Some direct links to interesting bits of the VCF West which took place online yesterday:
Sol 20 with Helios Floppy system (Corey Cohen) at 0h19m
Operating an Apollo DSKY Panel (Carl Claunch) at 0h55m
Magnetic tape data recovery (Len Shustek) at 1h10m
Whirlwind (Guy Fedorkow) at 1h33m
6502 Assembly Language (Stephen A Edwards) at 2h10m
4004 Electronic Manoeuvring Board (Dwight Elvey) at 2h55m
PDP 8 History and Operation (David Gesswein) at 3h39m
The ENIAC (Brian L Stuart) at 4h22m
Core64 (64 bit core memory build and demo) (Andy Geppert) at 5h10m
Amiga Video Toaster (Bill Winters) at 5h25m
Univac 490 Real Time Computer (Bob Roswell) at 5h40m
IBM 1620 Jr (Steve Casner and Dave Babcock) at 6h10m (teensy emulator in retro rebuild)
NOVA 445 Homebrew Retrocomputer (Steve Toner) at 6h25m
Retrosheild for Arduino Mega (Erturk Kocalar) at 6h42m
Genesis of the 6502 (Bill Mensch & Stephen Edwards) at 6h45m
Bil, Bill and Eric Talking Tech at 7h55m
Scelbi 8H and Digital Group Video (Mike Willegal) at 8h57m
I watched almost all of it live, while working on my own homebrew vintage computer (more on that later). I thought it was very, very good. I particularly enjoyed Len Shustek’s data recovery talk, David Gesswein’s PDP-8 talk, and the two interviews with Bill Mensch, but I don’t think there was a single talk I didn’t find interesting to at least some degree! The only one I missed entirely was the IBM 1620 Jr talk, as it was during my family’s dinner.
My only complaint was that even virtual conferences need the occasional break! I missed a few minutes here and there due to … biological requirements … or family requests. It went off very smoothly, particularly for a first virtual offering from the VCFed. Kudos to everyone who made it happen, and everyone who gave a talk.
The individual videos are all linked on the VCF YouTube channel (but don’t include the Q&A afterward, at least yet): https://www.youtube.com/c/VintageComputerFederation501c3
I imagine they’ll put up a playlist at some point.
The 1620 Jr. needs an off-line line printer to produce its output from a punch-card deck! I don’t think the original assembler printed the symbol table on the console, did it?