[Coco] CoCoFest Report

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

----- "Frank Swygert" <farna at att.net> wrote:

> From: "Frank Swygert" <farna at att.net>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Sent: Friday, April 3, 2009 8:40:21 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: [Coco] CoCoFest Report
>
> Hmmm.... yeah, you were out of high school, but could have went back
> and no one would have questioned you! I/'m not as old as a lot of the
> guys here, but at 47 I'm just a bit older than you. Maybe I'm just
> jealous... You're old enough to appreciate the old phrase "youth's
> wasted on the young" though! Good to "see" a few new younger guys
> (well, one or two in their 20s, more in their 30s) occasionally too. 
> 
> Maybe it was just the three of us then -- at least in my car. Long
> time ago! Maybe I'm thinking about others that went with us to the
> Hard Rock in another car. To be honest I really just remember that
> LONG trip back to the hotel, don't recall much about the restaurant!
> Oh, and I wouldn't deprive anyone of seeing what "fun" a fest could
> be!! 
> 
> 30th Anniversary sounds good. But will have to see. My parents want
> the wife and I to take a trip to Germany with them in the spring of
> 2010. Maybe moving the fest to the fall is an omen though? 

Late summer might be better.  As I recall, the Color Computer (along with the TRS-80 Model 3 and the Pocket Computer PC-1) was announced on or around July 31, 1980.  All were in the stores when I joined the Shack November 2nd that year.  Doing things the actual anniversary might drum up more attention.  And I still want to get to one, and next year I might not be so strapped.  And I'll have longevity for a second week of vacation (my one week at this point is spoken for every year, <http://www.freestateproject.org/news/festival> and it takes a while to drive from Jersey to Illinois and back, since I will not submit to the Homeland Security A$$h0l3s and fly).

It'd be good to hit a gathering of Color Computer fans.  The last I recall attending was a Rainbowfest at Long Beach CA in the mid 80s.  (After that, I was too deep into the Xenix stuff and then into the AT&T Unix PC and then other Unix stuph).

I'm not sure La Esposa will understand.  Her classic computer friend is the TI99/4A (she credits a cassette-based algebra program with getting her through that requirement in nursing school).  But I've accompanied her to some pretty weird conventions based on her tastes (I suspect somebody around here aside from myself knows what Slash fiction is, you can Google the phrase, but read the Wikipedia entry first, you might not want to read the actual crap, it's definitely not to my taste, but she's been reading and sometimes co-writing it for decades) so for a change she can put up with something I like.  If we can afford to get there -- I burned out on tech support and system administration, I'm presently a low-paid clerk (but I don't get nearly as many hostile calls as I used to and that's easier on my liver, which was threatening to go elsewhere for attention).  Computers are mostly a hobby again, which is how it's supposed to be.
-- 
Ward Griffiths        wdg3rd at comcast.net

<home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd>