#vintage computer festival west xiii

[commodorez]

Having seen @foone's exhibit at VCF West XIII & XIV, I can say with 100% certainty, she does a fantastic job. Hands-on experience with history is what a vintage computer festival exhibit should be all about, and this right here is a prime example.

removable storage fandom rise up

[commodorez]

I exhibited the Cactus at VCF West on August 4th & 5th in Mountain View California, at the Computer History Museum. A few weeks prior to the show, I discovered that the MOnSter 6502   would be in attendance, along with the good folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.   I reached out to its creator, Eric Schlaepfer, and asked if he would be willing to combine our two machines in an experiment. He was interested, letting me know that as long as I adhered to the NMOS specification and clocked down to 50KHz, the two should be able to work together.   Normally, the Cactus relies on the 65C02's Bus Enable pin to halt the CPU and allow the front panel logic to take over to provide the user with direct memory access. I built a new processor card with additional buffers to account for the lack of such a pin on the NMOS variant, and tested it with an original Commodore 6502 from 1983.   Once at VCF West, our first attempt on Saturday pointed out that I had neglected to buffer the Read/Write line, resulting in bus contention.   On Sunday, Eric brought me a breadboard, some additional jumper wires, and a few tristate buffers from his stockpile.   After splicing an additional 74LS245 into the NMOS card, and testing with an NMOS 6502, we decided to try again.   Lo and behold, the Cactus and the MOnSter 6502 successfully booted into BASIC, and ran at 50KHz for about half an hour, creating a spectacular fusion of blinkenlights.   That makes the Cactus the third machine to use the MOnSter 6502, and the first one that wasn't made by Eric. Needless to say, this was the highlight of my weekend.  

[commodorez]

Jason Scott is super cool, and his data preservation efforts are legendary -- textfiles.com? The Internet Archive? Yeah, that Jason Scott. 

It was nice to see him at VCF West XIII.  He was kind enough to take a picture with me and my masterpiece.

[commodorez]

Vintage Computer Festival West 13

I will be exhibiting the Cactus at VCF West on August 4th & 5th in Mountain View California, at the Computer History Museum.  Feel free to come and try your hand at using the front panel, or perhaps program in BASIC.  This will be my first time at VCF West, which means flying the Cactus cross-country.

DEFCON 26 Hardware Hacking Village

I will be giving a talk & demonstration at the DEFCON 26 HHV at 4PM on August 11th, in Las Vegas Nevada at Caesers Palace .  Come learn about the Cactus, the machines that influenced it, and the build process.  Attendees will be free to try the machine for themselves after the formal talk.

[commodorez]

Oh hey, it’s an Apple I.  And another Apple I.

That’s like...  5 I’ve seen in person.

[commodorez]

It’s beautiful… the DEC PDP-1 is beyond spectacular.

[commodorez]

Check out my new hobby business cards!  I’ll be needing them for the next week, because in case you haven’t heard, I’m flying out tomorrow for:

Vintage Computer Festival West 13

I will be exhibiting the Cactus at VCF West on August 4th & 5th in Mountain View California, at the Computer History Museum. Feel free to come and try your hand at using the front panel, or perhaps program in BASIC.  This will be my first time at VCF West, which means flying the Cactus cross-country.

DEFCON 26 Hardware Hacking Village

I will be giving a talk & demonstration at the DEFCON 26 HHV at 4PM on August 11th, in Las Vegas Nevada at Caesers Palace .  Come learn about the Cactus, the machines that influenced it, and the build process.  Attendees will be free to try the machine for themselves after the formal talk.

[commodorez]

I've met some really nice people here at VCF West XIII. This is a fun event, and it's been nice to see a few familiar faces from past VCF events.

Also, the folks at Evil Mad Scientist are super cool. You want to talk about a class act, you look no further than them.

[commodorez]

Made it to Mountain View!

[commodorez]

VCF West XIII Closing Thoughts

This weekend was pure awesome. Today in particular.

I met Jeri Ellsworth for the first time since I was 16. She's an absolute wizard.

I played Space War on a PDP-1 computer.

I took a picture with Jason Scott and the Cactus. That guy is a legend, and the fact that he knows about me and my work is oh so nice to know.

I ran into Brian Benchoff of Hackaday, and finally got to show him my computer. He digs it. Even made a SECOND Hackaday post on it. Nice.

I got to meet Marc of Curious Marc on youtube, and thank him for his efforts to share history.

I watched an IBM 1401 computer from 1959 run a program, where it took my name on a punch card and printed out a giant page with it on an IBM 1403 Line Printer.

I saw a real OSI-300 again, and was given massive diagrams & schematics by the guy who brought it to the show (who found it in his garage just to show me). That was really nice of him.

I saw a real Data General Nova on display. This is the machine that showed Woz that you could creatively cut down on hardware and achieve the same results. This concept was taken to heart with the Cactus. I kinda want one more than I did before.

I won second place for Best Demonstration.

Met alot of really nice people from parts of the community I had never interacted with before.

I talked kit building with Oscar Vermeullen, the guy responsible for the PiDP-8 and 11. He gave me good advice.

I met another former Commodore employee.

I managed to fix damage the Cactus incurred during transit using minimal parts and tools.

I scored the entire year of Byte magazine issues from 1977.

Erik Klein of the Vintage Computer Forums (among other things) was kind enough to lend me a Televideo 910 terminal to use while I was at the show. It worked great!

A robot is delivered me oreos in my hotel room.

But the best thing of all? Eric Schlaepfer and I combined the MOnSter 6502 and the Cactus.

That's right. It's now the third machine to interface with the MOnSter, and the only computer not made by Eric himself to run his processor. I was honored to have the experience. The Cactus had a special NMOS board constructed just for this situation, which required minimal tweaking to get it to work right. We ran it at 50KHz for about 20 minutes - pictures are coming.

[commodorez]

I’m going to VCF West!

I will be exhibiting the Cactus on August 4th & 5th at Vintage Computer Festival West XIII.  It’s held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. 

[commodorez]

This is what a real OSI-300 looks like.  Complete with purple ceramic 6502, and white ceramic 6810.

Apparently the reason these are so hard to find is because Ohio Scientific had a return policy that let you put the value of this ($99) towards a more powerful 6502 machine of theirs.  Thus, Ohio Scientific ended up reclaiming them.

[commodorez]

IBM 1401

In 1959, IBM debuted the 1401 computer.  It greatly lowered the threshold at which a serious computer could be purchased.  Paired with the IBM 1403 line printer, which boasted massively improved reliability and a new consistent level of quality compared to all computer printers that came before it.

On Saturday of VCF West, I demonstrated the Cactus to an older gentleman who was wearing Computer History Museum attire, unaware of his specialty.  Then on Sunday, I had the pleasure of attending the 1401 demonstration, only to find that same man standing inside the barrier, leading the talk!  What a fun surprise. 

The CHM happens to have two IBM 1401′s, matching 1403′s, vacuum column tape drives, punch card readers, and a handful of keypunch stations.  I got to punch my name on a card, after which it was fed through the reader, and then printed out on paper in big graphical text, after the computer had processed it.  Thing is, this is a 6-bit machine which predates the ASCII standard.  It has no lower case characters.  I was given a decoding card showing how the characters are represented for the 1401 -- mighty fun. 

The IBM 1401 is a class-act of a machine. I highly recommend seeing this demo at the CHM if you ever get the chance, because it is truly a magnificent computer.