Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest 2018

February 10th and 11th, 2018

at Living Computers: museum + labs in Seattle, WA USA


Pictures I took of some of the exhibits at the Festival

(Click on a picture for a larger version.)

icon to link to picture of every imaginable type of floppy disk Every imaginable type of floppy disk from
2½" to 120 MB!
icon to link to picture of Digi-Comp II recreation Digi-Comp II re-creation.
digicompii.com
icon to link to picture of the MOnSter 6502 MOnSter 6502, running a game. It is a transistor-for-transistor working replica of the 6502 microprocessor, and was reverse-engineered from the actual die. Due to the gate capacitance of the discrete MOSFET transistors, it only runs at 60 kHz.
icon to link to picture of close-up of MOnSter 6502 A close-up of the MOnSter 6502.
MOnSter6502.com
icon to link to picture of spare parts for PDP-8 Anyone need spare parts for a PDP-8?
icon to link to picture of reanimated front panel for PDP-11/70 BlinkenBone: Program a PDP-11/70 over a reanimated front panel.
icon to link to picture of my booth at the show This was my booth. The large (48"x36") poster described my ST-2900 system and the UFDR hardware and software for capturing data from old floppy disks.
I exhibited my ST-2900 System 3 with two borrowed external 5¼" floppy disk drives. I used a Toshiba T2400CS (1994-era '486 notebook computer) with Windows 95 running HyperTerminal as the serial terminal. The ST-2900 was running the FLEX and OS-9 operating systems. A Windows 7 laptop computer was used to connect to the UFDR hardware and run its software.

Read the PDF copy of my poster, which explains what my display was all about.
(On June 22, 2024 I displayed a reduced size version of my poster at the Retro-Computing Expo '24.)

You might also find the complete 2018 festival program interesting.

I had several very enjoyable conversations about my floppy disk reader project at the festival.

Unfortunately, the "Living Computers: museum + labs" facility closed its doors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, never re-opened, and is now permanently shut down.

As of 2018-Jun-29 I had already imaged 130 of my old 5¼" floppy disks with the UFDR hardware and software. Most of them captured with zero read errors on the first try! Of the rest, after cleaning the drive heads, re-reading the tracks that had errors, and tweaking the software digital PLL decoding coefficients used in the post-processing software, all remaining errors were eliminated! Not bad for disks that were 25-37 years old!

So far the analog signal recording hasn't been needed for "fixing" read errors. It has been interesting to see how the signal amplitude sometimes varies significantly, yet the drive is still able to successfully extract all the pulses.

Now I have started the process to analyze and organize the files read from the floppy disks, and create web pages to document my old projects.



Some of the museum's computers on display.
Many are available for the public to play with.

icon to link to picture of a Cray 1 supercomputer The famous Cray 1 supercomputer. This unit is not functional.
icon to link to picture of the wiring of a Cray 1 computer Wiring of the Cray 1 -- looks like a rats nest!
icon to link to picture of DEC PDP8/e mini-computer DEC PDP8/e mini-computer system.
icon to link to picture of CDC 6500 supercomputer Control Data 6500 supercomputer.
icon to link to picture of Xerox Sigma 9 Xerox Sigma 9.
icon to link to picture of an IBM 029 Keypunch IBM 029 Keypunch. I punched thousands of cards on a machine like this while studying at B.C.I.T. 1974-1976.
icon to link to picture of a DEC PDP-7 computer DEC PDP-7 computer.
icon to link to picture of Jeff using the Xerox Alto My friend Jeff using the Xerox Alto, in my opinion the world's first "modern" personal computer.
icon to link to picture of a Kenbak-1, SCELBI-8H, and homebrew 4004 Kenbak-1 computer (TTL, serial memory), SCELBI-8H 8008 computer, homebrew Intel 4004 board.


On Sunday morning, before the museum was open to the public, Cynde Moya, the museum's Collections Manager, gave some of us a tour of their huge basement storage area and restoration work areas. These pictures show only a very tiny portion of what we saw. Fascinating!

icon to link to picture of LGP-30 vacuum tube computers I think these are LGP-30 vacuum tube computers.
icon to link to picture of some unknown device ???
icon to link to picture of an IBM 711 punch card reader IBM 711 punch card reader.
icon to link to picture of card cages with lots of cards Card cages with lots of cards.
icon to link to picture of neat and very dense wiring Neat wiring, but very dense!
icon to link to picture of devices needing lots of TLC In need of lots of TLC.
icon to link to picture of DG Eclipse mini Data General Eclipse minicomputer?
icon to link to picture of rows and rows of disk drives Rows and rows of disk drives.
icon to link to picture of lots of spare ICs Lots of spare chips.
icon to link to picture of rows and rows of magnetic tapes Rows and rows of tapes.
icon to link to picture of lots of punch cards Punch cards.
icon to link to picture of shelves of various microcomputers Shelf after shelf of microcomputers of every description.
icon to link to picture of HP 2100S mini HP 2100S minicomputer. Similar to the HP 2100A I used at B.C.I.T. 1974-1976.
icon to link to picture of very large old hard disk drive Large (in dimensions, not storage capacity) hard disk drive.
icon to link to picture of the museum's restoration work area Restoration work area.



Many, many more pictures, and reports from other people who attended:
Michael Brutman's Google Photo Album
HACKADAY
Atlanta Historical Computing Society
TechRepublic



I hope you enjoyed this tour!
David C. Wiens

Last revised 2024-Jul-28 12:06 PDT.
Copyright 2018- David C. Wiens.


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