Hello, I'm writing to user groups and hackerspaces to inform your members of a very unique upcoming event -- the Vintage Computer Festival East 8.0, May 5-6, in Wall, New Jersey. If you're not familiar with the Vintage Computer Festival, then please take a moment to keep reading .... The event is run by a user group called MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists) of which I'm president. Each day of the weekend-long show contains lectures/workshops (in the morning) and an exhibit hall (in the afternoon.) This year's keynote speakers include Dartmouth's Dr. Thomas Kurtz, who co-invented BASIC (on Saturday) and Apple's Daniel Kottke (Steve Jobs' college buddy, India travel companion, Apple 1 board builder in Jobs' parent's garage, and Apple II/III/Mac engineer), on Sunday. Both days, in the afternoon, is our hands-on exhibit hall. Imagine an antique car show -- the cars are nice to look at, but you can't touch anything, and you certainly can't drive. Well, that is no fun at all! Our exhibitors are required to have their systems up and running for live demos all weekend! People can see minicomputers, punch card machines, teletypes, homebrew-era computers, 8-bit micros, etc., all live and running. The venue for our event is the InfoAge Science Center, which is a grassroots, all-volunteer, non-profit facility. It contains a computer museum (run by my user group), along with museums for antique radio/TV, shipwrecks, military communications, amateur radio, etc. -- all operated by independent clubs. Best of all, our event is dirt-cheap to get in. Adult tickets are just $10 a day and $15 for the weekend. Kids are admitted for free. Proceeds benefit our museum, which is strictly educational in nature -- we're all volunteers. In fact, we all lament that our jobs and families interfere with our volunteer time. :) Details are frequently updated at http://www.vintage.org/2012/east/ and http://www.facebook.com/vcfeast8. We'd be very grateful if you could share this announcement with your group members. People attend the Vintage Computer Festival East from all around the U.S. and even from other countries and continents. For now, however, we're reaching out to our fellow user groups around the northeast and mid-Atlantic. Thank you, - Evan Koblentz (evan@snarc.net, cell: 646-546-9999)