VCFMW 2018

VCFMW 13 was very successful again this year, with lots of new people in attendance both as exhibitors and visitors. It was held in Elk Grove Village, IL (close to Chicago) on September 15-16, 2018. For corrections and omissions, please mail me: cenbe at protonmail dot com. You know what to do: click the pixtures to make them more bigger! (And if you'd like higher resolution copies of any of them, shoot me an email).

After only four years, we have outgrown our new location!

My table, showing the usual Commodore 64 stuff (GEOS gopher client on screen) as well as my Mac SE/30. I gave a talk on geoCom, a BASIC compiler for GEOS.

Mike Naberezny brought a dual 8" Winchester hard drive (the Mator Shark) for the Commodore PET machines. It holds a whopping 22 megabytes!

Remember parking a hard drive? Well, the Shark takes a bit more effort...

Jim Brain discusses a Commodore 64 accelerator he's working on.

The prototype (left) is based on a CoCo accelerator.

Alexander "Z" Pierson showed his front-panel-style homebrew 6502 computer, the Cactus.

Cactus inside! Here's a view of the Cactus' boards.

Z gave a presentation covering the genesis and hardware details of the Cactus.

This was the presentation room's "sound booth", watched over by the able Jim "Trixter" Leonard. The crew takes such good care of the talks presenters!

The highlight of the show for me was Patrick Finnegan's VAX 11/780, since I first learned to code on an 11/750.

The console terminal of the 11/780, showing it booting 4.3 BSD UNIX.

And this is how you get a machine that size to the show and back.

An older machine in that family is Kyle Owen's PDP8/M, which was running OS/8.

Here's the PDP8/M's front panel...

...and here's its terminal.

John Orwin showed an AT&T 3B2/310.

Brian Taylor showed a NeXTstation.

Mike Loewen's HP 3000 Series 37, running MPE-V.

Joe Zatarski showed an HP 7550A graphics plotter, which produced beautiful output.

The usual libations were available at the after-party in the lobby.

See you next year!