Vintage Computer Festival 8.0

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."

Comments

I could have participated too..

[bogaboga]

...if I were anywhere near that location. Mine is an IBM with a 36Mhz processor and 1MB of RAM, bought 1981 and I recently installed MS-DOS 5.0 onto it. I was not easy as it could not read most of my floppies. It takes 19 seconds to boot and had a 12" green monitor.

But I am a young man myself...a 35 year old male!

Re:I could have participated too..

[empaler]

I have a 1.6 Ghz WXP box. I would love to have a 19 second boot time...

Re:I could have participated too..

[cnettel]

I guess it should read 1991, not 1981?

Re:I could have participated too..

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, what model IBM PC had 1MB RAM and a 36MHz CPU in 1981?

Answer: NONE. The IBM PC-XT was released around that time, and had a 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU. As I recall, it came with 64KB RAM.

You're probably thinking of an 808486/33 MHz CPU... and if you bought one in 1991, then you were a few years late, as they were first released in around 1989, as I recall... and 1MB RAM would have been on the low side by then - 4MB would have been standard, with 8 or 16 more common.

Re:I could have participated too..

[Graemee]

80's????

Try 1977, Commodore PET 2001, 8K builtin Tape and 9" BW display. Chicklet Keyboard.

Now that's vintage.

It boot's in about 6 secs. Not bad for 1 Mhz. Runs Microsoft Basic.

Re:I could have participated too..

[Mr Z]

4MB was still a lot of RAM in 1991, unless you were plonking down $4000 for a PC. Then you might get a capacious 8MB or 16MB system. My approx $2000 386SX25 system came with 4MB of RAM, and that was summer of '92. It also had a 1MB video card (ET4000 based).... Ah, the bad ol' days. It even briefly had an out-of-date 68MB ESDI drive in it, but that was quickly swapped out for a 120MB IDE drive. 486s didn't really become popular outside of servers until 1992 or so, and they were still rather expensive. I bet AMD made a lot of money selling 386DX40s in that time period.

I remember a couple years later paying $475 for 16MB of RAM for that system. (By then, it was upgraded to a 486DX33.) $475 was considered dirt cheap at the time, having come down from $600. Ah, 1994.

--Joe

Vintage?

[geomon]

Other computing luminaries were noticably absent from the gala affair including Drs. J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, designers of the ENIAC machine. The creator of the Antikythera Mechanism was also not in attendence. Conference organizers said that the originator of the ancient greek computer was unknown, so it was understandable that an invitation was not sent. Similar reasons were given for not inviting the designer of the abacus.

Old Data Recovery?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If I arrive, will I finally be able to get those homebrew games
off my dusty old 5 1/2'' (B:) floppy?

Re:Old Data Recovery?

[JoeCommodore]

Probably more than likely, I myself have been there since the first one, and at times convert data and programs for folks who have the disks and not the computer. Though my forte is Commodore 8-bits (mainly the PETs) but I've ssen people demoing thier TRS-80s, and older CP/M units, etc. If there is any place you can find someone who knows how to do it (or can do it) VCF is the place to go.

I wonder?

[elgee]

I wonder if any of the Obfuscated C Code was ever folded into commercial products? Or mission critical enterprise applications?

Re:I wonder?

[Tony Hoyle]

I heard there was a small seattle based software company that was taking it and making products out of it... wonder what became of them?

Hmm

[linforcer]

So it's pretty much a festival for obsolete computers? I guess I can bring my AMD 2400+-pc, too, then.

Re:Hmm

[Pegasus]

Sigh ... If I could, I'd moderate you as 'sad'.

the museum has come a long way

[rtphokie]

I remember when this museum was housed in an old storage building on the Nasa Ames base. I've never seen so much computing history, or so many adding machines, in one place. Put the Smithsoneums Information Age exhibit to shame.

Beauty of the old machines: simplicity

[G4from128k]

With only a few k of memory and a few thousand or few tens of thousands of transistors, these old machine were 100% comprehensible. A hobbyist could readily learn the purpose and functioning of every instruction, every chip, and every circuit trace. In contrast, modern machines are largely inscrutable black boxes with millions of lines of code in deeply layered architectures.

I'l gladly give up knowledge of 100% of the internals in exchange for the power of OS X on a G5, but those old machines do provide a pleasant simplicity.

Re:Beauty of the old machines: simplicity

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

those old machines do provide a pleasant simplicity.

Not only that, but everyone "into" computers back in the late 70s and 80s were enthusiasts. A computer show/swap in 1988 would draw every nerd in a 50 mile radius ... It was great to be among such kindred spirits: nerds donning vendor t-shirts like sports fans flaunt team jerseys, nerds with nervous ticks, nerds browsing floppy drive porn, nerds diving into bins of cables/breadboards/proms, skinny nerds struggling to carry bulky XT cases across the parking lot. Sadly those days are looooonnnnngggg gone.

