For those willing to get up early and make the trek, breakfast happened. Others (imo) wisely chose to save their energy and sleep in. Today is the official first day of KansasFest 2014 and it’s going to be crammed full of activity.
Our first event was the Garage Giveaway, sometimes referred to as ‘freebay’. Attendees got to grab as much Apple II gear, magazines, software and books as they could carry FOR FREE. Apple IIGS monitors were a big hit this year, as were several Apple II and vintage Macintosh computers. At least 92% of what was brought has been claimed by eager KFesters. A great big thank you to everyone who donated to help defray gas, storage and shipping expenses, but our deepest gratitude is extended to KFest Alums Michael Mahon and Ray Merlin for their personal donations to the Apple II community.
After the Apple II feeding frenzy, a feeding frenzy of another kind was held. The annual Kookout hosted by GrillMeister Kirk Mitchell is the official ‘meat and greet’ social event of the conference. Burgers and hot dogs (even the veggie variety) were heaped before hungry attendees. Yum.
Margot Comstock, editor and publisher of Softalk Magazine presented the keynote. Margot is awesome, and it was a privilege to hear her stories about the history of the magazine, the early microcomputer industry and her personal anecdotes about relevant people she’s known (like Woz). Personally, Softalk will always be my favorite Apple II magazine (with Nibble being a close second). Margot and Al Tommervik (who both founded Softalk in 1980) were presented with the ‘Apple II Forever’ award by the KansasFest Organizing Committee in recognition of their contributions to the Apple II community.
Peter Neubauer next demonstrated Appletalk networking with GSport. Spoiler: Peter wrote the code that makes GSport the first modern Apple IIGS emulator with built-in support for Appletalk. Peter showed how seamless the Appletalk support is, by sharing files with emulated and real Apple IIGS machines.
After dinner, Rob Walch of ‘Today In iOS’ podcast gave his annual update on tips, updates and predictions for iOS. I skipped it, because I was doing Apple II stuff elsewhere.
The evenings activities were pretty laid back. Sarah W. presented an Apple II themed ‘make your own Christmas ornament’ session. Concurrently, the classic ‘Bite the Bag’ contest was held. First time attendee Ian Primus won, followed by Andy Molloy in second place.
The last session featured James Littlejohn leading a workshop on accelerating your Apple IIc Plus. It’s actually pretty easy to double your average IIc Plus from 4MHz to 8MHz or even 10MHz under the right conditions. James and a few helpers managed to upgrade about a dozen machines in the span of about an hour. It’s *that* easy.
Afterwards there were a few late night outings to local restaurants, and lots of gabbing in the common areas before eventually, sometime around 4:00am, even the die-hards began calling it quits.