In hopes of giving Sean a break to catch up on sleep, I’m going to give the Friday KFest update. As the days progress, it gets harder to make it to breakfast hour. This day was probably the fullest yet.
The first morning session was presented by Michael Mahon and covered his NadaNet project in depth. It was quite a sight to see him send a picture of a house from one Apple II computer over an RCA cable and see the same picture appear on a different Apple II’s screen. His network can reach speeds of 10 Kb/sec. A few of us are envisioning next year’s KFest where each room has an Apple II, all networked together using NadaNet–maybe for messaging or posting the day’s schedule. Very exciting.
Bruce Baker continued his multi-year project of demonstrating a selection of Apple II games from SoftDisk. The entire audience participated in a game of Twist, where we tried to come up with as many 5-letter words as possible from a rotating letter grid. This participation continued with a ‘guide the ball’ type game called Place Ball, involving levers, diverters, and bouncing bumpers. Other games included Dangerous Dave Returns (platformer), Osmosis (solitaire-type game), and a shoot ’em up typing tutor game.
Ed Eastman took us through the basics of soldering with a hands-on demonstration. He described the necessary equipment, warned us not to sniff the burning flux, and gave attendees a chance to try their hand at soldering a few resistors. I used what he taught me to put together a NadaNet adapter kit on Saturday night.
GS/OS, the operating system of the IIgs, was the subject of Geoff Weiss’ afternoon session. He walked us through a quite complete tour of the file system. If you are used to the IIe and were ready to start using the IIgs, this session provided a good foundation.
Tim Kellers closed out the day with an introduction to FreeBSD, a UNIX-like operating system that is used in Apple’s OS X. It’s free like Linux, but prides itself on being secure and robust.
The evening was our traditional KFest banquet, a slightly more formal event that didn’t fail to bring out the laughs and good times. While dining we were treated to a slide show looking back at the history of Apple. “MC for Life” Ken Gagne then presented an entertaining review of Roasts of KFest past with help from Sheppy, Geoff and Ryan. Another slide show trip down memory lane showed old photos of past KFests (nothing too incriminating). More raffle prizes were distributed, and then the famous Roger Wagner tie contest closed out the evening. Geoff Weiss took first place with his warped “tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree”.
And the fun did not stop even there! About half the group headed out to the traditional late movie, split between Transformers (overall, a thumbs down) and Die Harder (mixed reviews). The abortive 1 AM Denny’s run of the night before was rectified with a successful outing tonight. Most were asleep by 3:30 am (except those finishing up their HackFest projects).