Position Statement CJ Reha

I’m a relative newcomer to MARCH, having first attended VCF East six short years ago in 2018, but in that time I have developed a deep love for the club and for the preservation of vintage computers in general. My first ever experience with them was when my father gave me his old Atari 800 stuff when I was in middle school; at the time I suppose he thought he’d just be recycling old junk by letting me play with it, but the experience of learning how to use a 40-year-old computer completely unlike anything modern lit a spark in me I keep to this day. My interests have wildly branched out since then – I specialize in vintage workstations and smaller-scale supercomputers, but collect and restore just about every kind of system that fits in the house, alongside vintage A/V equipment and whatever else piques my interest! If you’ve been to any of the workshops in the past few years, it’s likely you’ve spotted me hacking on a CRT of some kind, or perhaps banging my head against a workstation power supply…

For a couple years now, I have slowly but surely helped MARCH build out its own workspace (the Grabbe Laboratory) and begin larger-scale restorations on some of its more exotic artifacts for future exhibitions at East and for filling out some under-represented sections of computer history in the main museum. Some examples of current projects include the swath of vintage graphics workstations currently being restored (Apollo DN570, SGI IRIS, Tek XD88, etc.), the Hammond Novachord originally owned by J. Presper Eckert, and anything currently in the museum that may need occasional repair or refurbishment. I will continue to do so, now under my accepted title as Restorations Manager, and would be able to better formulate the priorities of the museum if I were to be elected to the Steering Committee. In this way, the artifacts of biggest public interest owned by VCFed could be better appreciated and made more accessible.

Furthermore, I plan to continue assisting with the renovation and improvement of the museum warehouse, as well as help to get the ball rolling on making the new museum space usable – we have more than enough to fill it out! I will finally help in any way I can with general museum matters that come up in day-to-day operation; despite being some hours away, I am in regular contact with local volunteers, and find myself on campus often enough I still maintain a “finger on the pulse” of current issues. I see incredible potential in MARCH and InfoAge in general, and hope that I can help them continue to be indispensable sources of history and interactive artifacts alike!