This Weekend: Vintage Computer Festival Zurich

November 14, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

This weekend, November 18th and 19th, the greatest vintage computer conference in Europe is going down. It’s the Vintage Computer Festival Europe, and if you’re around Zurich this weekend, we highly recommend that you check it out.

On deck for this year’s VCF Europe is an incredible amount of amazing retrotechnology. A demonstration of high-resolution graphics without using computer memory will be found in a few Tektronix storage tube terminals (their Wikipedia entry is phenomenal, by the way). There will be a few Olivetti microcomputers on display demonstrating Italy’s contribution to the computer revolution. A PDP 6 will be recreated, and a 1964 IBM 360/30 will be revived. There will be discussions on using logarithms as a basis for computers. [Oscar], creator of the PiDP-8/I will be bringing his latest project, an exquisite miniature recreation of a PDP-11/70, with a molded enclosure and purple toggle switches.

This is a retrocomputer conference where an Apple I is the least interesting computer on display, an extremely difficult feat to pull off. VCFe will be held at Rote Fabrik in Zurich, and tickets are five units of the local currency per day. You can check out the festival on Twitter, Google+, and the main website.

This Weekend: Vintage Computer Festival West

August 1, 2017 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Next weekend is the Vintage Computer Festival West, held at the Computer History Museum. Hackaday is once again proud to sponsor this event that brings together the people and hardware that drove the information revolution. [Bil Herd] and [Joshua Vasquez] will be on hand representing the Hackaday Crew.

This year’s talks show an impressive lineup of people. [Bil Herd] will be on stage with a collection of other engineers who secured Commodore’s place in history. The Computer History Museum has a very active restoration program for original computer hardware. Friend of Hackaday, [Ken Shirriff], has been working on a restoration of the Xerox Alto and is on the panel giving a talk about the process. And just to cherry-pick one more highlight, there’s a talk on system debugging before you even turn the thing on — a topic that can save you from having a very bad day with very ancient hardware.

A great part of VCF is that the exhibits are often either hands-on or demonstrations so you can actually play around with hardware which most people have never even seen in person. Add to that the collection at the Computer History Museum plus some extra exhibits they have planned for the event and you’re likely to run out of time before you make your way through everything.

Since we’ve mentioned the Computer History Museum, we also have some upcoming news. A bit later this month, Hackaday Contributor-at-Large [Voja Antonic] has been invited to visit the museum, record his oral history, and deliver to their collection an original Galaksija computer — wildly successful first as a kit and then as a manufactured computer which he built in Yugoslavia 1983. Congratualtions [Voja]!

Next Weekend: The Vintage Computer Festival East

March 28, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Next weekend is the Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, New Jersey. We’re going, and you should be there too.

The VCF East is the largest gathering of retrocomputing aficionados on the east coast. It’s three days of talks, exhibits, a flea market, and a pow-wow of the greatest minds buried under obsolete technology. No VCF is complete without a few talks, and this year is shaping up to be great. Keynotes will include [Bjarne Stroustrup], designer / implementor / inventor of C++. Computer historian [Bill Degnan] will give a review of 40 years of ‘appliance computers’, and [Tom Perera], Ph.D. will be giving a talk on the Enigma machine.

The exhibits at VCF are always the star of the show, and this year is no different. Highlights include mechanical computers, the finest from Silicon Graphics, and a version of Unix published by Microsoft. The individual exhibits are always great; last year the world’s first digital camera made an appearance. If you’re in the area, this isn’t an event to miss. VCF is going down at InfoAge, a science center at the former Camp Evans — a military installation that is best described as, ‘DARPA before World War II’.

Hackaday is proud to once again sponsor VCF East. This has been going on for a couple of years now and our Art Director, [Joe Kim] has created some incredible art as part of the sponsorship. Click on the thumbnail of this year’s art to embiggen. The VCF West art from last year is a stunning take on the Macintosh and last year’s VCF East art reflected the retro hackathon we sponsored.

Vintage Computer Festival Switzerland This Weekend

November 18, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

This weekend marks the Vintage Computer Festival Europe – Switzerland, a two-day extravaganza of vintage hardware held in Zurich, Switzerland.

Of interest for this VCF will be an LGP-30 replica (a computer without RAM or ROM released in 1956), an IBM System/360 front panel, lots of blinkenlights, Swiss computers, and [Oscarv], creator of the very successful PiDP-8/I project on Hackaday.io, will be there with his minified PiDP-11/70. If you don’t have one of [Oscar]’s PiDP8 machines sitting on your desk yet, don’t worry — the 11/70 is the one you really want. It is beautiful.

As you would expect from a Vintage Computer Festival, all the standards will be there. The flea market is open, soldering stations are present, talks will be held, and very old and very rare hardware will be blinking. From our experience with Vintage Computer Festivals, Europe does it right. Last year’s festival in Munich was a blast, and this year’s celebration in Zurich looks like it will be as well.

