This Weekend: Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest

March 19, 2019 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

The most iconic parts of computer history come alive next weekend in Seattle during the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest. It’s all happening March 23rd and 24th at the Living Computers Museum+Labs.

VCF celebrates the great hardware that has sprung up during the technological march of the last fifty years. The VCF series has been around for many years with events in Mountain View, CA and Wall, NJ, but this one is new. VCF Pacific Northwest was founded in 2018 and Hackaday’s own Dan Maloney had a great time at the inaugural event.

Keeping vintage computers running is a trick in itself and this where you can meet those who have made it a mission and a hobby as they set up exhibit tables and show off the rare, exotic, and of course nostalgic equipment. There are exhibits with PDP-8 PDP-10, and an emulated PDP-6 (because only 23 were sold and none remain). You’ll find a Gigatron TTL computer, several flavors of Atari, and some slightly newer equipment like the Indego RISC-based workstation. There are exhibits on recreating classic computers, and buidling your own single-board computers from open source designs. The event is being held in a museum and this gives you the opportunity to check out their collection.

This year’s lineup of speakers is amazing. Joe Decuir will be speaking on Saturday morning. His long list of inventions and contributions to computing (and video gaming) make it hard to decide what to mention first. He’s well known for his time at Atari, but also developed the Amiga, and worked on USB and a laundry list of other standards.

Hackaday is once again proud to be a sponsor of VCF Pacific Northwest, VCF East, and VCF West.

Great Beginnings For Vintage Computing In Seattle; VCF PNW

February 17, 2018 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

The pitch to my wife was simple: “Feel like spending the weekend in Seattle?” That’s how I ended up at the inaugural Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest last weekend, and I’m glad we made the five-hour drive into The Big City to check it out. Hackaday is a VCF sponsor, after all, so it seemed like a great excuse to make the trip. That it ended up being two consecutive days of great Seattle weather was only icing on the cake of being able to spend time with fellow retro computer aficionados and their dearest bits of old hardware, in a great museum dedicated to keeping computer history alive and accessible.

The fact that Seattle, home of Microsoft, Amazon, and dozens of other tech companies, has until now been left out of the loop in favor of VCF East in New Jersey and VCF West in Mountain View seems strange, but judging by the reception, VCF PNW is here to stay and poised to grow. There were 20 exhibitors for this go around, showing off everything from reanimated PDP-11 and Altair 8800 control panels to TRS-80s from Model 1 through to the CoCo. Almost every class of reasonably transportable retro hardware was represented, as well as some that pushed the portability envelope, like a working PDP-8 and a huge Symbolics 3640 LISP workstation.

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Next Week: Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest

February 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Next week something magical is happening. Seattle is getting a Vintage Computer Festival. It’s the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, and it’s happening Saturday, February 10th and Sunday, February 11th at the Living Computers Museum and Labs.

As with all Vintage Computer Festivals, this is one with plenty of exhibits, speakers, and the ever-popular consignment shop. A few of the more interesting exhibits include a demonstration of the Syntauri alphaSyntauri, a synthesizer card and controller designed for the Apple II. When it was released in 1980, this was the first affordable digital synthesizer that competed against the Synclavier and Fairlight CMI. The difference? Synclaviers cost as much as a house, where the alphaSyntauri cost as much as a car. Also on deck is the dis-integrated MOnSter6502, a complete NMOS 6502 constructed out of individual, surface mount transistors. The Digi-Comp II from Evil Mad Scientist will be there, there will be BlinkenBones, and for anyone who wants to assemble their own front panel for a vintage minicomputer, [Oscar Vermeulen] will be there with the Pi-DP/8. This isn’t an event to miss.

As an aside, we’d really like to commend the Vintage Computer Federation for their incredible work in putting these shows together. The VCF West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is an incredible show, VCF Southeast has some amazing displays, and VCF East in New Jersey is a pretty incredible gathering going down May 18th through the 20th this year. The people working behind the scenes to make these shows happen are doing a service for all vintage computers and performing digital archeology that benefits us all.

Hackaday is proud to be a sponsor of VCF Pacific Northwest.