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| Saturday October 26, 2002 |
|  | | The pace of the digital revolution has a dark side. Vintage computers become rarer and harder to maintain every day. It is a sad fact that many folks will never get the chance to see a vintage computer, let alone interact with one. Luckily, the same digital technology allows us to re-create a lot of that experience exactly, through emulation.
With some programming background, access to the right information, and a lot of spare time, emulating old computers has never been easier. This presentation will be an introduction to emulation and a "how-to" guide for creating emulators including resource gathering, nostalgia, development choices, technical/legal issues and the pitfalls that can arise. |
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|  | | Bruce will discuss the major lineages and fascinating story behind the birth of the graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop metaphor, paradigms we are all very much locked into today. Starting with the work of Douglas Engelbart's team at SRI he will take you on a journey through the innovative "bean bag chair" days at Xerox PARC through to the Alto and Star 8010 and their successors, the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, Windows 1.0 and up.
Also to be discussed are some odd and some compelling GUI environments that cropped up along the way including the PERQ/Intran, VisiOn, GeoWorks, Amiga, NeXT, Magic Cap, early Unix shells, and the Elixir Desktop, a system written by Bruce and a team in the 80s and marketed by Xerox.
Bruce will finish by suggesting that all of this GUI stuff is old hat and the new frontiers in interactivity lie elsewhere, in such places as avatar cyberspace and massive multiplayer gaming worlds.
Bruce is curator of the DigiBarn Computer Museum and a prime mover in the Personal Computing Stories project at the museum. For more information please see www.damer.com and www.digibarn.com. |
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|  | | | Sellam Ismail, founder of the Vintage Computer Festival, will give a summary of events that led up to VCF 5.0 and will generally ramble about computer history and computer collecting. |
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|  | | Zbigniew will discuss the pioneering work on personal microcomputers conducted at the Canadian company Micro Computer Machines (MCM) in the early 1970s and, in particular, the making of the MCM/70 microcomputer.
The MCM/70, announced by MCM in early 1973, was a small desk-top personal microcomputer designed to provide the APL programming language environment for business, scientific, and educational use. MCM was among the first companies to fully recognize, articulate, and act upon the immense potential of microprocessor technology for the development of a new generation of cost effective computing systems. |
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| | Sunday October 27, 2002 |
|  | | | Hans will give a talk on how to use XML to archive data from old program disks, cassette tapes, etc. |
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|  | | From an opportune dumpster dive in the early 1990s, James turned a scrounging habit into a multi-million dollar non-profit recycling venture that now eclipses any other operation west of the Mississippi.
Hear Mr. Burgett tell the story of how he created the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, and how the ACCRC has placed free computers on every continent on the planet (including Antarctica!) |
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|  | | | John Toole is the Executive Director of the Computer History Museum. John will be speaking about past accomplishments of the Museum and also discuss where they're headed in the next year. |
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|  | | Museums as cultural institutions, shrines, and places to learn have diverse constituencies: students, intellectual property specialists, historians, retired engineers and programmers, Hollywood, and news organizations, to name just a few. Balancing the needs of these audiences with the preservation mission of a museum is an ongoing challenge. The Computer History Museum, as home to one of the largest single collections of electronic computing artifacts in the world, uses various strategies to interact with each of these communities. This talk will briefly discuss these approaches and how the Museum attempts to strike a balance between them. It will then present a case study: the restoration to working order of an IBM 1620 computer by a team of Museum volunteers.
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|  | | | Jeri will discuss her Commodore One creation: an enhanced adaptation of the Commodore 64--the most sold of any computer model according to the Guiness book of World Records. While retaining almost all of the original's capabilities, the Commodore One adds modern features and capabilities and fills a sorely needed gap in the hobbyist computer market. |
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