VCF West — Speakers

Talk 1

"Artifacts" at 25
Christine Finn

In 2001, MIT Press published "Artifacts: an archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley" my left-field survey which spanned the end of the dotcom boom and the start of the bust. In this illustrated talk, I will reprise the story of that book, and what happened next. Over the past two decades, computer archaeology has become about more than the use of digital tech in excavation, but the excavation of old computers and peripherals, and an appreciation of floppy discs and memory sticks as artifacts. Not just hardware, but software and I will discuss retrieval projects, lost data, and the different notions of tech "value" both sides of the Atlantic.

Talk 2

#include <ai.h>: Coding a Sun 3/60 emulator with LLMs
Dan Moisa

How do you bridge a forty-year gap in computer history? This talk explores a modern approach to vintage preservation: using agentic AI and Large Language Models to accelerate the development of emulators, reverse-engineer legacy hardware, and make sense of historical archives. We will look under the hood at how AI can assist with the grueling nuances of low-level systems architecture—from untangling custom MMU logic and recreating missing disk components, to writing parsers for legacy formats. Crucially, we will also look at how modern AI can act as a digital research assistant, parsing through historic, massive repositories like SAILDART to exhume lost documentation, design notes, and software context. Whether you are a veteran hacker or a modern developer, discover how today's bleeding-edge intelligence is being used to sift through the digital sands of time and keep the horizon bright for classic Sun Microsystems hardware.

Talk 3

FPGA CATBOX for testing 6502 hardware
DALE A LUCK

The FPGA CATBOX is a reimplementation of the original Atari CATBOX used to help find problems in Atari arcade games. The original 1981 CATBOX had a small numeric keyboard and the ability to read/write the 6502 bus, display results, and do digital signature analysis. The FPGA version is like that but on steroids. It brings those capabilities under control of a Windows based UI that can automate testing of ROMs, RAM, and I/O. It uses config files to specify address ranges and what they do.

Talk 4

HEART OF NEON: They don't make games like they used to
Paul Docherty

The film HEART OF NEON charts the unique career of game developer Jeff Minter from the earliest days of home computer programming. Director Paul Docherty, a former game developer himself, shares a clip from the film about those early days and discusses Jeff Minter's career and why documenting the origins of game development is so important now.

Talk 5

History of Ethernet--Musings of an Early Networker
Rich Seifert

An insider's view of the original DEC-Intel-Xerox 10 Mb/s Ethernet, from one of the designers and authors of the Ethernet Specification. How it came to be, the tradeoffs (and mistakes) made, and how it evolved into what it is today.

Talk 6

How Sphere Hid a Minicomputer Inside Their Micro
Ben Zotto

Sphere Corp of Utah designed and shipped one of the earliest and most forward-looking commercial personal computers. But its BASIC looked backwards instead, emulating a full 1960s minicomputer on the Sphere's Motorola CPU! This technical and historical talk will break down Sphere BASIC and reveal how Hewlett-Packard's BASIC jumped to the obscure SEL 810B and then got reused by Sphere, describing these older systems along the way. If you're curious about what all those strange "minicomputers" really were and how they worked—and how they differed from the micros we all came to use later—this talk is for you! Bring your octal calculator (just kidding).

Talk 7

Impossible Until It Isn't - How Neurodivergent Students Rebuilt ENIAC—and What It Teaches Us About Human Potential
Thomas Burick

What happens when young people are trusted with work that is real, complex, and consequential? In 2025, a team of neurodivergent students at PS Academy Arizona undertook an audacious challenge: rebuilding ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, at full scale. What emerged was far more than a historical reconstruction. With over 22,000 hand-built parts and 23,000 hours of student labor, It became a powerful demonstration of what is possible when young people are invited to do something extraordinary. ENIAC is ultimately not a story about a machine. It is a story about human capability—and what unfolds when we trust students with consequential work that matters.

Talk 8

Is That Really UNIX?
Sean Haas

Over the last few years I've become obsessed with some very strange UNIX-like things. From Idris to Coherent, OMNIX to CROMIX. All of these have one thing in common: they aren't actually UNIX, but they are certainly trying to be! In this talk we will dive into the history of small UNIX clones. I like to think of it as a forgotten front of the UNIX wars.

