VCF East 2.0, Day one.

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Fri Jul 16 20:27:14 2004

First off, I'd like to thank all the people who worked to put this
together formally, and also
a very special thank you to all those who just showed up and lent a hand!

I'm very impressed with this years event overall.

It seems to me we had a very different mix of people looking at the
exhibits, as compated to
VCF East 1.0. I had the oppertunity to spend some time talking with a
younger programmer
who worked at Sun. His experiance in the modern software world left him
rather impressed
at the sight of a running minicomputer that was running totally
home-grown software, from
the device drivers up to the file system.

He really took the time to think and ask some excellent questions about
the process of writing
a O/S and programming language for a machine without an already running
O/S, and my
reasons for building a native ATA disk controller for my old CPU's.

 From his perspecitive, this is something thats nearly impractical with
modern hardware. How
do you bootstrap a workstation without even BIOS code or low-level
drivers in ROM?
In hindsight, I wish I'd halted the machine, and shown him how to enter
binary machine code
from the front panel, and the very basics of bootstrapping such a machine.

I found it facinating to see how much the very concept of a computer has
changed since the
early days. I think I gained a better understanding of the evolution of
machines than I'd had
before I'd been exposed to his perspecitve.

There was also a good deal of good deals going on in the parking lot and
hallways.

I did miss a few exhibits from the last VCF East, I was really looking
forward to seeing spacewar
running on the Imlac and DPS-116(?).

Would anyone have sourcecode for Spacewar, for any old mini? I'd love
to port it to my HP's.
Received on Fri Jul 16 2004 - 20:27:14 BST