We had a great time last weekend!  Congratulations to our award winners!

• Max Tonnage Award, Josh Dersch, 40 Years of the Three Rivers PERQ Workstation
• Youngest Exhibitor, George Amores, Commodore 64 vs. Commodore Plus 4
• Most Interactive, Joerg Hoppe, BlinkenBone, Program a PDP-11/70 over reanimated front panel
• Best Display, John Ball, AppleTalk – Apple’s First Generation Network Protocol
• Most Interesting Presentation, Rick Bensene, Wang Laboratories’ Electronic Calculators
• Most Complete System, Jason Howe, Atari 800 Productivity
• Garage Queen, Stephen M. Jones, SDF Public Access UNIX System
• Best Restoration, Chris Henkel, Early PC based Engineering Workstations
• What the heck is that?, Kaylin, Hayes, & Papenhoff, PDP-6 emulation with interface to PDP-6 Console and 340 Display
• Kill-A-Watt, Madeline Autumn-Rose, CompuServe and Their PDP-10 Clones
• The Overachiever Award, Ian Finder, Only Amiga Makes It Necessary and The GRiD
• Best in Show, Sergey Kiselev, Retro Brew Computing – Do-it-yourself 8-bit Single Board Computers

It was my first time handing out awards, so I apologize for the flubs and wonderfully awkward moments. 🙂

Links to the presentations can be found on the event page at https://vcfed.org/vcf-pnw/.

If you attended the event please consider adding your pictures to the shared photo album at https://photos.app.goo.gl/e2rzk4iT4aHrQUoy6.  It helps others to see the show from a different perspective, and it helps us who were too busy to take pictures.

And one last request – help us make VCFed events even better!  If you were at VCF PNW 2019 please fill out a short survey for us: https://goo.gl/forms/V3DiyxwkpbIOCKn73

See you in 2020!
Mike, on behalf of VCFed

VCF PNW 2019 is this weekend in Seattle!

Come check out the 30 exhibits, enjoy six presentations, and go hunting for treasure in the consignment area.  And of course come for the people – they are what make a VCF event so fun!

Details can be found at https://vcfed.org/vcf-pnw.  We hope to see you there!

Mike on behalf of the VCF PNW crew

A note from our friends at the Atlanta Historical Computing Society about Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 7.0: exhibit registration is open! The show will be Saturday, April 27, 2019, 10AM-7PM, and Sunday, April 28, 2019, 12PM-5PM.

This year’s focus is on the 50th anniversary of Unix and 40th anniversary of the Atari personal computer (and the TI-99/4). More space is expected to be available than last year, so visitors should expect to see more than 30 exhibits. The event takes place at the currently under-construction Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia.

Visitors will be able to view the museum’s artifacts and construction in progress through viewing panels. You may be able to explore part of the museum, depending on the status of construction.

Announcements about keynote speakers are coming soon.

Ken Thompson, who invented the UNIX operating system with Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s, will be a star at Vintage Computer Festival East this year! It’s the 50th anniversary of when their work began. Thompson also wrote the programming language B, which preceded Ritchie’s world-changing language C. His accomplishments on these and other important works in computer science must be acknowledged. Ken will be interviewed on stage on Saturday morning, May 4, by Bell Labs’ Brian Kernighan of K&R fame. Brian himself spoke at VCF East in 2015.

If you were thinking of joining us for VCF Pacific Northwest 2019 in Seattle then now is the time to let me know!

The event is March 23-24th (Saturday and Sunday) with setup the day before. We still have room for some more exhibits if you are interested in joining us. If you are going to join us I need to know by Friday, February 8th. If you have told me you were coming but did not complete the registration form, well, now is the time …

A description of the event can be found at https://vcfed.org/vcf-pnw. General information for exhibitors including pictures from last year, a link to the registration form, and a FAQ can be found at https://vcfed.org/vcf-pnw-exhibitor-registration/. Also, yell at me directly if you have questions.

Thanks,
Mike

mbbrutman@brutman.com or michael@vcfed.org

PS: Not exhibiting at the event but interested in unloading some tonnage? We are hosting a consignment area again!  The consignment area is open to everybody; now is a good time to start cleaning and testing things that you might want to sell.

You keep asking, and now we have answers! For 2019 the Vintage Computer Festival series schedule is:

• VCF Pacific-Northwest — March 23-24, Living Computers: Museum+Labs, Seattle, WA
• VCF Italia — April 27-28, Cartiera Latina – Parco dell’Appia Antica, Rome, Italy
• VCF East — May 3-5, InfoAge Science Center, Wall, NJ
• VCF West — August 3-4, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

All four events are awesome! We promise you will have a great time there. Bring your friends, family, and coworkers too! Our events are truly “festivals” to celebrate the history of computing.

Happy holidays from Vintage Computer Federation!

