The Vintage Computer Festival is coming to sunny Southern California in February 2024. That’s right, bring your Commodores, your Tandys, your PDP-11s, and Altairs. The world of retrocomputing will be open to vendors, visitors, and exhibitors at The Hotel Fera Events Center in Orange, California on February 17th and 18th, 2024.
If you’re thinking there already is a VCF out west, you’d be right. VCF West was held in August at the Computer History Museum. The CHM is in Mountain View, California. That puts it nearly at the epicenter of the microcomputer revolution of the ’70s and ’80s.
Southern California still had plenty of computer enthusiasts though. For the non-geographically inclined amongst us, SoCal is nearly 6 hours from Mountain View by car. We’re sure we’ll see many familiar faces at SoCal, along with plenty of new ones.
The Vintage Computer Federation holds several events across the country each year. You might have heard some music from VCF Midwest 2023 back in September. Hackaday was also out in force at VCF East this year, where our own [Bil Herd] moderated a panel of vintage computer YouTubers including [Usagi Electric], [Adrian’s Digital Basement], and [FranLab].
3 out of the 4 corners of the USA and wonder why I haven’t given 1 bit in decades
Which corner would you prefer?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU&pp=ygUUb25lIG5pZ2h0IGluIGJhbmdrb2s%3D&t=1m29s
VCF Midwest 2023* back in September
Whoops! Good Catch, Brian. Thank you!
Original 100% working TRS-80 needs a home. Free.
What model?
Located where?
“That’s right, bring your Commodores, your Tandys, your PDP-11s, and Altairs. ”
Might be a U-haul involved in some of that movement.
Wow, these things are really taking off. Pre-COVID I attended VCF East and VCF SE 4 or 5 times. It was a lot of fun, but < 300 people at each event. They look a lot busier these days.
“I agree to receiving marketing and promotional materials *”
It’s MANDATORY to agree to receive marketing and promotional materials? Are they serious?
Can anyone explain to me the reasons that people who are not in it for nostalgia, get all hot and bothered over vintage PCs? They were before my time, and I just have no interest, but there are definitely people my age who love this ish.
A little history, back in the 90’s and early 00’s people were try to ‘recycle’ their old PCs by dumping them on the museums. This obviously becomes a huge storage problem. Also the PCs were a commodity and ‘not interesting’.
Fast forward to the 10’s and 20’s, where I was in the ‘no PC’ camp, I’m now in the ‘some PCs are vintage’. There are a lot of interesting machines but there is also a lot a generic commodity PCs which are less interesting but not totally without interest.