For the third year of the Vintage Computer Festival SoCal, the former CMA staff coordinated with the staff of the Paul Gray PC Museum on a shared exhibit.
For the 2026 edition, the San Diego State Library staff graciously agreed to let us borrow items from the collection to show VCF SoCal attendees. In addition, former CMA acquisitions manager Jim Trageser chaired a panel with Claremont Graduate University professor Joshua Goode, former Paul Gray PC Museum executive director Anna Atkinson, and CGU graduate student Lilly Leif – who is one of the researchers working on cataloging the CMA collection at SDSU. (When the VCF SoCal team get that video posted to YouTube, we’ll share the link here.) The slideshow of CMA photos from SDSU that was shown during our panel can be viewed here.
Among the items we exhibited for 2026 were:
- An Exidy Sorcerer personal computer circa 1978-79
- A Tomy Tutor personal computer circa 1982
- A Vector I personal computer (Z-80 CPU) from 1978
- A MITS Altair 680 kit computer from 1976
- A MITS Altair 8800b kit computer, also from 1976
- Game carts from the Fairchild Channel F videogame console (1976)
- A full carton (2,000 count) of punch cards, circa 1965
- A U.S. Army Signal Corps semaphore kit from World War I
We also had smaller items in shadow boxes, including an old CMA t-shirt with the “Chip” logo, a brochure for the Atari ST Book laptop computer, CMA postcards, a refrigerator magnet, a pen and a monitor brush from the gift shop, and a vintage Atari patch.
Former CMA acquisitions manager Jim Trageser led a panel discussion on Sunday afternoon with Professor Joshua Goode, former Paul Gray PC Museum executive director Anna Atkeson, and graduate researcher Lilly Leif on the project to index the collection.