If you’re like me, you’re panicking a bit at this point, feverishly finishing up stuff before you pack for the show and leave. In actuality, it’s T-5 for me, since I’ll be arriving Thursday evening to help with setup and just general prep. If you are, stop, take a deep breath, and remember that we’ll enjoy your presence no matter the situation.
As John Mark and others have noted in the past, the official title is The <number> Annual “Last” Chicago CoCoFEST!, where <number> is nominally the number of years since the first Annual event in 1992, with a skip in 2020 we don’t talk about much :-). Though, to be pedantically correct, except for the number, pretty much the entire name of the show is a lie…
As noted, with the skip in 2020, the word “annual” probably should have a “*” by it, as a few folks have noted. But, ignoring that for a moment, except for the current fest, the word “Last” in all the previous show names are lies, as we have held another one a year later. Obviously, it’s a bit of CoCo inside humor. But, if we give a pass for everything shutting down a year, us included, and keep a bit of humor in the title, I posit even the name “CoCoFEST!” is a lie.
Why, you may ask? Well, though we do tend to see quite a few Color (Colour for our members up North) Computers, we also see CoCo-like machines such as the Dragon 64, the Z-80 based Tandy machines, some related products (like the MM/1), and our favorite little Tandy system, the MC-10. Talk about an underdog!
A number of our community cater to this tiny member of the family, including Brendan Donahe. Here is Brendan explaining some novel constraints around the Tandy MC-10 video system:
So, if you have a non-CoCo Tandy or Radio Shack computer (or even a clone), you’re part of our people!