December 2025 - vcf-midatlantic

Merry Christmas Everyone
by Christian Liendo 25 Dec '25

25 Dec '25

I wasn't able to be there and I hope to be at VCFE. So I couldn't say be before. I hope you guys have a great day. It will be nice to see you all again.

4 3

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Early delivery from Santa's sleigh
by Bill Degnan 23 Dec '25

23 Dec '25

Thanks. I added a link to the ENAIC drawings here: https://vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=147 This is my list of vintage computing-related links. On Sun, Dec 21, 2025 at 8:15 PM Brian L. Stuart via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > > So Santa had his sleigh out for some test drives tonight. For > ballast (the real gifts won't be loaded until Wed night), he used > a big stack of engineering drawings from the 1940s. Fortunately > for us, his "spirited" driving included one turn that was too > tight and out flew the drawings, where they landed on my lap. For > anyone who's as eager as I am to geek out over 1940s computer > design, I share them with you here: > > http://cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/drawings/ > > There are over 900 drawings in the set. Most of these images come > from scans of microfilm taken of the patent trial exhibits. There > are also about 100 copies that the Smithsonian had imaged and put > up on their web site. I've processed them all to approximate > something like we remember from our technical drawing classes in > college (well those of us old enough to have taken them). The > quality varies widely, but a large subset are readable down to > the measurements for the panels and the component values in the > circuits. > > If you've read Kathy Kleiman's excellent book (Proving Ground) > about the original ENIAC programmers, you may have found yourself > wondering what the block diagrams from which they figured out how > to program the machine looked like. Well, those are among the > drawings here. So feel free to try your hand at figuing out how > to program it from them. > > One subset of the drawings is conspicuous by its absence, the > PX-15 series. From what I can tell, those were drawings of a > delay line memory unit that was never built. Those drawings were > not part of the trial exhibits and were not microfilmed. However, > some physical copies do exist, and I am hoping to get back into > the archives to scan them at some point in the future. > > Beyond that, there are a number of drawing numbers that are > skipped, and I suspect that these are drawings that do (or did) > exist, but were not microfilmed for whatever reason. So if anyone > has or comes across any drawings that are not on this list, or > better copies of those that are, feel free to send scans my way. > > For anyone wanting to grab copies of the full set, it should be > pretty easy to extract a file name list from the index.html file. > I'll leave the sed command for extracting the list as an exercise > for the reader. > > For printing, all of them are sized in the PDF files for 8.5x11 > or 11x17 paper. Be warned, printing all of them without duplexing > and folding the 11x17s to fit into a normal binder, ends up > filling 2 4-inch binders. > > By the way, if anyone has access to the adapter shown in drawing > PX-4-119, I think there's an error in the drawing and I'd like to > check to see if either there really is or if I'm missing > something. > > Thanks and have fun, > BLS >

2 1

Call for speakers - VCF East 2026
by Jeffrey Brace 22 Dec '25

22 Dec '25

Register to give a talk here: https://forms.gle/6BW1tayfcD5Wqfx96 Jeff Brace VCF East Showrunner

1 0

OT: Return to the Moon: Artemis Update by Frank O'Brien
by Jeffrey Brace 22 Dec '25

22 Dec '25

I interviewed Frank O'Brien back in October about the Artemis mission to the moon: https://youtu.be/2NSAfLyIjVU Enjoy! Jeff Brace

1 0

VCF East 2026 Hotel Block(s)
by Jeffrey Brace 22 Dec '25

22 Dec '25

The first block is ready for Residence Inn: https://vcfed.org/vcf-east-hotel-blocks/ The second block is pending. We are finding a third one as well. Take care! Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President VCF East Showrunner VCF Fundraising Manager VCF Evangelist Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/>

1 1

MARCH Workshop Dates for 2026
by Jeff Salzman 22 Dec '25

22 Dec '25

The MARCH Workshop event dates are listed below. You can get more details about the rules, location, and other pertinent information at the following link: https://vcfed.org/repair-workshops-at-infoage/ Jan 10 – 11, 2026 Feb 7 – 8 , 2026 Mar 21 – 22 , 2026 No Workshop in April due to VCF-East May 2 – 3 , 2026 June 13 – 14, 2026 (may coincide with the VCF Swapmeet) July 11 – 12 , 2026 Aug 8 – 9 , 2026 Sept 19 – 20 , 2026 Oct 17 – 18, 2026 (may coincide with the VCF Swapmeet) Nov 14 - 15 , 2026 No Workshop in December due to VCF Festivus Thanks, Jeff Salzman MARCH Workshop Manager VCF Steering Committee

