In which we sell out – of merchandise!
Where: VCF Southeast 13.0, in partnership with Southern-Fried Gaming Expo at the Marriott Renaissance Waverly in Atlanta, Georgia
When: July 31 – August 2, 2026
Exhibit: Worst Buy Stores
The Crusty Computer Club is back with another business computer system! Step back into retail history with the IBM 4680/4690 Store System and the General Sales Application! Run our cash registers; earn Gertiecash to “spend” on ridiculous items at Worst Buy, or buy real components to finish your next project.
Recap & Photos
We got tired this year. Tired of hauling around an 800 pound minicomputer, plus all the printers and accessories this year. Some early ideas for the 2026 show was “A Single ZX Spectrum” or “A Single Palm Pilot,” but then a few late-night eBay searches changed our course in an instant. We found IBM 4680 and IBM 4690 Store Systems terminals.
Initially, we were going to bring to life an old MAD Magazine parody, Hazard Fraught Tools, but as we’re a computer show decided to stick with the same idea but instead parody everyone’s favorite blue-shirted consumer electronics store, and called it Worst Buy. I’ll let you figure out who we’re parodying.
Before the Show
Here are our terminals as they arrived, a 4683 is on the right and a pair of 4690s is on the left. For our show this year, we did not bring any of the 4690s – namely because the plastics on the 4690s crumbled to dust once we started trying to disassemble them for inspection.
Initial testing begins, trying to bring up one of the 4690s with 4690 OS and General Sales Application.
Eventually, we did get the OS to install, and we began to attempt configuring a terminal file and General Sales Application.
Eventually we got our first signs of life out of our test terminal! W100 was due to us not having the application files configured correctly, while A063 we eventually figured out was because GSA was trying to load and talk to a printer, but failing to because we did not have a printer connected. We would eventually obtain some printers and this error went away.
Here is a before cleaning and an after cleaning of our keyboards. We elected not to Retrobrite or repaint our keyboard bodies as we felt the yellowing added a level of authentic retail grime, but we did replace the light legends with new strips and made new key legends to fit our configuration.
Our three 4683 terminals finally IPLed after about a month of work! All three successfully IPLed, downloaded the OS and GSA image, and executed some transactions for the first time in likely 30 years.
Our final 4680 configuration was a single cash drawer, one keyboard, one Model 4 printer, and two pole displays, one for the operator and one for the customer. And at long last…
…Everything was ready for the show. Only thing left to do now was to break it all down and to pack it all up.
At the Show
The following gallery courtesy Jon, AHCS
We ended up bringing four total terminals to VCF Southeast 13, two 4683-P21s, a 4683-002 (writeups are coming soon, I promise!), and a SurePOS 4800-784. We made our exhibit part of our fundraising efforts, and sold a lot of surplus software, parts, components, and other miscellaneous junk that we’ve been building up over the years. Everyone loved the Worst Buy gag. Everyone loved the registers. We sold everything on the shelves. I’d say we had a pretty successful year.