Re:Beauty of the old machines: simplicity

[Arandir]

But darn it, the machine could actually *do* something with a couple thousand bytes of code!

Actually, modern computers can actually do something with a couple thousand bytes of code too!

There are three main factors contributing to modern "bloat":

1) Error checking. It takes resources to detect error, and further resources to recover from them.

2) Abstraction. Programming in a high level language is not as efficient as programming hand tuned assembly. C is a good compromise, but even there you run across the next problem:

3) Common code. Common shared libraries, by necessity, always do more than you need them to do. Consider "printf" for example.

4) User Interface. Textual interfaces bloated software, but they were nothing compared to GUIs. I'm writing a piece of software now that is probably 95% GUI code. I can't see any way to trim it down without losing user friendliness and ease of use.

The first computer I programmed.

[elgee]

An RPC-4000. Picture here:
http://home.att.net/~lgaska/images/rpc-4000.jpg
If memory serves me correct, it had 4096 words of rotating drum meemory. Paper tape or Flexowriter input. It was great.

Yes, I am older than dirt.

What a shame...

[Landak]

Pity I can't send my school's 'Sysadmin' there for retraining. He might actually pick up a few new tips too.....

Re:I love my Amiga

[Daengbo]

Yeah. My Dad bought it from Radio Shack. Over $1000. I didn't even know the brand name for years later, just "Model I."

Re:Even back then

[Zedrick]

Eh? Could you please elaborate a bit on that? I've been using C64's since the mid-80's, and currently own about 20-22 of them in different revisions (plus 5 C128 and C128D), but I have to admit I've never heard of a C64 from 1980 with a "buggy rom chip". Also, the commodore techs didn't start working on what would become the C64 until January 1981. Are you confusing it with Basic 1.0 for the PET? There has never been anything but Basic 2.0 in any C64 revision.

my first computer experience, HP 2000

[rheotaxis]

In early 1970's, I recall this computer, the HP 2000, with real-time BASIC, paper tapes, and teletype terminals with modem connections. (My first computer program was on this machine, 1972!) It had great interactive games, all text of course, and some based on real physcial science. I recall one our Physics teacher wrote, trying to land Apollo Lunar module on the surface of the Moon, without running out of fuel, or crashing into the surface too fast. It wasn't easy, and I remember kids screaming with joy when they actully made it safe, which wasn't very often. This was real science teaching at its best.

Timex Sinclair

[jackbower]

I was one of the lucky ones and actually owned a 1000,1500, and then a 2068. I had an uncle that worked for Timex.

Those were the days....

TS-1000
http://www.brtb.com/articles/timexindex.shtml

TS-2068
http://www.timexsinclair.org/

Re:Commodore Question...

[Zedrick]

From Jim Brains Commodore Trivia:

Q $0E0) What is the difference(s) between the Newtronics 1541 and the 1541C? (only one difference is needed)


A $0E0) (George Page, a noted authority on CBM Drives, indicated that Commodore made this a tough question to answer.) By the time the 1541C was introduced, Commodore threw a number of drives together and called them 1541Cs. The theoretical 1541C exhibited the following features:

No head banging, and other problems fixed by modified ROMs.
Case color matches C64C and C128 computers.

What my wife would like to know is...

[Dystopian Rebel]

Will they take a donation of some of the boxes of stuff that I have in the basement?

Re:Even back then

[IL-CSIXTY4]

I wonder if it could be referring to the "clear screen" bug:

In the original version of the Kernal, the routine that cleared a screen line set the corresponding Color RAM to a value of 1, which gives text characters a white foreground color. This was changed in version zero because the white color was found to sometimes cause light flashes during screen scrolling. It was that white foreground color, however, that enabled the user to POKE the screen code for a character into screen RAM, and make that character appear on the screen that contrasted the blue background. This change to the Operating system caused colors POKEd to screen RAM to be the same color as the background, and thus made them invisible. By initializing Color RAM to the foreground color, version 3 of the Kernal solved this problem.

Source: Mapping the Commodore 64

Re:Even back then

[JoeCommodore]

I can assure you the Commodore 64 has had a presence at all the VCFs and this year is no exception with the demonstration of the Q-Link Reloaded, Q-Link recreated over the internet - for the Commodore 64! (or 64 emulator)

Should be fun!

Re:Who is Evan Koblentz?

[evanak]

Hi, I am Evan. My main qualification for moderating the VCF's Nerd Trivia Contest is that I am editor of a publication called "Computer Collector" which is a free, weekly, subscription-based newsletter for, well, vintage computer collectors. There is a relatively simple web site at http://news.computercollector.com/ if you would like to learn more about us.

Re:Why can't we have a midwest vintage computer fe

[evanak]

Actually, you just missed VCF Midwest, check it out: http://www.vintage.org/2005/midwest/