Vintage Computers At Maker Faire

It’s no secret that Maker Faire is highly geared toward the younger crowd. This doen’t mean the Faire is completely devoid of the historic; the Bay Area Maker Faire is right in the heart of the beginnings of the computer industry, and a few of the booths are showing off exactly how far computers have come over the last forty years.

Superboard[Vince Briel] of Briel Computers has a booth showing off his wares, mostly modern reimaginings of vintage computers. His table is loaded up with replica 1s, a board that’s much smaller but still completely compatible with the Apple I. The MicroKIM made an appearance, but the crown jewel is [Vince]’s Superboard III, a replica of the Ohio Scientific Superboard II. It’s your basic 6502 computer with 32k of RAM, but unlike just about every other modern retrocomputer out there, [Vince] put the keyboard right on the main board.

The switches are Cherry MX, the keys are from WASDkeyboards. [Vince] is actually getting a lot of interest in making modern ASCII keyboards to replace the old and busted boards that came in the home computers of the 70s and 80s. That might be a project [Vince] will release sometime in the future.

[Jef Raskin], the Swift Card, and the Canon Cat

[Steve Jobs] may have been the father of the Macintosh, but he was, by no means, solely responsible for the Mac. It was a team of people, and when you talk about the UI of the Mac, the first name that should come up is [Jef Raskin].

One of [Jef Raskin]’s finest works was the Swyft Card, an add-on to the Apple II that was basically just a ROM card that had an OS and Forth interpreter on it. The distinguishing feature of the Swyft card was the use of ‘leap’ keys, a simple way to change contexts when using the computer. We’ve seen replicas of the Swyft card before, courtesy of [Mike Willegal] at the Vintage Computing Festival East.

Woodie[Dwight Elvey] of the vintage-computer.com forum brought a few extra special items related to [Raskin] and the Canon Cat. The first was a Swyft card installed in an Apple IIe. The second was a prototype Swyft computer, with SERIAL NUMBER 1 printed on a Dymo label and fixed to the case.

The ‘woodie’, as [Dwight] calls it, has two 1.44 MB disk drives, of which half of the disk is actually usable. [Dwight] didn’t take the machine apart, but I’m 99% sure the CRT in it is the exact same tube found in early 9″ Macs.

Also in [Dwight]’s display is a production Swyft computer and a Canon Cat, the final iteration of [Jef Raskin]’s idea of what a text-based computer should be.

The vintage-computer booth also had a few interesting retrocomputers including a Commodore 128D, the Apple made, Bell & Howell branded Apple II, and an Amiga 2000. Right next door was the Computer History Museum, who brought a very kid-friendly storage medium display. Showing a 10-year-old an 8″ disk is fun.

6 thoughts on “Vintage Computers At Maker Faire

  1. Ha! Leap key. It’s mind boggling, the number of 1980’s personal computer brands that fell by the wayside. Somehow the most boring ones ended up winning. They all used the same subset of processors z80/8086/6502, etc… but if a platform included extended capabilities such as color or onboard sound, they were perceived as a toys.

    1. Why do you think we’re all using “IBM Compatible” computers today, boring appeals to businesses and businesses buy lots of computers. Sadly peacocks sometimes go extinct.

      1. True about business. It was more than boring though, it was “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. You put yourself at risk to bring Apple IIe/Lisa/Mac into your organization – though I recall there was a Lisa when they were brand new at Boeing for graphics (Mac Draw/MacPaint type stuff) in one of the 7N7 groups.

    2. I tried to figure out what those leap keys do. It seems they are just incremental search shortcuts. To be honest, even if Cat design was in some ways revolutionary (I like the whole keyboard is more efficient than mouse idea), it appears to have been designed as the most boring, strictly business-oriented appliance ever. So it seems that being bland and boring was not a sufficient recipe for success.

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