On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, D. Peschel wrote:
> I do have to say that it was a little disappointing, because I didn't see some
> of the machines I wanted to see (or if I did see them, e.g., at the Computer
> Museum, they weren't running). Those would be old machines that are cool by
> modern standards, instead of being cool by old standards -- Amiga, Perq, Acorn,
> Symbolics, Be, NeXT, maybe AT&T 3B, Blit, Sony with NeWS, PDP-10, PDP-11 with
> GT40, PDP-12, LINC, PDP-1.
There was a NeXT cube on display (not running), an Amiga that never made
it out of the box (my fault), someone was going to bring a Be but canceled
out at the last moment, and as for the rest of the stuff, it all depends
on who brings what to exhibit. Next year we hope to at least double if
not triple the number of individual exhibitors, thus bringing more breadth
and depth to the exhibit (more people to exhibit more things and put more
time into what they are exhibiting). And if you can find a PDP-1 to
exhibit, I'll happily expend the resources to get it running.
> The flea market was useful but not as cool as I had hoped. Also some people
> were selling worthless stuff or were obviously non-hobbyists who were drafted
> to sell things. (I don't object to non-hobbyists with knowledge and interest
> nearly as much as I object to non-hobbyists who have no clues or scruples.)
Nobody was convinced to come just to fill out the vendor area if that's
what you are implying. There were some people there who basically sell
old computer stuff because they know there's a market for it, but
otherwise know nothing about what they are selling. If I had more vendors
than I could give space to I would carefully pick and choose who I let in.
However, it was the other way around, and I had to do a lot of marketing
to get as many vendors as possible to make the flea market full enough to
be worthwhile.
> It concerns me greatly that I didn't meet many people my own age (24)
> and that many people there were in fact much older than I am.
I hope to change that as the event grows and expands to draw in a younger
crowd. You should actually be glad that there were a lot of old guys
there who you could talk to, ask questions and learn from. They're the
guys with all the knowledge of this old stuff.
> It surprises me that I haven't seen much interest in this. BTW, the VCF is
> quite relevant to this topic because the concept of "look at all these
> computers at once and compare them" is extremely useful.
One of the things the VCF is useful for is to be able to see the trends of
computing over the years. It allows you to look back at some of the
designs and see what features made it into our current day and which ones
dead-ended on an evolutionary limb.
> I can think of two problems, though:
>
> - We had a thread about designing your own CPU. We've also had
> discussions about the lack of schematics and technical info.
> So it seems that hardware is less accessible to the individual
> amateur, and it's very difficult for the amateur to break through
> to the next generation.
>
> I don't know if it's true, but it seems that way.
Again, this is something I hope to start changing as I emphasize homebrew
as a major part of the next and all subsequent VCF's.
> - Also, information is disappearing. There's relatively copious
> documentation about old hardware, but not much about old software
> (or old software itself). Didn't someone try to put together an
> archive of software info? I haven't heard much about it.
There are many on the web. I'm in the process of planning a rather large
one that will include any and every bit of software that comes into the
VCF archives.
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Fri Oct 30 1998 - 21:43:10 GMT