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Vintage Computer Festival 8.0

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the places-to-be dept.

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."

14 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Vintage? by geomon · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    "Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
  2. Old Data Recovery? by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
  3. Re:I could have participated too.. by empaler · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  4. I wonder? by elgee · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    1. Re:I wonder? by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 3, Funny

      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?

  5. the museum has come a long way by rtphokie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Beauty of the old machines: simplicity by G4from128k · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
    1. Re:Beauty of the old machines: simplicity by Average_Joe_Sixpack · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Beauty of the old machines: simplicity by Arandir · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  7. The first computer I programmed. by elgee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:I could have participated too.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. What a shame... by Landak · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    My UID is prime. Is yours?
  10. my first computer experience, HP 2000 by rheotaxis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Software freedom...I love it!
  11. Re:I could have participated too.. by Mr+Z · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

    --
    Program Intellivision!