The Vintage Computer Festival - a staple of US and German techno-culture for the past ten years - is finally coming to the UK thanks to the National Museum of Computing.
If you're of the old-school of computing, the guys at the National Museum of Computing have just the thing for you: the first official Vintage Computer Festival in Britain.
As reported over on
TechRadar, the festival - scheduled for the weekend of the 19th of June at the Museum's home in Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes - is a continuation of the regular tradition started a decade ago in Silicon Valley and marks the first time the festival has hit UK shores.
The event is set to feature demonstrations of vintage computing hardware - both culled from the Museum's own impressive collection and brought along by private exhibitors - a series of lectures on British contributions to computing throughout the years, stands with yesteryear's top-notch tradeshow traditionalists including Amiga, Atari, and Sir Clive's Sincliar, along with demonstrations of DEC's PDP11 mainframe, hands-on gaming and "
vintage challenge" events, and even a flea market for people looking to expand or shrink their own individual collections.
The Museum has also promised performances by chip tune artist
Pixelh8, aka Matthew Aplegate, who will be using original Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, and even Nintendo GameBoy hardware for his particular brand of techno. Pixelh8 is to be joined by "
one of the pioneers of British synthpop," although the Museum is keeping tight-lipped on exactly who that might be.
Museum trustee - and event coordinator - Kevin Murrell expects that the event will "
exceed one thousand visitors" over its two days, "
draw[ing] visitors from overseas as well as from across Britain." Murrell describes the early response to the as-yet minimally publicised festival as "
already remarkable," and is hoping to gain interest from additional sponsors.
The Museum has an
official page regarding the event, with more information planned for release closer to the date.
Will you be planning on attending the event, or are you very much about the here-and-now when it comes to computing? Do you have any memories about particular British computers of yore - something from Acorn, perhaps, or rivals Sinclair or Amstrad? Share your thoughts over in
the forums.
14 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyMy first computer was a Dragon32, then an Amstrad CPC6128, then Amiga500, then PC's took over lol...
Tempest is still a very good game and plays on just about anything...
I have fond memories of loading Harrier Attack on it's 'integrated' tape deck. It's about the only game I could ever get my dad to play due to it's ultra simple control.
Ah, those were the days!
You kids now and your "hard disks" don't know you're born! lmao xD
2Mb of ram is rediculous I mean what would you ever need that amount for.
Emulators just don't give the same feel.
The games only took KB of space and that was huge!
2Mb? We had the A500 with the 512kb expansion, it was years before I could afford a computer with 2Mb of RAM. (eventually had an A1200 with an extra 8Mb for a grand total of 10 whole megabytes, and a faster CPU).
The event is this weekend (Sat & Sun). Worth popping along for a bit of nostalgia.