Vintage Computer Festival East XII is imminent! In just 10 days from now there will be a three-day weekend featuring a dozen technical talks, three keynotes, two sold-out exhibit halls, a consignment / vendors room, learn-to-solder classes, and of course the year-round VCF museum will be open (Saturday/Sunday; not Friday). Online ticketing stays open until this coming Sunday; after that you’ll have to buy tickets at the door.

There three special team exhibits at VCF East this year, each as large as five standard exhibits, plus there are 26 standard exhibits — which means we’ve got 41 exhibits! That is a VCF East record and, as far as we can tell, a record for ANY edition of the Vintage Computer Festival. Check out the list and remember to save time at the show by getting tickets online.

VCF East is only six weeks away, but we’re already planning VCF West! The show will be August 5-6 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Visit the show web site.

Last year’s VCF West was our resurrection of the original VCF which ran from 1997-2007. This year, Vintage Computer Festival West XII will be even bigger! We have two additional rooms to use at the museum for speakers, which means we can fit more exhibits, more consignment tables, more lunch tables, and who knows what else we may do!

Exhibitor registration for VCF West is already open. Will you be the first to sign up? Can you out-do last year’s incredible lineup?

If you’re interested in speaking at the show or being a sponsor, then please contact us. VCF West is produced by Vintage Computer Federation, a national user group devoted to enabling hobbyists and spreading awareness of computer history. The Federation is a 501(c)3 non-profit.

If you have questions or comments, then please feel free to VCF West producer Erik Klein (erik@vcfed.org).

The nice people at EEWeb honored us with their “Engineering Site of the Day” award. Thank you, EEWeb!

Several people inquired about archive pages for past Vintage Computer Festival events. Much of the information was lost during a rebuild of the former Festival owner’s web site, however, much of the same information was also available at Archive.org. Tonight we posted about 50% of the basic data from past Festivals — when, where, who. (It would be a HUGE amount of work to post the exact web sites from past Festivals, and there’s not much point to saving the logistical information about what time of day people will speak, etc., so what we are posting seems like a good balance.) We hope to get the remaining 50% onto the page soon.

We joined Amazon Smile. If you shop via this link, then they’ll donate .5% of your purchase price to Vintage Computer Federation. It’s easy for  you and helpful for us! You can also make a direct contribution to our cause.

C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup, Ph.D., Enigma machine expert Tom Perera, Ph.D., and a panel discussion by computer historian Bill Degnan on the 40th anniversary of appliance computers featuring the Apple II, Commodore PET 2001, and TRS-80 Model 1 will be the keynote sessions for Vintage Computer Festival East XII, March 31-April 2, in Wall, New Jersey.

The event is produced by Vintage Computer Federation (www.vcfed.org), a national user group devoted to enabling hobbyists and spreading awareness of computer history. The Federation is a 501(c)3 non-profit.

Stroustrup, who developed the C++ programming language at Bell Labs starting in 1978, will discuss “The Origins and further Evolution of C++” on Saturday morning, April 1. He is currently a visiting professor of computer science at Columbia University and a managing director in the technology division at Morgan Stanley. His talk is sure to be an excellent follow-up to C language author and pioneer Brian Kernighan, who spoke at VCF East X in 2015.

Perera’s company, EnigmaMuseum.com, is in the business of hunting for, researching, restoring, and selling Enigma machines and related items. His talk, “Inside the Enigma: The history, technology and deciphering of an early laptop computer and the real story of the Imitation Game” will be presented Friday, March 31 after lunch. The World War II German Enigma was arguably an original form of laptop computer. This talk will explain the history and technology of the Enigma and link it to the movie “Imitation Game” which tells the story of the cracking of the German Navy Enigma code and the extraordinary contributions of mathematician Alan Turing to this endeavor. In order to keep the audience interested and involved, the movie has allowed some inaccuracies and omissions in the history and technology and in the masterful portrayal of the eccentric mathematician Alan Turing by Benedict Cumberbatch. This talk will trace the actual story of the Enigma and the cracking of the Enigma Code and attempt to fill in some of the Enigmatic aspects of Alan Turing’s personality. Perera will also give a more technical demonstration of how the machines work and a real-time disassembly of an Enigma in a separate session that day. He will give further demonstrations and will offer for sale his Enigmas, Enigma simulators, other historic cipher machines, books, Enigma Library CD-ROM, and related items on Saturday and Sunday. Perera was formerly a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, Barnard College, and Montclair State University.

