The Vintage Computer Festival East is going down right now, and I’m surrounded by the height of technology from the 1970s and 80s. Oddly enough, Hackaday frequently covers another technology from the 80s, although you wouldn’t think of it as such. 3D printing was invented in the late 1980s, and since patents are only around for 20 years, this means 3D printing first became popular back in the 2000’s.
In the 1970s, the first personal computers came out of garages. In the early 2000s, the first 3D printers came out of workshops and hackerspaces. These parallels pose an interesting question – is it possible to build a 1980s-era 3D printer controlled by a contemporary computer? That was the focus of a talk from [Ethan Dicks] of the Columbus Idea Foundry this weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival.
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.
Here at VCF, we stumbled across a gigantic contraption that spanned several tables. Rube Goldberg machine this was not. Instead, this device actually does something useful! [Tim Robinson’s] differential analyzer can solve differential equations through several stages of mechanical integrators. The result is a pen-plot graph of the solution to the input equation, input by displacing a rod as a function of time.
Differential analyzers have been around for over a century. [Tim’s] claim to fame is that this particular DA is constructed entirely from Meccano-branded parts. We’re thrilled to see Meccano, over 100 years old at this point, continue to find new uses outside the toy box.
The Torque Amplifier
The differential analyzer is riddled with mechanisms that are bound to swing some heads for a double-take. Since the input shaft that transmits the input function f(x), has very little friction, the result can only be carried through the remainder of the machine with some means of torque amplification. To do so, [Tim], and most other DA designers implement a torque analyzer. For [Tim], though, this feat proved to be more difficult (and more triumphant) than other solutions, since he’s using a set of parts that are entirely from Meccano. In fact, this feature took [Tim] through about 20 iterations before he was finally satisfied.
VCF West continues to run through the end of the weekend at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If you haven’t already packed your bags for DEF CON, stop by for a few more bewildering brain teasers.
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.
Right now HOPE is dying down, and most of the Hackaday crew will be filtering out of NYC. It was a great weekend. The first weekend in August will be even better. We’re going to DEF CON, we’ll have people at VCF West, and a contingent at EMF Camp. If you’re going to EMF Camp, drop a line here. There will be Hackaday peeps wandering around a field in England, so if you see someone flying the Hackaday or Tindie flag, stop and say hi.
Raspberry Pi’s stuffed into things? Not all of them are terrible. The Apple Extended keyboard is possibly the best keyboard Apple ever produced. It’s mechanical (Alps), the layout is almost completely modern, and they’re actually cheap for something that compares well to a Model M. There’s also enough space inside the plastic to fit a Pi and still have enough room left over for holes for the Ethernet and USB ports. [ezrahilyer] plopped a Pi in this old keyboard, and the results look great. Thanks [Burkistana] for sending this one in.
We’ve been chronicling [Arsenijs] Raspberry Pi project for months now, but this is big news. The Raspberry Pi project has cracked 10k views on Hackaday.io, and is well on track to be the most popular project of all time, on any platform. Congrats, [Arsenijs]; it couldn’t happen to a better project.
A few months ago, [Sébastien] released SLAcer.js, a slicer for resin printers that works in the browser. You can’t test a slicer without a printer, so for the last few months, [Sébastien] has been building his own resin printer. He’s looking for beta testers. If you have experience with resin printers, this could be a very cool (and very cheap) build.
Anyone going to DEF CON? For reasons unknown to me, I’m arriving in Vegas at nine in the morning on Wednesday. This means I have a day to kill in Vegas. I was thinking about a Hackaday meetup at the grave of James T. Kirk on Veridian III. It’s about an hour north of Vegas in the Valley of Fire State Park. Yes, driving out to the middle of the desert in August is a great idea. If anyone likes this idea, leave a note in the comments and I’ll organize something.
[John Blankenbaker] did not invent the personal computer. Museums, computer historians, and authors have other realities in mind when they say [John]’s invention, the KENBAK-1, was the first electronic, commercially available computer that was not a kit, and available to the general population.
In a way, it’s almost to the KENBAK’s detriment that it is labelled the first personal computer. It was, after all, a computer from before the age of the microprocessor. It is possibly the simplest machine ever sold and an architecturally unique machine that has more in common with the ENIAC than any other machine built in the last thirty years..
The story of the creation of this ancient computer has never been told until now. [John], a surprisingly spry octogenarian, told the story of his career and the development of the first personal computer at the Vintage Computer Festival East last month. This is his story of not inventing the personal computer.
In the US, we don’t hear much about computing from beyond the Anglosphere. We’ve seen some home computer clones from behind the iron curtain, but getting any information about them is hard. If you find an old keyboard with a QWERTZ layout, or even a few Cyrillic characters, in the States, it’s a rarity. To date, the only French computer on Hackaday is an old Minitel dumb terminal. To help rectify this, [Jeremie Marsin], [Thierry Mazzoleni], and [Jean Paul Mari] from Quebec brought the best of the French computing revolution of the 1980s along to this year’s Vintage Computer Festival East
The American-designed French Victor
The evolution of the reigning champion of this exhibit begins with the Micronique Victor Lambda, a licensed copy of a purely American computer, the Interact Home Computer System. This computer featured a 2 MHz 8080A, 8 or 16 kB of RAM, and was quickly discontinued. The French company Micronique quickly bought the original designs and remarketed the computer in France.
In a few short years, Micronique took this design and turned it into the Hector. This machine featured a 5 MHz Z80, 48 kB of RAM, high resolution graphics (243×231 at four colors) and included BASIC and Forth interpreters.
The Victor and Hector were the best home computers at the time, but for every Commodore or Apple, you need a ZX Spectrum. France’s version of this tiny computer with a terrible keyboard was the Matra Alice 32, a computer with a 1 MHz 6803, 16kB of Ram, and a real 80×25 text mode. The Alice is heavily based on the American TRS-80 MC-10, with a SCART connector and an AZERTY keyboard.
The weirdest computer [Jeremie], [Thierry], and [Jean Paul] brought out? That would be the Excelvision EXL100. The 1980s, for better or worse, were the times of the Z80 and 6502. The EXL100 was running something completely different. This home computer used a TMS7020 CPU from Texas Instruments, a speech synthesizer, and a wireless keyboard. Very strange for the time and relatively inexpensive; in 1984 this computer cost only ₣3190, or about $550 USD.
[Jeremie], [Thierry], and [Jean Paul] had an exhibit that presented the best the Francosphere had to offer to the computing world in the 80s and 90s. We haven’t seen enough early computers from outside the US, so we’re happy to have met these guys at the 11th annual Vintage Computer Festival East.
