Sometimes it can feel like a slow laptop or a balky phone is so old that it belongs in a museum, but the Vintage Computer Festival West celebrates pieces of technology from decades past that actually do.
The Computer History Museum is the setting for the annual Vintage Computer Festival West on Aug. 4-5. Courtesy Computer History Museum.
Presented by the Vintage Computer Federation, this annual event, which takes place Friday, Aug. 4 and Saturday, Aug. 5, at the Computer History Museum, will take visitors way, way back in time to when 8-bit graphics and music ruled the monitors (and not as just an aesthetic choice), computer users had to rely on disks to save their work, and further back to when said storage devices were big — 8 inches square at one point — and quite literally floppy.
The festival presents exhibits and demos of computers and other tech from the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and beyond, plus two full days of speakers on a variety of topics.
Friday’s speakers include Byron Stout looking ahead with “What can Vintage Computing tell us about the Next Generation of Engineers” and Dave Plummer sharing “Windows War Stories.”
Featured speakers on Saturday include Al Alcorn, talking about the early days of video game pioneers Atari, a webcasters’ roundtable and Bob Welland discussing “A life inside of Moore’s Law: tales of a journey at Commodore, Apple, Microsoft, and more.”
