VCFMW 2017

This was another extremely successful year for Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, which was again held in Elk Grove Village, IL (close to Chicago). For corrections and omissions, please mail me: cenbe at protonmail dot com. You know what to do: click the pixtures to make them more bigger!

Attendance was excellent again this year...

...with lots of curious and enthusiastic visitors.

The hit of this year's show was virtual reality goggles for the Commodore 64. Yes, you read that right.

People lined up to be hypnotized by this strange juxtaposition of the old and the new.

Jim Happel gives his talk on how he created the goggles and the software that runs them.

This was the talks schedule for the show.

Jim "Trixter" Leonard handled the AV and recording for the talks. Just like downtown!

Jason Compton (of ECCC fame), the voice of VCFMW, announced each talk.

This was my display: a gopher client for Commodore GEOS, which was released shortly after the show.

I set up my soldering iron to assemble the 6502-based show badge, and got it running!

Dan Mackey becomes only the second person ever to build geoLink (he made a small customization). Him assembling and me soldering: what's wrong with this picture?

DemongerX is not letting his recent vision impairment slow him down, and was archiving disks at the show.

If there were an award for best t-shirt, this would probably have gotten it (although my "God Uses Debian" shirt might have gotten an honorable mention).

In addition to his tricked-out Apple IIgs and IIc systems, Avery Grade (in light blue t-shirt) had some working telephones... and a telephone pole!

A real Altair 8800...

...and a replica built using an Arduino. Which would you rather have?

A real PDP-8...

...and one of Oscar Vermeulen's replicas. Decisions, decisions...

This is the new PDP-11 replica.

This is the Retro Elf Plus.

Mike Loewen showed an HP 2113E running RTE-6/VM.

This is the HP 2113E itself.

We were blessed with not just one...

...but two Sun workstations at the show (which was bittersweet considering Oracle's recent layoffs).

Here's a Mac Classic in excellent condition.

Leif "Schema" Bloomquist takes a Linux system on a card with an RS-232 interface, plugs it into a terminal, and gets a shell... on the printer. (Here's a picture from the rear.)