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Vintage Computer Festival #22

2022-12-02 00:44:50
Three years after our last visit, my girlfriend and I went to Zurich again for the Vintage Computer Festival (vintagecomputerfestival.ch). Not only have we met some of our friends and fellows, but also seen a lot of machines from the past, a few of which we had not even heard of before. And we attended a talk on the Multics operating system which we had known to have had a lot of influence on Unix and other systems later, discovering that its sources had been released eventually and there are still lots of people interested in it (multicians.org).

One highlight for me was holding an actual Depraz computer mouse in my very own hand, which I had only gotten to know a year ago thanks to Ron Minnich passing one to John Floren (https://jfloren.net/b/2021/8/6/1) that had been used at Bell Labs - yes, THE Bell Labs. We talked to many of the exhibitors, and one of them had brought a БК-0010 Soviet home computer from the eighties (http://www.mailcom.com/bk0010/index_en.shtml), a PDP-11 compatible for which he had a floppy with a very minimal Unix port, bkunix. I could successfully run the `cal` command on it to show the current year's calendar, and that felt amazing. :)