Degnan is a co-founder of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of Vintage Computer Federation, a professional programmer and web developer, and formerly taught computer history at the University of Delaware. At his panel, “1977: The year of the appliance computer” you’ll learn about the launch of the Apple II, Commodore PET 2001, and Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. Bill will guide the discussion to explore how the appliance computer facilitated the expansion of computers as an appliance into small businesses, schools, and the home. Panelists will be separated into three groups each representing the Apple, Commodore, and Tandy/Radio Shack perspective. The panel will respond to questions and share their knowledge and personal experiences. The discussion will continue from 1977 through the milestones of 1980s 8-bit appliance and home computing.

All three sessions will be 90 minutes which includes audience Q&A. Further details will be shared as the event nears.

We accomplished great things in 2016. We doubled the size of the museum at our New Jersey headquarters, hosted the 11th edition of Vintage Computer Festival East, resurrected the former Vintage Computer Festival West, and joined forces with the Vintage Computer Forum. It was a fantastic year to be a vintage computing hobbyist!

Now we’re asking for your help to keep the momentum going. Can you make a tax-deductible gift to us this holiday season? Over at our contributions page you’ll find four options — Binary ($10.00), Phreaker ($26.00), 555 Timer ($55.50), S-100 ($100), and Variable (enter your own amount).

If you’d like to do something truly awesome, and you happen to live in or will be traveling to the San Francisco / Silicon Valley area, then bid on lunch with Lee Felsenstein through our friends at CharityBuzz. Lee is a technical and social media legend — he was a spark behind Community Memory, moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, and a top engineer for both the Processor Tech Sol-20 and Osborne-1. Bring a few friends, have lunch with Lee at your mutual convenience, and we’ll pay the bill!

Where will your money go? We are planning even more things for 2017 and beyond. Vintage Computer Festival East XII will be held March 31 through April 2 at our museum. We are currently planning Vintage Computer Festival West XII and will announce the dates soon. We’re considering expansion of the Festival to other cities, we’re looking to incubate additional regional chapters, we are planning to offer more resources online, and we’re preparing a slew of improvements to the physical museum. If you thought we were active this year, then 2017 is going to exhaust us — but we love every minute of it!

If you want even your news even more frequent and granular, then you’ve got options! Read our blog at vcfed.org, join the discussion forum there, like us at facebook.com/vcfederation, and follow us through twitter.com/vcfederation.

Finally, if you have questions or comments, then please feel free to contact me directly.

Thank you.

We have two new board members! Michael Brutman and William Degnan. Welcome, gentlemen.

Mike grew up wanting to work for IBM and got his wish for 18 years. (He continues to be gainfully employed in tech.) When nobody is looking he writes networking code for DOS so that his PCjrs and related machines can sneak onto the Internet. Other passions include flying and trying to keep up with home improvement projects.

Bill collects everything from minicomputers to 8-bitters. By day he’s an independent programmer and web developer. By night he’s a bass player and Frisbee golf fan. He co-founded the Federation’s original Mid-Atlantic chapter.

Learn more about our governance.

Everyone should experience the joy of connecting to an authentic dial-up bulletin board service. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. 🙂

It’s why we ordered an 8-port analog PBX with a GSM module today.

Our plan is to connect this to a PC running the MajorBBS software. Visitors at our museum and at Vintage Computer Festival East (or heck, why not bring it with us to VCF West too?) will get to pick from a selection of vintage computers, hear a dial tone, hear the handshake, and be productive at 300-2400 bps. People could also telnet in over the Internet and, in phase two, dial in through the GSM connection.

We’ll share an update this winter when the PBX arrives.