ECCC/VCFMW 2016

Once again, the forces of ECCC (the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention) and VCFMW (Vintage Computer Festival MidWest) teamed up, in the more spacious environment we enjoyed last year. The show was held in Elk Grove Village, IL, USA (in the Chicago area) on September 10-11, 2016. For corrections and missing names, please mail me: cenbe at protonmail dot com. Click the pixtures to make them more bigger!

This is how the big iron arrives at the show. A PDP-8 was strapped onto a dolly and ever so gingerly eased down the ramp into the loading doors.

And this is how it looked in its place of honor, next to the diagnostic equipment it was originally used with.

Another PDP-8 was fitted with something you don't see on one of these machines every day...

We saw some interesting PDP replicas again this year as well. It seems this is becoming a thing.

A Prime mini takes its turn down the ramp.

The machine was meticulously cleaned before attempting to apply power to it.

The Prime loads its microcode, but...

"We're out of boot devices!" Still, a noble effort.

An SGI Indy undergoes exploratory surgery.

Look, Mom! I'm on TV!

John Justice brought a Commodore 64 with a very low serial number: S00001281.

The uncommon Commodore Plus4 and C16 were also on display.

"Recovering Commodore Engineer" Bil Herd attended the show. Here he examines Eric Kudzin's prototype of an unreleased Commodore 128.

Bil mentioned how fond he was of this particular model, having taken one home for his own use back in the day. He signed it for Eric.

This is my exhibit. I gave a talk on the PROMAL programming language.

A Commodore 1541-II floppy drive being fitted for the JiffyDOS mod. The sight of a 1541 case being drilled always gives me the shivers.

A prototype CPU accelerator that Jim Brain's been working on.

Jim makes a custom modification to Alex Burger's ZoomFloppy.

The presentation list. I spoke (again) about PROMAL, a programming language for the Commodore 64.

Thomas Haigh spoke about ENIAC. His new book ENIAC in Action corrects some of the common misconceptions about this primordial machine.