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| Saturday November 5, 2005 |
|  | | | Debut Film Screening: The Future of Pinball | | In 1998 pinball was dying, thanks to a saturated market and shrinking player base. Williams, the world's largest pinball manufacturer, was considering abandoning the game in favor of the more lucrative video slot machine business. The Future of Pinball is a 60-minute documentary that tells the story of "Pinball 2000", a clever attempt at resuscitating pinball that failed just at the moment a lot of people thought it might succeed. A "Soul of a New Machine" for the pinball world, The Future of Pinball is a compendium of interviews with legends of the pinball industry, photos, and films of the best games the industry has produced. Though nominally about pinball, the film is many things: a story of innovation, a business case study, a nostalgia trip, a story about personality and passion, of unlikely teamwork and cooperation in a workplace traditionally driven by ego. It's a story of a bold success dizzyingly followed by a stunning failure.
Greg Maletic, creawill be presenting a rough-cut of "The Future of Pinball", followed by a Q&A/feedback session. |
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|  | | | International Obfuscated C Code Contest Presentation | | The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code, held annually since 1984 (with the exception of 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2003).
Landon Curt Noll, one of the founders of the contest, will announce the winners of the 2005 contest and will demonstrate the winning entries. Knowledge of the C language is not required to attend nor to appreciate the functionality of the winning entries. |
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|  | | | VCF Shenanigans | | | This year's edition of the VCF Shenanigans will feature a show 'n tell by Sellam of interesting items he's picked up in the past few years, along with stories and tales from the VCF research department. |
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|  Bruce Damer (Moderator) Len Shustek Steve Wozniak (Woz) Lee Felsenstein Michael Holley Bob Lash Allen Baum | | 01:00 PM | Homebrew Computer Club Retrospective |
| | Homebrew Computer Club 30th Anniversary Retrospective | | On March 5, 1975, a very special meeting took place at Gordon French's garage in the then freshly named "Silicon Valley". This was the first gathering of the "Homebrew Computer Club" (also called the Amateur Computer User's Group). Now, this was no ordinary amateur group of folks but the very acorn of the great tree of the personal computing revolution to come. The hand-soldered microcomputer grew up to become the personal computer through the guiding hands of Homebrew Computer Club members and the many other clubs and enterprises that popped up like mushrooms in the late 1970s.
What a time and what a Club it was, so we are coming together on November 5th, 2005, to cut a cake, toggle in a boot loader or two and hear from some of the members of the group that compiled for us the nerd world in which we are all seemingly permanently uploaded.
Bruce Damer, producer of the Homebrew Retrospective and curator of the Digibarn Computer Museum in the Santa Cruz mountains, will be the moderator of this panel discussion involving original Homebrew Computer Club members.
Bruce has created a Homebrew Computer Club 30th Anniversary Special Online Exhibit. Contributions and recollections from former Homebrew Computer Club members are welcomed and appreciated.
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| | Sunday November 6, 2005 |
|  | | | A History of the Smart Card | | | Smart Card inventor Jerry Svigals will tell the story of how this technology came about and where it's heading. |
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|  | | | Yack 'N Hack: Computers Talk Back | | Deborah will be talking about the history of speech synthesis and demonstrating a variety of vintage talking devices. Come listen to some of the earliest attempts to synthesize human speech. See what's inside an early speech synthesizer and learn how people with disabilities used computers since the 1970s. You'll see a thirty-year-old device that predated optical character recognition but enabled the blind to read print, DEC's talking terminal, the world's first battery-operated PDA which had a Braille screen, and the first talking calculator ever sold!
Deborah will also preside over a companion exhibit in the exhibit hall. |
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|  | | | A Personal Re-telling of Personal Computer Retailing | | Dave Freeman, founder of Advanced Computer Products, one of the oldest and longest running retail computer establishments in the world, will be discussing the computer collection that he began in the late 1970s, which is now one of the largest in the world.
Dave will discuss his history of selling PC's such as the MITS Altair 8800, Processor Technology SOL-20, IMSAI 8080, Osborne 1, and others from CompuPro, TEI, Scelbi, and Eagle. He will also discuss his philosophy on collecting computers. |
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|  | | | Nerd Trivia Challenge! | | Are you up to the Nerd Trivia Challenge? Come to VCF 8.0 and find out. Take the preliminary quiz on Saturday, November 5, for a chance to compete against two other nerds in a contest to determine who harbors the greatest amount of useless computer history esoterica.
The Nerd Trivia Challenge is being hosted by Evan Koblentz, Editor of the Computer Collector Newsletter. |
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|  Jason Scott (Moderator) Christian Wirth Joe Russack Ernie Longmire | | 01:00 PM | BBS History Panel |
| | In The Beginning: A BBS History Discussion | | Jason Scott, director and producer of the BBS Documentary (screened in beta form at last year's VCF) will host a panel featuring some of the interviewees from his mini-series. The group will discuss the history of the BBS, the experience of interviewing on camera about the online past (from both sides of the camera) and relate stories from this bygone communications era.
Episodes from BBS Documentary will also be screened throughout the VCF,
now in final edited form and on DVD thanks in no small part to feedback from VCF attendees last year. Watch the episodes on Saturday and line up your questions for Sunday.
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