Talk 9

Making games in the 1980s
DAVID CRANE

A technical discussion surrounding the challenges and methods for creating games in the days before modern authoring tools. Speakers include two of the most successful designers / programmers of retro video games.

Talk 10

MiNT - The Amiga Workbench Killer?
Matt Nawrocki

Sensing a need to better compete with their rival Commodore, Atari Corp hired a gentleman named Eric R Smith in the early 90s to make his personal operating system project for the Falcon official, which was called MiNT. This talk will go over the history of the project as well as demonstrate where MiNT is at in the modern day.

Talk 11

Osborne, The Man Who Would be King documentary screening and Q&A
Anand Kamalakar

While Jobs and Gates are household names, tech lore has forgotten Osborne, inventor of the portable computer. From South India to Silicon Valley, his journey changed the computer world, Anand Kamalakar's new documentary, "Osborne, The Man Who Would be King" captures his remarkable journey.

Come join Anand as we screen his new documentary, and stick around afterwards for a lively panel discussion and Q&A session.

The panel will include some very well known names, including: the director Anand Kamalakar, Lee Felsenstein, Mike Hesly, David Carlick and possibly some more.

Talk 12

Resistencia Atari
Diego Javier Alberti

Resistencia Atari is an art project in which I reinterpret digital image creation using the Atari 2600 (VCS) console. The resulting images evoke patterns found in textiles from northern Argentina and the Andean region. These designs do not arise from specific programs but from very simple algorithms executed on the VCS, making specific use of its video generation capabilities for CRT screens. This system presents analogies with the textile field, where the warp (analog video lines) and weft (VCS playfields) function in a manner analogous to a loom. In this talk, I present my entire creative process, from restoring the consoles to programming these visualizations and creating new cartridges: we will go over the details of the technology that made the VCS possible, its programming language and features, the system's limitations, and the development of new cartridges using modern open source/diy technologies.

Talk 13

The world's first search engine was @ Bletchley Park during WWII
Eric Nelson

Bletchley Park used BTM and IBM tabulating machines to perform searches on indexed words, and then to assemble them into responses. This was a major operation @ BP and has not been spoken about. Just as the world's first programmable computer was invented and operated @ BP (the Collossus), so also the world's first search engine was also invented and operated there. Learn more about it.

Talk 14

Welcome to VCF West 2026
Marc Etkind

Marc will say a few words to welcome everyone to the event.

Talk 15

Xerox PARC Cedar Programming Environment on Modern Hardware
Carl Hauser

From the early 1980's to the mid 1990's the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC pioneered the development of what we now know as integrated software development environments. The Cedar programming language and system were originally hosted on proprietary PARC hardware (primarily the Dorado computer), but beginning in the late 1980s the system moved onto Sun SPARC workstations. In 1993, in conjunction with an ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles paper, PARC released a CDROM that allowed Cedar to be run by anyone who had a SPARC workstation. Two years ago I set out to get this release of Cedar running on modern hardware, and hopefully, to make it available to anyone who wanted to try it. In this talk I will demonstrate Cedar (running on a generic Linux laptop) and take a tour through some of the features that, in its day, were pioneering. And I'll also talk about obstacles encountered in the process of getting it working and getting it to a point where it can be shared. In addition I hope to have a few words about how running Cedar today is helping make historical PARC documents available in a modern format.

Talk 16

“What Makes an Artifact? Contextualizing 1950’s Software Artifacts”
Guy Fedorkow

Preservation of physical artifacts in museums and cultural institutions is a well-studied practice, but it’s not so clear what to do with software artifacts. “Simulation” is the surface-level answer, but a simulator by itself rarely conveys the cultural context around an artifact, which might shape decisions in software recovery efforts. This presentation looks at some of the practical issues and choices involved in preserving software—written in a different era for machines that no longer exist—in a way that helps non-specialist observers learn about the experience of seeing and interacting with software in action. The presentation focuses on specific examples from the recovery of programs from MIT’s 1950’s Whirlwind computer.