Exhibition

The exhibition is the central part of the VCFe. A collection of some of these wonderful and secret devices, that changed the world during the last 20 years - and carved our memories.

Who can't feel again the intrigue and miracle that took our immagination hostage, spellbound to stay up all night in front of a CRT, highjacked into a world nobody else could see, lightyears away, sophisticated without any connection to known reality and incredible simple and logic at the same time.

Planned Exhibitions:

Real Life Incarnations of Terminal Emulations

Standard terminals of the 70's and 80's. See all the termcap entries as real hardware.
By Gaby Chaudry

BSD History

BSD Unix in various Flavours on different Hardware.
By Jochen Kunz

Apollo DomainOS

DomainOS was an early network operating system. Workstations could share their resources in the network transparently. Unix was added on-top of the native Aegis environment, both in System V and BSD flavours.

We will demonstrate a three-maschine DomainOS system interconnected with a proprietary Apollo token ring network (ATR). One of the machines is configured as DTP workstation with the Interleaf publishing system. Interleaf was the DTP environment of choice at that time, but it's user interface is pretty unintuitive compared to today's products.

More Info: DomainOS Archive

Intergraph Clipper

Intergraph started in the eighties as manufacturer of graphics systems based on DEC VAX CPU's. The limited number crunching abilities of this platform led Intergraph to the development of an own RISC CPU, Clipper, which was manufactured by Fairchild. For the time, the Clipper had excessive performance but it's success was limited as it hit the market too late.

We'll show a Intergraph 2430 workstation running CLIX 3.2, a Unix System V Release 2 derivative. The system uses the MGR windowing environment which is, compared to MIT's X Windows System, lean and fast. It also looks pretty different than most X-based environments.

More Info: Intergraph

Symbolics LISP machine

Symbolics was a producer of a family of systems with LISP as the native language environment. Their machines had proprietary CPUs which executed a machine code which was tightly coupled to LISP, and many basic LISP operations mapped directly to machine operations on this architecture. These machines were, for their time, very advanced and used in so-called "artifical intelligence" projects. From today's perspective, the artificial intelligence of that time was more what we know as object oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. We hope to be able to demonstrate a Symbolics 3640 system running Genera with 4 graphical terminals, all sporting the Super, Hyper, Meta, Alt, Shift and Control modifier keys on their keyboards.

More Info: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

Mixed Version & Mixed Architecture VMScluster

A cluster containing the two VMS platforms (VAX and Alpha) running different Versions of VMS (new and old ones together in one cluster). Many of the magnificent features of VMS will be demonstrated such as booting completely from a remote bootserver, transparent disks in a cluster, load balancing and monitoring. See Machines from the Alpha and VAX Series
By VAXbusters International

Industrial Controll System I14

A Process Controll System bases on a DEC PDP 8E, as used by Volkswagen for the Jetta Lines.
By Gerd Schuenemann

"Half-a-Vax" - The Symmetric 375

a BSD 4.2 Unix-Box. The developer (Bill Jollitz) wanted to own "half a VAX 11/750", hence the name. NSC 3201o CPU 10 MHz, 2 MB RAM. Jollitz did later on a BSD port for the Intel 386, the foundation of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD etc.
By Julian Stacy

Training and Experimental Systeme

This exibition shows some teaching and experimentation systems realized as small systems around different processors (Z80/U880, SC/MP, ...). Although these systems have usually only very few resources we will demonstrate some interesting applications.
By Frank Dachselt and Thomas Falk

Analogue Computing

Before the advent of the digital computer the engineers were using analogue computers for solving differential equations. We will present one of these beasts and solve some interesting differential equations with it.
By Thomas Falk and Hendrik Falk

Amiga Story(s)

From an illfated Game Console to the Multi Media Work Station A4000.
By Thorsten Kuphaldt

Sinix

Eventualy the most successfull Unix Computers in Europe.
Von Michael Engel

trash

remainings of modern society
(Dunpster Findings)
By Herbert Krammer, Robert Sterff and Bernd Sedlmair

PKS

Programmierbare Kernspeicher Steuerung
A small process controll computer in core memory technology.
By Reinhard Radtke

Archiving the Content of 'Classic' Media

A life demonstration of how to preserve the content of outdated classic computer media, or how to migrate your old disks and tapes into the modern world of PCs and emulation. By Markus Brenner

Amstrad / Schneider Mikrocomputer

A collection of Amstrad micros (In Germany sold under the Schneider brand until 1987)
By Stephan Sommer

The first PET

No, the VCF will not change into a dog show, this is rather a display of the possibly oldest still existing Commodore PET computer - a 4 K unit serial number 10004. See original Dokumentation and letters from "The Commodore".

Where's your Display ?

• Do you own historic gear ?
• Maybe even a collection you want to display ?
• Or does a friend of your's ?

Just click here and tell us !