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VCFMW17 was fun. (To avoid confusion: The 17 means this was the 17th
vcfmw. It happened in the year 2022, not 2017)
Leading up to the show we had some difficulties. Due to various
circumstances we did not have a dog sitter, which meant my wife could
not make it to the show. Moreover, When prepping the nuclear keyboard
I accidentally broke not one, but two arduino pro micro usb ports, of
my last 2 arduino pro micros. These things are ludicrously fragile.
The micro-usb ports are barely held on with the teensiest bit of
solder. I did have a regular arduino micro, so I made an adapter that
sits on top of the board i already had, that makes it work with that.
All very last minute wackyhacky. To make matters worse, thursday when
I finally made it to the show, I realize I didn't bring the right usb
cable for the thing. I grabbed what looked like a long micro-usb
cable but instead it was a micro hdmi cable - AAAARGH - Thankfully my
friend who was to meet me later friday evening said he could bring me
a cable, and friday I got it all working during setup day.
Thursday, we got there around 5pm - wife dropped me off, I quickly
unloaded everything on my table, some weird social interactions.
Decided to hide in my room the rest of the night and avoid people.
Thursday night, my first night in the hotel room felt rather surreal.
Since I was by myself, it was very quiet in the room, and I can't be
bothered to turn on the hotel room TV since it's all spam anyway,...
Breaking the silence was the old familiar sounds that somehow are
universal for every hotel room experience:
* The humming airco and/or room-fridge.
* Muffled sounds of people talking nearby.
* A kid running down the hall.
* Someone in the next room unlocks their door, but it sounds
like your room.
* Someone leaves their room and the door slams shut.
* Distant plumbing sounds... is it running sinks? Is it toilets
flushing? Who knows!
It kind of sounds like being surrounded by people with lives more
interesting than yours, or more complicated perhaps. Wandering
through the hotel corridors, endless rows of closed doors, each one a
potential gateway into someone else's world. What goes on behind
them? Who knows! Yes, between the above narrative playing in my head
like a cheesy noir-movie, and trying to get accustomed to a different
bed, needless to say I did not get much sleep thursday night. All in
all, maybe 3 hours.
Got up friday morning at 8 to be ready at 9am which is when setup
time starts. Got everything set up rather quickly. Got the terminals
logged into SDF - this year I had no problems logging in with the
vcfmw account, since i just screen -x'd the terminals and logged in
with a normal keyboard. Last year I had some issues with that because
the account password is rather long and uses some special characters
not present on the honeywell terminal. Heck, the thing doesn't even
do pipe characters. We take that stuff for granted, but obviously a
terminal for a non-unix environment (GCOS) would have no use for a
pipe character.
Technically the show doesn't start until saturday - yet friday felt
like it was a normal day open to the general public. So many people
walking around looking at things, buying things, tinkering with stuff
-it's great. I tinkered a bit with Forgotten Machine's [1] Convergent
Technologies AWS CTOS system. It has some sort of forms system. Forms
can be saved into files, and presumably loaded from COBOL - I started
with trying to get a basic COBOL program compiled on it, but ran out
of time eventually. I may look around to see if there's a way I can
emulate CTOS and tinker with it at home a bit. It's a rather
fascinating menu-driven OS. Forgotten Machines also brought a cute
little Polish terminal. He said he went all the way to Poland to pick
it up, and it took a lot of work to reverse engineer it into a usable
terminal. It does not use ascii, nor serial. Fascinating.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed with all the interesting projects at
the show. I couldn't help but feel like my stuff was kind of lame in
comparison haha, but I guess it's important to remember that some
people have more resources, time-wise or money-wise - also, the best
projects were collaborations where many people helped make it happen.
All in all, I think I had 4 hours of sleep Friday night.
Me at my table, desperately trying to get a toobnix stream going.
My laptop already has shitty wifi. The hotel wifi was also really bad
and the combination just made it near impossible to stream anything.
Saturday morning, got in slightly after 9am opening time, and quickly
got everything up and running. Things very quicly got CRAZY with how
many people were there. Both front and back parking lots were FULL,
and there was cars parked in the street all the way up to the
intersection. I felt very overwhelmed and when my friend offered to
go out for breakfast I gladly obliged. After breakfast we decided to
go to the Galloping Ghost arcade for a bit instead of heading
straight back to the show. The Galloping Ghost is the biggest arcade
I've ever seen. Many many rooms just full of arcade machines. It was
a welcome break from the crowds.
