December 2025 - vcf-midatlantic

Early delivery from Santa's sleigh
by Brian L. Stuart 22 Dec '25

22 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

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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/>

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How the RESISTORS Put Computing into 1960s Counter-culture
by Christian Liendo 20 Dec '25

20 Dec '25

I'm happy that Claude is still remembered. How the RESISTORS Put Computing into 1960s Counter-culture Teenage nerds in New Jersey were hacking before the PC and the Internet https://spectrum.ieee.org/teenage-hackers

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VCF MidAtlantic Steering Committee - Voting Results
by Jeff Salzman 18 Dec '25

18 Dec '25

The results of the VCF MidAtlantic Steering Committee were presented at the VCF Festivus event on Dec 13, 2025. The elected members are: Thomas Gilinsky August Culbert The voting breakdown was: Joe Giliberti: 19 votes August Culbert: 31 votes Thomas Gilinsky: 30 votes Please note that eight votes were invalid because they were rendered using email addresses that were NOT registered to this mailing list. It had been stated in the rules that only the mail addresses registered to this email list were eligible to vote. Please check your mailing list registration to find out what email address you used to sign up. vcf-midatlantic Info Page <https://lists.vcfed.org/mailman/listinfo/vcf-midatlantic> The invalid votes in this case DID NOT affect the results of the vote. Sincerely, Jeff Salzman VCF MidAtlantic Steering Committee

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VCF 2026 t-shirts Which two t-shirts colors do you like?
by Jeffrey Brace 17 Dec '25

17 Dec '25

Pick two: https://catalog.companycasuals.com/p/3480_HtSapphire Jeff Brace VCF East Showrunner

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VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR VCF MONTREAL JAN 24-25, 2026
by Jeffrey Brace 17 Dec '25

17 Dec '25

The Vintage Computer Federation is having its first show in Canada! I'm co-showrunner and am supporting the new showrunner Nicolas Mailloux. *DATE*: Jan 24-25 *LOCATION*: Royal Military College of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu 15 Rue Jacques-Cartier N, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC J3B 8R8 Look here for Volunteer information: https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/vcf-montreal-volunteers-faq-aide-et-benevola… Look here to register as a volunteer: https://forms.gle/ZshZerNbSD5og9cw6 General info: https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/ 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/>

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] VCF East 2026 Exhibit Registration
by Bill Degnan 17 Dec '25

17 Dec '25

Is “TRS-80” a typo? PET to Amiga would make more sense in the context of the other machines in the paragraph. “… >From the *Altair 8800*, *Apple I*, and *Commodore PET* to the *TRS-80*, *IBM PC*, and *Macintosh*, this theme gives us room to showcase the innovation and competition that defined the era …..” On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 7:52 AM Sentrytv via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > Just curious, what is the “theme “for VCF East 2026? > > > Sent from: > My extremely complicated, hand held electronic device. > > > On Dec 17, 2025, at 12:02 AM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic < > vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > > > > Fill out this form to register an exhibit at VCF East: > > https://forms.gle/cghQMPuh366pkdfD8 > > > > 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/> > >

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OT: InfoAge Holiday Train Show 2025
by Jeffrey Brace 17 Dec '25

17 Dec '25

Don't miss the annual InfoAge Holiday Model Train Show 2025! Last two days are this coming weekend Dec. 20 & 21. Here is a video preview: https://www.infoage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Holiday_Train_Show_2025_… 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/>

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Apology
by Joseph Giliberti 17 Dec '25

17 Dec '25

Everyone, I just wanted to say I am sorry for my comments and how I acted on Sunday. I was running on little sleep after being at IA setting up for Festivus from 0400 on Saturday. I was under the impression that Sunday would be an easy going continuation of the and was kinda blindsided to find out that everyone had gone home and we had to clean up everything ourselves. It won't happen again. Regards, Joe Giliberti

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] VCF East 2026 Exhibit Registration
by David Gesswein 17 Dec '25

17 Dec '25

https://vcfed.org/2025/05/09/vcf-east-2026-mark-your-calendars/ On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 07:12:18AM -0500, Sentrytv via vcf-midatlantic wrote: > Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:12:18 -0500 > From: Sentrytv <sentrytv(a)yahoo.com> > To: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> > Cc: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org>, Jeffrey Brace > <jeffrey(a)vcfed.org> > Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] VCF East 2026 Exhibit Registration > X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (22H124) > > Just curious, what is the “theme “for VCF East 2026? > > > Sent from: > My extremely complicated, hand held electronic device. > > > On Dec 17, 2025, at 12:02 AM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > > > > Fill out this form to register an exhibit at VCF East: > > https://forms.gle/cghQMPuh366pkdfD8 > > > > 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/>

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