[GreenKeys] Model 33 at VCF East

[Hugh Pyle]

Hi greenkeys,

I'd promised Wayne some notes about VCF East, the Vintage Computer
Federation event held a couple weeks ago in Wall NJ.  Wayne fixed up (or
rather, reconstructed) my 33 last year.  I've never been to VCF before, but
got word of plans for "Unix Town" with dozens of (mostly 80s-90s) Unix
machines, and figured that it would be neat to connect a mechanical
terminal to some of them.

I loaded the Teletype into the back of my car and drove down from
Massachusetts on Friday.  I hadn't managed to fix shipping-bolts, so just
drove cautiously, trying to avoid the pot-holes.  It was just early evening
when I arrived, so there was time to unload, set the unit on its pedestal,
and get things roughly in place.

Unix Town was already well installed by then.  Andy Diller had a SGI box
running IRIX, an Apple Quadra running A/UX, a VT102 and some other stuff.
Ethan Dicks set up a couple NEXT machines, a Dec Pro, and a Sun 3/60.
Jason had two Lisas.  Jameel showed his RS/6000.  There were an AT&T 3b2,
an Atari running SysV, and tons more Silicon Graphics gear including a
Tezra and a huge Onyx server.  (This was just one side of one room.  There
was a wall of Amiga exhibits, and *so* much more in the other exhibit room,
and also the InfoAge museum which has a Univac and a Bendix and a Cray and
goodness knows what else).

Some of the Unix boxes were on Ethernet, and Andy also brought a serial
term server.  But to be honest, I was busy just getting some basic demos
worked out using things I new could work, and didn't have nearly enough
time to work out a "connect to everything" plan.

Saturday morning... and the first event was a "fireside chat" with Brian
Kernighan and Ken Thompson on stage, talking about early Unix history.
Quite wonderful.  There's a video online, it's well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o

Then back to the exhibit floor.  The day was a blur - everyone wanted to
hear about and use the tty.  Middle-aged and older folks who had used them
in the past.  Families and kids who were fascinated by the noise, the
smelly punched tape, the machinery.  It was non-stop.

I'd prepared a few interactive demo things, based on a RaspberryPi-style
server, that included
- printing emoji with ASCII art ("fish", "apple"...)
- banner text
- patterns on papertape: text, hearts, skulls, space invaders
- Mandelbrot-set fractals
- Zork (although that didn't work due to some software glitches)
- connection to the CDC6500 at Living Computer Museum, and BASIC.
Then locally we managed to connect (telnet, not serial...) to several of
the Unix boxes in the room.  One of my favorite experiences of the whole
show was the simplest multi-user interaction:  logged in to IRIX with both
the VT102 and the Teletype, using "write" as a chat program, and kids just
wide-eyed at the way their messages fly back and forth.

Sunday - same all over again.  Then the long and wet drive home.  I had so
much fun.

My random photos:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/QNaxm8eA2rtYXKxp7

A nice writeup by attendee Sher Minn
http://piratefsh.github.io/2019/05/12/vintage-computer-fest-east.html


- Hugh
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