Vintage Computer Festival West opens in one hour

Are you a nerd? (You're reading this blog, that qualifies.) Are you in the Bay Area? (Google already knows and it's across the street from where I'm typing this.) Then come by the Vintage Computer Festival West today and tomorrow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. There are lots of exhibits from old-school systems revived to new takes on old hardware, and since this blog's major interest is Power ISA, a surprising amount of Power hardware -- and not just mine. So far there's three PowerPC 604 based systems, an RS/6000 43p-150 with a 604ev at 375MHz running AIX 5L, another RS/6000 7025-F50 with a 604e at 332MHz also running AIX, and a rare bird indeed, a Daystar Millennium (Genesis MP 800+) with four, count 'em, four 604es with 200MHz running Mac OS. Naturally, they are all being put to serious business playing Quake, which IBM actually ported to AIX. And continuing in the Mac category are also a couple Pippins, which recently were cracked.

Oh, there's an IBM 603e, too: my IBM ThinkPad 860 laptop, also technically a member of the RS/6000 family, with Ultimedia, a camera, Quake, Abuse (also ported by IBM), along with some other RISC laptops and portables from my collection: a Tadpole-RDI UltraBook IIi running Solaris 10, an SAIC Galaxy 1100 (HP 9000/712) running NeXTSTEP 3.3, an RDI PrecisionBook 160 running HP-UX 11.00 and not running but there for very purple show a Tadpole Viper SPARC rebadged as the Sun Ultra-3 A60. You can play with them. Just don't go trying to get root. I won't like you very much and you wouldn't like me when I don't like you.

Not convinced? There's an Atari 800 running Fujiboink, some CoCos, Apple Newtons, a blinkenlights 6502 and someone even brought an Acorn Archimedes, not a frequent machine on this side of the Atlantic. There's even a operational Xerox Star! Everything's running and ready for play. We're opening in less than an hour and there's lots of cool stuff on consignment, too. I saw a Power Mac 9600, a couple NeXTSTATION Color systems and even some Commodore IEEE-488 dual disk drives. What are you waiting for, Christmas?