[TriEmbed] Virtual Vintage Computer Festival

[Gregg Tracton]

My work study job @ Penn took place in the room where Penn left the Eniac
to rot.  If the camera scrolled 10’ to the right you would have seen my
workspace. Our group was assigned space there b/c Penn ran out of office
space.

When bored, I’d play with the knobs and generally examine the internals,
but since I’d not taken hardware classes yet, it didn’t mean anything to
me...  There were a few large (6’ x 6’ x 2’?) double-sided matrixes of
20x20 dials, on wheels, that I presume acted like a portable
keyboard/display. The cables on these were 2-3” in diameter, with a metal
meshed exterior, quite heavy.  At the top I recall seeing a row of
electronic tubes each containing all the individual digits 0-9 as discrete
plates; I guess only one digit would be lit at a time to represent the
value of a corresponding accumulator.

Mounted on the wall, near the 15’ tall ceiling, were two 12” wide bare
copper strips, about 1” thick, that were likely for power. It was said that
when the machine was in use, all lights in West Philly would dim.  The was
no A/C, so I presume that room got really hot in summer.

I wish that I had owned a camera at the time.

-gregg


On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 11:02 PM Rodney Radford via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> I watched the Virtual Vintage Computer Festival today and really enjoyed
> it and thought some on this list would enjoy some (all?) the sessions.
>
> You can see them on their Youtube channel:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/c/VintageComputerFederation501c3/videos
>
> Some of the highlights (to me) were:
>
> * two talks on the ENIAC - how it worked, real issues found, etc (I
> ordered the ENIAC technical reference manual reprint mentioned in the video)
> * recovering magnetic media from tape
> * retroshield for the Arduino Mega - he uses the Arduino to handle the
> RAM, ROM, IO, etc, but then plugs in a real CPU chip and he has adapters
> for several of the 4 and 8bit older CPUs
> * Sol 20 - but this one is special to me as I own a Sol 20  ;-)
> * MIT Whirlwind system
> * Apollo DSKY - making a real Apollo display work
> * Advanced 6502 programming (great description of the architecture and I
> ordered both of the books mentioned)
>
> But honestly, there was not a single presentation that I did not find
> fascinating. So if you have the spare time and want to learn about older
> computers, please take a look at the videos.
>
> I have attended a few other virtual conferences in the last few weeks, and
> plan to attend more as they become available (virtual vintage computer east
> will be in October)
>
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> --
Gregg Tracton: tired, retired & inappropriately unattired (PJ's)
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