If you’re looking for an end-of-year charity contribution, Vintage Computer Federation is an excellent choice. We’re a 501(c)(3) devoted to preserving computer history, enabling hobbyists, and informing the public. Please click here for more information.

Thank you.

Just some quick updates on VCF PNW 2019

• So far we have 11 registered exhibitors plus a few more who have expressed interest.  We are looking for 20 to 25 exhibits and probably have room for up to 30 so don’t be shy.  (We would like to have exhibitor registration complete in mid-January so we can start working on the show layout.)
• We are also still looking for a few more speakers who want to present their topics.  Being a speaker at VCF PNW is a great way to share your knowledge with a very friendly crowd.
• We are hosting a consignment area again!  Have an old machine or gear that you want to find a new home for?  Now would be a great time to get it cleaned up and ready for sale.

VCF Pacific Northwest 2019 will take place March 23-24, 2019 at Living Computers: Museum+Labs in Seattle, Washington.  Details can be found at https://www.vcfed.org/vcf-pnw. 

(Mike re-posting for Oscar)

Just a heads-up: there will be a Vintage Computer Festival in Switzerland again this year!

Like the last two years, it’ll be in Zurich’s Rote Fabrik cultural center, at the shore of Lake Zurich. November 24 & 25…

Here’s an impression of last year’s event.

There’s a new & nice line-up of exhibits and presentations. Including two World Premieres, the Unibone (PDP-11 hardware! Attach Simh to a physical Unibus, or connect all sorts of emulated peripherals to a real PDP-11 Unibus – the thing works both ways) and an FPGA remake of the RPC-4000. We’ll also have Swiss Jazz & computer music pioneer Bruno Spörri and a related section on vintage synthesizers. Like always, the kids can be left safely at the Vintage Gaming podium…

Details on Twitter and on www.vcfe.ch. Switzerland is really not that far away, so no reason not to come 

Kind regards,
Oscar

Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro, perished November 8 due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California. He was 79.

There is a family-led GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.

Godbout was an important advocate for the industry-standard S-100 bus in its early days, as well as being a parts supplier for electronic music projects, according to 1970s microcomputing expert Herb Johnson.

Godbout was born October 2, 1939. He talked about his introduction to computing in an interview with InfoWorld magazine for their February 18, 1980 issue. “My first job out of college was with IBM. I served a big-system apprenticeship there, but I think the thing that really triggered [my interest] was the introduction of the 8008 by Intel,” he said. “I was fascinated that you could have that kind of capability in a little 18-pin package.”

Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote about Godbout’s Silicon Valley electronics business. “Bill Godbout… bought junk on a more massive scale — usually government surplus chips and parts which were rejected as not meeting the exacting standards required for a specific function, but perfectly acceptable for other uses. Godbout, a gruff, beefy, still-active pilot who hinted at a past loaded with international espionage and intrigues for government agencies whose names he could not legally utter, would take these parts, throw his own brand name on them, and sell them, often in logic circuitry kits that you could buy by mail order.”

“For those of us who lived and did business in the East Bay during the opening years of the personal computer revolution Bill was a friend. He operated Bill Godbout Electronics from a Quonset hut on the margins of the Oakland Airport,” explained Lee Felsenstein, associated with Silicon Valley landmarks such as Community Memory, the Homebrew Computer Club, Processor Technology, and Osborne Computer Corporation. “Bill was a friend and ally to the operators of the first generation of personal computer businesses that grew up in that early period.”

“My only direct interaction with Bill took place in 1979 after Processor Technology closed its doors. I was trying to peddle the next generation VDM card but Bill asked me to design and prototype a simplified VDM-1 S-100 card — I did so but he didn’t take it further for his CompuPro line of computers and add-ons,” Felsenstein said. A year or two later, “He was a member of the poker group that included Adam Osborne, George Morrow, and Chuck Peddle, and made a bet there that Adam would not ship his Osborne-1 computer on time. He lost that bet, but it was a real squeaker — I was involved.”

“Bill put on no airs — he was always ‘one of the guys’ and dealt in a straightforward way — this is worth noting for a time just after the opening gun when a new field often brings forth poseurs, popinjays, and pure phonies,” Felsenstein added. “Bill was none of those and we are all distraught to learn that he was taken from us in this terrible way.”

Budding engineer Mark Graybill got a job assembling clocks and other electronic gadgets at Godbout’s Oakland facility in 1976. “I’d jump on a bus after school, go down there, and originally I’d go in and work at an assembly station. I was lucky to be in the area at the time. It was cool to be doing something in electronics,” Graybill recalled. “He was kind of like the friendly uncle who’d let you take the sports car for a spin and laugh when you crashed it… I’ll remember him as the guy who trusted a 14-year-old kid with a sackful of hundreds of dollars of RAM because it was too difficult to take the bus down everyday.”