[ale] AHCS Vintage Computer Festival

[Charles Shapiro]

I was there, it was great.  Made meself a silly watch at the Learn to
Solder station (even though I already know how to solder).

The most fun talk I saw was Ray Holt talking about the F14 flight computer,
one of the first microprocessor-based computers ever. The F-4 had a
completely mechanical flight computer ( like an automatic transmission
circa 1965).  They built the machinery, but didn't bother with assemblers,
linkers, and all that other modern fooferaw.  He wrote the software it ran
in BINARY ( **not machine code** ) on graph paper. It was awesome. He had
old notebooks full of hand-written 1s and 0s, plus the first chips off the
asembly line and a bunch of other souvenirs.    You can see his page about
it ( http://www.firstmicroprocessor.com/ ).

I also got to hold an actual Curta ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta )
in my hand for the first time.  They currently go for $1,000 - $1500 on
ebay.  Several IBM 1391401 keyboards were on sale in the consignment area
for $20-$25, but they were gone by the time I ginned up enough organization
to go grab one.

You shoulda gone.

-- CHS


On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com> wrote:

> Whoaa I missed this. Darn it...
>
> Anybody been there?
> On Feb 18, 2016 11:08 PM, "Raylynn Knight" <seca900rider at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Took my grandkids last year and they enjoyed it more than I expected.
>>
>> Ray Knight
>>
>>
>> On Feb 17, 2016, at 9:48 AM, Charles Shapiro <hooterpincher at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> In case you haven't heard the news..
>>
>> http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-southeast-4-0/
>>
>> This is the 4th annual. These shows are really fun.  Who knows, yoiu
>> might see some of your current hardware exhibited as antiques!
>>
>> -- CHS
>>
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