VCF East 9.1 -- All of the details updated
VCF East 9.1 -- All of the details updated
The ninth “annualish” Vintage Computer Festival East will be held April 4-6, 2014, at the InfoAge Science Center, in Wall, New Jersey.
VCF East is a celebration of computer history from the 1940s-1980s. The schedule includes a hands-on exhibit hall, technical workshops, lectures, a marketplace, tours of the InfoAge museum complex, a dollar-per-pound book sale, prizes, more.
This year's show will be bigger than ever. New attractions include Friday's “VCF East University” which is a full day of technical classes. Friday attendees can win an oscilloscope courtesy of Tektronix!
The main show on Saturday-Sunday will have lectures/workshops and dozens of exhibits.
Keynotes include former IBM archivist Paul Lasewicz and IEEE 802 LAN/MAN committee founder Maris Graube. Other lectures topics include software preservation, the history of Franklin Computer Corp., and many more, all scheduled for the morning. In the workshops you can learn hands-on vintage computer repair skills or even build a working replica of something exotic.
This year there will be two exhibit halls instead of one. Exhibits open in the afternoon – imagine an antique car show, but instead of “no touching” signs, everyone has to take you for a ride! Registered exhibits so far cover everything from a real Apple 1 to the M.I.T.S. Altair to DEC minicomputers. In addition, the event's main sponsor MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists) will debut its UNIVAC 1219-B military mainframe computer, circa 1965.
Tickets for VCF East University are just $20 and include a pizza lunch. Tickets for the main show are $15/day and $25/both days. Saturday/Sunday tickets are free for ages 17 and younger. A three-day adult admission is $40.
Proceeds benefit MARCH. Official sponsors include the InfoAge Science Center, VintageTech, Tektronix, the Trenton Computer Festival, Eli's Software Encyclopedia, and Vintage-computer.com. Archive.org, IBM, and the IEEE History Center are providing informal assistance.
• Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple: "Seeing the early equipment at VCF is an amazing experience. For many of us, it's better than a museum. It touches on all the hopes and dreams of the time and the many efforts to achieve what others thought would never happen. It brings back memories of a revolution in the making. ... The people you meet at the VCF are amazing."
• Lee Felsenstein, moderator of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club and creator of the Osborne 1 portable computer: "In 35 years the personal computer grew from nothing into the most important device shaping everyday life. It should be part of everyone's education to see how it grew and to learn from the people who grew it in ways they wanted to see it grow. VCF is the place to be where not only the equipment can be seen and tried out but, perhaps more importantly, where the people who rose to the challenge offered by these machines can be met and heard from."
• Gordon Bell, top DEC engineer and co-founder of the Computer History Museum: "As a speaker at the first September 1998 VCF, I have been delighted to see it grow and flourish. The Vintage Computer Festival is an important institution for computing history simply by getting everyone together for collecting, sharing, and trading all form of bits. Having a forum, gathering, and market for old stuff a.k.a. vintage computers and the software that made them live is an essential way to preserve and expand the history of computing -- for some of us, the greatest invention."
• Dave Ahl, founder/editor, Creative Computing magazine: "Vintage Computer Festival East celebrates the hard work and vision of all the volunteers who have made the InfoAge Science Center –- now a National Historic Landmark -- a place where one can learn from the past to live for the future. Oh, and it's great fun too!"
Full details are online at
http://www.vintage.org/2014/east/ and
http://www.facebook.com/vcfeast. Contact: Evan Koblentz (President, MARCH; VCF East Producer):
evan@snarc.net / (646) 546.9999 .... thank you and happy computing!
Now it's time to announce some of the guest speakers.
