ISA card with large prototyping space bolted on for $3. o P120 sub-notebook w/BSD to be used for GPS head w/Orinoco Gold WiFi card for $40. o Industrial GPS (bulkhead mount) with 2m lead to amplified antenna for $25. o Tube of PIC 16C54s for $2. I saw much less Sun gear than two years ago, only a couple of Sparc5s, and a few disks and Sbus cards virtually no DEC gear, not even Alpha (the bed of Dan Cohoe's truck notwithstanding). A few collectible micros (Timex 1000, C-64 with all the goodies, Atari 800...), with one guy having the pick of the litter - a Rockwell AIM-65 w/dual 8" floppies (asking $500) and an Altair 8800b (turnkey frontpanel) with 2 matching 8" floppy cabinets and docs (asking $1000). I was really disappointed at the sparseness of component vendors. There were a few there, but nothing like days past. I was unable to locate a variety of chips and switches that were explicitly on my shopping list of parts for my Elf 2000, Real Console, SBC65C02, etc. The weather was threatening rain at various points, but it did little more than mist briefly, not even enough to have people close down. The drive was incredibly foggy at 06:30, but cleared up by mid-morning. Today looks gorgeous, with partly cloudy skies and temps in the mid-70s. Tomorrow should be nice in the morning, turning to rain as people go to leave. The other thing that struck me was the number of empty flea market spaces... in some cases, near the back, it was well over 60% in a given area. Even on the dense side of the main aisle it wasn't entirely full. I don't know if the looming clouds played a part, but perhaps some Saturday-only folks may show up today to sell. I'd heard that flea market space prices had jumped, so perhaps the market is responding to the increase, or perhaps not as many people are willing to gas up the truck to make the long trek. Either way, attendance seemed to be good; the local news reported 30,000 attendees (no doubt based on reported ticket sales), and was touting the $10M being spread around by the Hams, much at local lodging and eating establishments. Since I am less than 90 minutes away, it's still worth it for me. I did get to meet a variety of people face to face from the list here. Dan Cohoe's spot made a good place to cycle through to see who had paused at the pile of CDC disk packs that Dan was using as bait to snag mini-computer mavens who might have stuff squirreled away in corners. Our planned meetup at the Rib Spot was a success, with several classiccmp regulars and a few lurkers in attendance. Should have thought to have gotten a group photo, but I was too tired to think of it, and I'd left my camera at home in any case. Something to remember for next time. So in short, I found a few bargains here and there, with some people willing to accept a bit below their asking prices, and some resolute and firm, but that's to be expected on the opening day... Sunday is always bargain day, especially on wet years, which this looks not to be. -ethan P.S. - one fun moment was peering into a digital data recorder/logger that Dan Cohoe had brought to sell and identifying the IM6100 processor and the 12-bit-wide bank of SRAM inside, c. 1979. I had expected an ordinary 8-bit micro like a 6800 or Z-80, and was surprised to find something off the wall.