This Saturday, Ars will be attending what you might consider a different kind of computer expo in a different kind of science museum. The event is hosted by MARCH, the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, and will feature 23 exhibitors with hardware that predates the 1980s, all of it working. But the Vintage Computer Festival East won’t be a show-and-tell type display; MARCH requires that its exhibitors be willing to let the attendees use anything that’s on display.
The event will take place at Info Age in New Jersey, a recently opened museum that’s taking a decidedly different approach to connecting the public with the science and technology behind the communication and computing revolutions. We talked to both the head of MARCH and the man behind Info Age to get a feel for this weekend’s events, and their place in the efforts to get Info Age up and running.
Getting a MARCH on computing tech
We spoke with Evan Koblentz, MARCH’s president, about version 6.0 of the Vintage Computer Festival East. The event was started on the West Coast in 1997; an East Coast version was launched in Boston in 2002, but New Jersey has hosted it for the last four years. The focus will be on anything from the early 1980s and earlier—Koblentz mentioned that Apple IIs and Commodore 64s would be some of the most recent hardware on display, but things will go back into the homebrew era and the minicomputers that dominated computing in the 1970s, along with a few things that we might not recognize as computers—switches instead of keyboards, with output displayed by a couple of lights.
But the main draw will undoubtedly be the chance for some hands-on time with the hardware. At most events focused on antique equipment, “The owners freak out if you touch anything,” as Koblentz put it. “We think that’s really boring. We require that exhibitors turn everything on so you can use them.” Referring to a bit of MARCH’s 1970s-era hardware, Koblentz said, “Our PDP11 is beat up and filthy, but it’s ours to turn on every Sunday.”
In trying to explain the love for out-of-date hardware, Koblentz said, “We’re not saying these are better, but it’s more that, the older you get, the better they used to be.” He pointed to a machine called the Tandy Model 100—although grossly underpowered by any reasonable standard today, it managed to get eight hours of life out of a few AA batteries. Progress, in some ways, has been a mixed bag.
In addition to morning talks on computing history, the festivities will include an eight-bit music concert and a BASIC programming challenge. The first contestant will start off writing a program and, when his time’s up, he’ll hand the keyboard over to the next person without telling them anything about what the program is meant to do. That game of telephone tag will continue for several hours, after which someone will try to get it to run and see what it ultimately does.
Commemorating the Info Age
The event typically highlights hardware developed at the site that’s hosting it: the Info Age site is housed by what was formerly the US Army’s Camp Evans. Last year, for example, it featured a talk by the designer of Mobi Dic, a “mobile” computer from 1956 that fit into the trailer of an 18-wheeler. As part of a test, Mobi Dic was shipped to Maryland; “The computer was fine but the truck broke down,” Koblentz said.
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September 11th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I’ve styled my laptop as retro by myself! :p