In the fall of 2023, notices began popping up on Facebook and other social media sites that a Vintage Computer Festival SoCal was being planned for Orange, Calif., in February.
Jim Trageser, the former acquisitions manager for the CMA, was talking to his father about maybe going up and checking it out – a love of technology being a shared passion. (His dad donated his vintage KIM-I homebrew computer to the museum in the late 1990s.)
James H. Trageser, Jim’s dad, passed unexpectedly in November. Jim and his sister Theresa decided to exhibit some vintage gear similar to that of the CMA in honor of their dad. They reached out to former Executive Director David Weil, and he contributed some items to exhibit as well.
For our booth, we exhibited:
- A Sega Game Gear handheld game console with screen magnifier
- Buttons and patches from COMDEX and similar trade shows
- A slide rule, various mechanical calculators, and an early electronic calculator
- A sealed Apple II copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” game from Infocom
- Core memory from a 1950s mainframe computer
- A working Tandy Model 102 with an unconnected acoustic coupler
- An Atari 2600 videogame console
- An Atari Jaguar 64-bit videogame console
- A working Atari Falcon030 personal computer
- A working iMac G3
- A working Atair XEGS 8-bit personal computer
- A working Atari SuperPong videogame
Legendary Atari engineer Joe Decuir, who helped design the Atari VCS (later 2600) in response to the Fairchild Channel F, stopped by the booth when he saw our 2600 console on exhibit.
Steve and Micki Diederich, the folks who run VCF SoCal, serendipitously placed the CMA exhibit adjacent to that of the Paul Gray PC Museum, which is housed at the Claremont Graduate University in the Claremont, just east of Los Angeles. Staff from the two museums chatted during slow times and began to wonder out loud how we might work together to help San Diego State University preserve the CMA collection.
Jim was also on a panel with Anna Atkeson, executive director of the Paul Gray PC Museum, on the role of private collectors and institutions like museums in collaborating on preserving the history of the Computer Revolution.