Join Us At Vintage Computer Festival West This Weekend

August 1, 2016 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

VCF West is happening this Saturday and Sunday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. This on of our favorite events; a celebration of the hardware that paved the way for our modern world. VCF attracts an impressive amount of rare and interesting computers and other technology items. That hardware doesn’t make it to the festival on its own. The people at VCF — exhibitors, speakers, attendees, etc — are themselves an incredible collection of stories from salvage and restoration to the inside story on the teams that made the computers in the first place. Check out some of Brian Benchoff’s coverage of VCF East earlier this year.

I ran into Vintage Computer Federation President Evan Koblentz ten days ago and he shared an interesting anecdote I think you’ll enjoy. Bil Herd was a featured speaker at VCF East a few years back. He was the Senior Design Engineer behind the Commodore C128 — obviously a fascinating person to headline the event. The year after Bil spoke at the festival, Evan as surprised to run into him wandering around the event again. Bil didn’t just want to speak, he wanted to see all the cool stuff and has attended, spoken, and conducted workshops at several of the festivals since.

Who will show up this year is anyone’s guess. But we know this event is incredible and you will be amazed at who you run into. It is important to recognize where our technology comes from, to celebrate those who made it happen, and to encourage young people to start on the path to becoming a computer engineering wizard. For all of these reasons we are happy to be sponsoring VCF West. On the inside cover of every festival program you’ll find this epic art by our Illustrator, Joe Kim. You can also click the image on the right to embiggen.

Joshua Vasquez will on hand for Hackaday at VCF West. He’s looking for the best bits to feature on our front page. If you want get a hold of him to show off your wares, or to grab some excellent Hackaday stickers, hit him up on Hackaday.io.

Hackaday Teams With Vintage Computer Festival For Retro Hackathon

March 31, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

For the last few years, we’ve been going to the Vintage Computer Festival East in New Jersey. This is one of the best cons we go to every year; there are dozens of interesting exhibitors, awesome talks, a great venue, and a small consignment area filled with the weirdest stuff you can imagine. This year proves to be no different, and we’ll be there cataloging the weirdness and spectacular hacks of computer systems old enough to vote, plus something new.

Hackaday’s 8-bit game programming contest is happening for the first time at VCF East, April 15-17 in Wall, New Jersey. Competitors are given two and a half hours and an old 8-bit system (Apple II, C64, Atari 800, etc.). The goal is to create a game using only what is currently in memory, be that in the ROM or between the ears. There are two sessions on the Friday of the event, starting at 10am and 2:30pm.

You can call the 8-bit game programming contest a hackathon. That’s basically what it is; getting a small team together to whip up an application quickly with a number of constraints. The term ‘hackathon’ has been bastardized as of late, with companies requiring the use of a particular API or other nonsense. The 8-bit programming contest doesn’t have these limitations. All you need to do is create the coolest game in two and a half hours, and get the most applause from the audience. The best game wins a prize.

Of course, we’re not going to VCF East just to promote a retro hackathon. We’re only obliged to mention that first because we’re sponsoring it. VCF East is a fantastic event, with more retro goodies to satiate even the most curmudgeonly retro aficionado. The show is enormous with keynotes from [John Blankenbaker], inventor of the Kenbak-1 personal computer and [Stewart Cheifet], host of Computer Chronicles. Dr. Dr. Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib and creator of Xanadu, the underlying software for computers that won’t be built for 100 years, will also be there. The weekend is, as always, packed with great exhibits of ancient tech, classes, and workshops.

Each Vintage Computer Festival is different, but if you’d like a sample of what it’s all about, check out these posts:

Apart from an announcement for the festival in New Jersey, there are a lot of changes in the organization of the various vintage computer festivals held around the country. The Vintage Computer Festival East was formerly organized by MARCH, the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists. Late last year, MARCH was dissolved, and reformed as a 501(c)3 called the Vintage Computer Federation. The VCF (see what they did there?) also has the rights to hold VCF West, which last happened in 2007. The VCF Midwest, Southwest, Europe, and UK will remain independent.

If it isn’t already extremely obvious, this is one of the top-tier events we go to every year. No, it’s not DEF CON, it’s not HOPE, and it’s certainly not a big con. It’s just a bunch of nerds nerding out, which is the critical ingredient for the best events we attend all year.

Vintage Computer Festival Europa 16.0: The Hackaday Report

May 2, 2015 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

The 16th annual Vintage Computer Festival Europa (VCFe) is still ongoing this weekend in Munich, and of course Hackaday had to swing by. If you’re anywhere in Germany, you’ve still got until Sunday at 16:30 to check it out.

The theme for this year’s festival is “The East is ~~Red~~ Colorful” and that means vintage computers from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Here in (West) Germany, that naturally means a good representation of computers from the former Democratic Republic of Germany (DDR), but Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and of course Russia were also in the house. There was far too much going on to cover it all, but here’s a few of the projects and computers that caught our eye.