The Arcade (1)
The Arcade (2)
The Arcade (3)
The Arcade (4)
The Arcade (5)
The Arcade (6)
The Arcade (7)
I can't resist me some OPERATION WOLF
After we came back from the arcade things looked a lot calmer at the
show. I met up with whixr and wife who apparently came a long way
just to talk to me about sdf stuff! I felt really bad for being gone
most of the day on saturday. But I ended up talking to them until 5am
that evening. I had some of the best conversation I've had with other
humans in a long time. We reminisced about the hacker/phreaking
culture from back in the day, and how things were where I grew up in
Belgium versus here. We talked a bit about cyberpunk culture and how
everything cyberpunk pretty much warned about came true and how there
is a big need for a positive message these days. We acknowledged that
solarpunk is cool, and we talked about how to survive doing
innovative / creative things in a world that's all about money.
Needless to say, Saturday evening, was only a 3 hours sleep night
again.
I think I learned something. I wrote some comment on the sdf bboard
a while back about how I had mixed feelings on the show growing so
large that it gets harder to do the tinkering/debugging/playing at
other people's tables. I've just been doing it wrong this whole time.
The real fun happens after the show. I should just not bother showing
up at my table at 9am and sleep in so I can stick around at night.
Another really cool display was that a group brought an entire TV
broadcast set-up. Including Emergency Alert System - which they had
tied into the local phone system. A broadcast head created several
channels which they had TV's hooked into, and you could interrupt the
shows with an emergency alert by calling a specific number and
speaking in a custom message. Very cool - I feel like it needed a few
Max Headroom heads to complete the vibe haha. They even had a little
portable tv that received a broadcast signal over RF.
Broadcast setup (+finger)
Works on c=64 monitors too!
More...
BCAST Headend
More...
Weather Star XL
More Weather Channel stuff.
It's actually an SGI O2 but in a metal box?!
^^that.
More...
Not complete without a good ph0ne
The whole setup(sans-finger)
Someone triggered an alert...
This year I brought my payphone to the show, and it actually got lots
of use if not just for triggering the emergency alerts.
Earlier, when I was setting up the nuclear keyboard, I was having
issues getting phetch compiled on the pi, and I didn't feel like
messing with it anymore, so I simply threw up a vi instance and let
people type whatever to test it. Incidentially, this seemed to make
it more enticing for people to use, because they could leave their
own custom messages for others to see.
Here's what the final .txt file ended up looking like
Sunday was rather short, I had to pack up in a hurry, earlier than I
had anticipated - because the puppydog was by himself at home.
Many thanks to Silent700 and all the organizers and volunteers making
the event possible.
I apologize if I left in a hurry and couldn't say goodbye properly.
But that's how it goes sometimes if you have pets, hah :)
Here's more pictures - Most of these were taken by my friend since my
phone does not have a forward facing camera - :
Jesus Eric working on an oversized mechanical keyboard.
Someone was 3d-printing these on the spot.
VCFMW pic
OUTATIME
Totally accurate targetting device
Detail of ^
Friggin' Bill (1)
Friggin' Bill (2)
Apollo 11 flight plan
Too rich for my blood.(1)
Too rich for my blood.(2)
Obligatory Altair 8800... but with a TVI term on top.
^^^ more of that.
Even more of that.
Processor Technology Sol Terminal Computer
Another shot of my table...
This person was selling stuff out the back of his truck.
Turns out he lives in Mahomet (not far from us).
More Altair
PDP 8/a panel (1)
PDP 8/a panel (2)
PDP 8/a 500
Coolest phone. I want this phone.
Teletype Action
...Stuff going on?
Ralph Baer's brown box (1)
Ralph Baer's brown box (2)
Obligatory acoustic coupler.
ZX81 stuff
More ZX81 stuff
I didn't even know this whiteboard was there...
Right then...
Anyone want any Model-M's?
Hah..
That Altair with the tvi terminal, but turned on this time
...broader view
...and again.
That's it! There was so much more to be seen, but I'm sure others
will upload more pictures and footage soon. There sure was no
shortage of camera's to be seen at the show this year.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/ConvergentMightyFrame/videos
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