1 0

OT: Anyone working/playing with AI professionally?
by Neil Cherry 22 Dec '25

22 Dec '25

I've also posted this to the CDL mail list. Prereq: I'm not so much interested in failures, I've seen a lot. I'm interested in successes. I've been playing with AI to help me program (I haven't quite gotten to using things like LM Notebook). I've used it to quickly write data parsing scripts for testing (I do QA on software defined networks). For the quick and dirty script it usually gets me about 95% there, quickly. I've attempted to use AI to fix & improve a data tool (in browser JS). That went really badly as it would loose huge chunks of code and. When I needed to write a complex test suite (Robot Framework/Python) things got even worse as corporate security issues got in the way and the AI didn't seem to understand what was needed to fix them. This was just before my end of year vacation so I haven't been able to find the correct corp. chat to get help and none of my coworkers seem to understand (weird). Now, on to my hobby use. This gets even worse. I normally give the AI a set of requirements, something normal to anyone who does software engineering professional. I even cover the 'Business As Usual' parts that every SE fails to provide. So for my home project of C code to read, write, create, and modify Flex OS Gotek images under Linux, I gave it a nice set of requirements as assumed that the AI would not find the information on the internet. That went very badly as it had a lot of trouble with off by one errors. I've tried Python, C and 68000 asm and all come up quite short when I start testing. Has anyone created real applications with AI? I see tons of Youtube videos that claim they have. So either I'm the problem or the AI is not up to the marketing hype. And for anyone interested, I can share the requirements of my home project. I can't share my work related projects. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies KD2ZRQ

9 20

VCF Museum and InfoAge Closed Dec. 24, 31
by Jeffrey Brace 22 Dec '25

22 Dec '25

The VCF Museum and InfoAge Museums will be closed Wednesday Dec. 24 and Dec. 31. Take care! Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President VCF East Showrunner VCF Fundraising Manager VCF Evangelist Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campai…> Virus-free.www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campai…> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>

1 0

Early delivery from Santa's sleigh
by Brian L. Stuart 21 Dec '25

21 Dec '25

So Santa had his sleigh out for some test drives tonight. For ballast (the real gifts won't be loaded until Wed night), he used a big stack of engineering drawings from the 1940s. Fortunately for us, his "spirited" driving included one turn that was too tight and out flew the drawings, where they landed on my lap. For anyone who's as eager as I am to geek out over 1940s computer design, I share them with you here: http://cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/drawings/ There are over 900 drawings in the set. Most of these images come from scans of microfilm taken of the patent trial exhibits. There are also about 100 copies that the Smithsonian had imaged and put up on their web site. I've processed them all to approximate something like we remember from our technical drawing classes in college (well those of us old enough to have taken them). The quality varies widely, but a large subset are readable down to the measurements for the panels and the component values in the circuits. If you've read Kathy Kleiman's excellent book (Proving Ground) about the original ENIAC programmers, you may have found yourself wondering what the block diagrams from which they figured out how to program the machine looked like. Well, those are among the drawings here. So feel free to try your hand at figuing out how to program it from them. One subset of the drawings is conspicuous by its absence, the PX-15 series. From what I can tell, those were drawings of a delay line memory unit that was never built. Those drawings were not part of the trial exhibits and were not microfilmed. However, some physical copies do exist, and I am hoping to get back into the archives to scan them at some point in the future. Beyond that, there are a number of drawing numbers that are skipped, and I suspect that these are drawings that do (or did) exist, but were not microfilmed for whatever reason. So if anyone has or comes across any drawings that are not on this list, or better copies of those that are, feel free to send scans my way. For anyone wanting to grab copies of the full set, it should be pretty easy to extract a file name list from the index.html file. I'll leave the sed command for extracting the list as an exercise for the reader. For printing, all of them are sized in the PDF files for 8.5x11 or 11x17 paper. Be warned, printing all of them without duplexing and folding the 11x17s to fit into a normal binder, ends up filling 2 4-inch binders. By the way, if anyone has access to the adapter shown in drawing PX-4-119, I think there's an error in the drawing and I'd like to check to see if either there really is or if I'm missing something. Thanks and have fun, BLS

1 0

VCF 2.0 from 1998
by Jeffrey Brace 20 Dec '25

20 Dec '25

Someone posted a video from VCF 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhwSmAYnDTU Enjoy! Jeff Brace VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President VCF East Showrunner VCF Fundraising Manager VCF Evangelist Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/>

3 2