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The Vintage Computer Festival East is where you go to see working computers from the forties through the eighties. It's held at the Information Age Learning Center (InfoAge) in Wall, New Jersey, a site that is full of electronics history on its own. In addition to displays (including a number of items for sale), there are sessions on topics ranging from "Keyboard Restoration" to "Fixing what's hopelessly broken." Event volunteer Evan Koblentz, today's interviewee, says that most of the several hundred people the event draws every year come from the United States, but there are always at least a few international visitors. And if New Jersey isn't your thing, there are other Vintage Computer Festivals you might want to attend. To get current news about these events, you might want to sign up for the VCF email list.

The Vintage Computer Festival East is where you go to see working computers from the forties through the eighties. It's held at the Information Age Learning Center (InfoAge) in Wall, New Jersey, a site that is full of electronics history on its own. In addition to displays (including a number of items for sale), there are sessions on topics ranging from "Keyboard Restoration" to "Fixing what's hopelessly broken." Event volunteer Evan Koblentz, today's interviewee, says that most of the several hundred people the event draws every year come from the United States, but there are always at least a few international visitors. And if New Jersey isn't your thing, there are other Vintage Computer Festivals you might want to attend. To get current news about these events, you might want to sign up for the VCF email list.

The Vintage Computer Festival East is where you go to see working computers from the forties through the eighties. It's held at the Information Age Learning Center (InfoAge) in Wall, New Jersey, a site that is full of electronics history on its own. In addition to displays (including a number of items for sale), there are sessions on topics ranging from "Keyboard Restoration" to "Fixing what's hopelessly broken." Event volunteer Evan Koblentz, today's interviewee, says that most of the several hundred people the event draws every year come from the United States, but there are always at least a few international visitors. And if New Jersey isn't your thing, there are other Vintage Computer Festivals you might want to attend. To get current news about these events, you might want to sign up for the VCF email list.

The Vintage Computer Festival East is where you go to see working computers from the forties through the eighties. It's held at the Information Age Learning Center (InfoAge) in Wall, New Jersey, a site that is full of electronics history on its own. In addition to displays (including a number of items for sale), there are sessions on topics ranging from "Keyboard Restoration" to "Fixing what's hopelessly broken." Event volunteer Evan Koblentz, today's interviewee, says that most of the several hundred people the event draws every year come from the United States, but there are always at least a few international visitors. And if New Jersey isn't your thing, there are other Vintage Computer Festivals you might want to attend. To get current news about these events, you might want to sign up for the VCF email list.

DeviceGuru writes "Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus."

Sellam Ismail writes "The 8th annual Vintage Computer Festival is being held on November 5th & 6th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The highlight of this year's event is a Homebrew Computer Club retrospective featuring a panel of original members of the Club including Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, and others. VCF 8.0 also brings the return of the Nerd Trivia Challenge, a game show style trivia contest for hardcore computer history buffs, and for the first time is hosting the award presentation ceremony for the International Obfuscated C Code Competition."

Sellam Ismail writes "The 8th annual Vintage Computer Festival is being held on November 5th & 6th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The highlight of this year's event is a Homebrew Computer Club retrospective featuring a panel of original members of the Club including Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, and others. VCF 8.0 also brings the return of the Nerd Trivia Challenge, a game show style trivia contest for hardcore computer history buffs, and for the first time is hosting the award presentation ceremony for the International Obfuscated C Code Competition."

RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 will be taking place November 6-7th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! In addition to the tours of antiquities and computer history galore, VCF 7.0 will be hosting a unique Retro Video Game Programming Challenge and presenting a number of interesting seminar speakers, such as the inventor of FidoNet, Tom Jennings. The VCF founder will also be appearing on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers" this Tuesday, October 19th, to demonstrate some of his favorite artifacts."

RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 will be taking place November 6-7th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! In addition to the tours of antiquities and computer history galore, VCF 7.0 will be hosting a unique Retro Video Game Programming Challenge and presenting a number of interesting seminar speakers, such as the inventor of FidoNet, Tom Jennings. The VCF founder will also be appearing on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers" this Tuesday, October 19th, to demonstrate some of his favorite artifacts."

RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 will be taking place November 6-7th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! In addition to the tours of antiquities and computer history galore, VCF 7.0 will be hosting a unique Retro Video Game Programming Challenge and presenting a number of interesting seminar speakers, such as the inventor of FidoNet, Tom Jennings. The VCF founder will also be appearing on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers" this Tuesday, October 19th, to demonstrate some of his favorite artifacts."

TheAlchemist writes "Applefritter.com has posted recordings of the talks that took place at the Vintage Computer Festival held at Sun's Boston campus July 16th and 17th. One of the talks revolved around the Atari 7800's 20th Anniversary, and was presented by Curt Vendel of Atarimuseum.com and Steve Golson, one of the original designers of the Atari 7800, the successor to the Atari 5200 that has more in common with the 2600 than the 5200. The presentation and accompanying slide show covered the history of GCC (the company that designed the 7800 for Atari, as well as many 7800 games), Atari, and the 7800. Sitting in the front row of the audience were 10 former GCC employees, who provided additional insight during the presentation. You can listen to the full Atari 7800 session here, and can find more talks from the Vintage Computer Festival here."

OaklyBonn writes "The Vintage Computer Festival West is happening today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I've been to several of these, and they're always a blast. It is always amazing to see the things that our current sotware practices treat as not currently possible on todays machines (like, why is my 1ghz XP box sooo slooow?) Did the Beagle Brothers have a pact with Satan? Are we better off today than in the past?"

K2 noted the Vintage Computer Festival taking place in California ... apparently MIT does this too (not that this matters to us midwesterners). At least there's a lot of interesting looking reading material on the site that those of us who aren't there can read (the true Apple story, archives on vintage computers, petitions to sign wrt releasing specs of vintage hardware into the public domain etc).

Darren wrote in to blatantly plug his 'Darren's Penguin Habitat' which aims to be a newbie Linux site. g8orade wrote in to say that Applix has Applix Anywhere which is apparently a Java compatible suite of mail, word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software. jimw wrote in to tell us about Vintage Computer Festival if you're into that old stuff, and near Santa Clara. yack0 warned us that Elijah Wood will be Frodo Baggins in the upcoming Lord of the Rings Trilogy of movies. Verne "Mini-Me" Troyer is also rumored to have a part. rawlink sent us a URL with some Hi Res Fractals that prove Rob' First Law of Art: All art is better if you can use it as your background image. An anonymous reader wrote in to plug these Y2k Posters which actually look surprisingly sweet if you're into those classic movie type posters. I dig 'em. Abe Zuckerman sent us pictures of the new Rios (hint: Butt ugly) Randy Rathbun wrote in to note that several new pictures of the empeg have appeared on their website. Mikey LeBeau us pix of a metallic hand-crafted aluminum Palm case for those of us who are entertained by shiny objects. Scooter sent us a report on how offensive South Park the Movie is. Absolutely Hilarious. Finally, matthewg pointed us to After Y2K which pokes some fun at Hemos, Martha Stewert, and Me.