Location Guide
Large Auditorium upstairs
Downstairs, to the left when you enter the front doors.
The area outside, near the cafe.
Saturday
Welcome to VCF West 2026
Mar Etkind, the CHM director, will say a few words to open the show!
The world’s first search engine was @ Bletchley Park during WWII
Eric Nelson is a forensic criminologist, former police officer, and former counterintelligence agent.
Bletchley Park used BTM and IBM tabulating machines to perform searches on indexed words, and then to assemble them into responses. Come learn about how they created the first “search engine”.
#include <ai.h>: Coding a Sun 3/60 emulator with LLMs
Dan Moisa is a software engineer by day, hardware enthusiast by night.
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.
History of Ethernet–Musings of an Early Networker
Rich Seifert has over 50 years of experience in the computer industry, and was one of the original developers of the 10 Mb/s Ethernet technology at Digital Equipment Corporation.
Come listen to his insider’s view on the original DEC-Intel-Xerox, and how it ultimately lead to what we have today.
Resistencia Atari
Diego Javier Alberti is a leading figure in contemporary art, blending computer technologies with traditional craftsmanship and cultural narratives.
Resistencia Atari is an art project in which he reinterprets digital image creation using the Atari 2600 (VCS) console. In this talk he will present his entire creative process, from restoring the consoles to programming visualizations and creating new cartridges.
Making games in the 1980s
David Crane and Garry Kitchen were pioneering 1980s video game developers who helped define the early home console era at Activision with blockbuster hits like Crane’s Pitfall! and Kitchen’s Keystone Kapers.
Come join them as they discuss all the ins and outs of early game development in the 1980s.
Impossible Until It Isn’t – How Neurodivergent Students Rebuilt ENIAC—and What It Teaches Us About Human Potential
Thomas Burick is a technology educator and program architect at PS Academy Arizona, where he develops large-scale educational experiences that challenge students to take on complex, consequential work.
Cameron Coleman is a Student Engineer and member of the ENIAC Reconstruction Project team at PS Academy Arizona.
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. Come hear their amazing story.
“What Makes an Artifact? Contextualizing 1950’s Software Artifacts”
Guy Fedorkow currently researches the history of early computing in the
1950’s, in collaboration with colleagues at the MIT Museum, Computer
History Museum and Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum.
His presentation focuses on specific examples from the recovery of programs from MIT’s 1950’s Whirlwind computer and delves into ideas on how to preserve and present software artifacts.
FPGA CATBOX for testing 6502 hardware
Dale Luck is a pioneering software engineer best known as one of the original core developers of the revolutionary Commodore Amiga computer system in the 1980s.
In this talk, Dale will introduce the FPGA version of the original 1980s CATBOX, that was used to find problems in Atari arcade games, and how it can be used today.
Osborne, The Man Who Would be King documentary screening and Q&A
Anand Kamalakar is a Brooklyn based documentary film director, producer and editor. Best known for his documentary “Salam – The first ***** Nobel Laureate”.
The panel will include some very well known names, including: the director Anand Kamalakar, Lee Felsenstein, Mike Hesly, David Carlick and possibly some more.
The second annual VCF After Dark
Join us for a meet and greet downstairs in the courtyard. There will be food and drink and conversations with your favorite retro friends.
Sunday
Is That Really UNIX?
Sean Haas is a software developers and independent historian. He produces the Advent of Computer podcast, and writes dubious code in his free time.
In this talk he will dive into the history of small UNIX clones, the forgotten front of the UNIX wars.
MiNT – The Amiga Workbench Killer?
Matt Nawrocki is a cybersecurity architect with a fond fascination with vintage computing centered around old PCs and Atari Systems.
This talk will go over the history of the Eric R Smith’s personal operating system for the Falcon Official, MiNT. He will also demonstrate where MiNT is at in the modern day.
“Artifacts” at 25
Christine Finn is a British journalist and creative archaeologist who pioneered the study of computing history by treating vintage hardware, software, and tech culture as modern artifacts. She is best known for her 2001 book Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley, which uniquely documented the material culture of the tech industry during the dot-com boom and bust.
Come join Christine as she reprises the story of this book, and what happened next.
HEART OF NEON: They don’t make games like they used to
Paul Docherty began as a video games graphics artist in the 1980s before moving into the world of Documentary editing, and ultimately directing his own documentary, Heart of Neon.
In this session, he will share a clip from his documentary and discusses Jeff Minter’s career and why documenting the origins of game development is so important now.
How Sphere Hid a Minicomputer Inside Their Micro
Ben Zotto studies and writes about technology and design, and has spent many years researching the Sphere computer, including publishing a new book about it, “Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared.”
In this talk, Ben will explore the how the Sphere computer emulated a full 1960s minicomputer just to run basic.
Xerox PARC Cedar Programming Environment on Modern Hardware
Carl Hauser was Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC from 1984 to 1996, later serving as PARC’s IT manager from 1996 to 2001.
Come listen to the story of how he has brought the Xerox Park Cedar Programming Environment to modern day hardware.