Thank you for putting all of them together, it's a good idea. It's funny that you mention this I was going though old USB drives and found images from MARCH's Spring 2009 party, back when there were Spring Parties. https://photos.app.goo.gl/kbpk55UVu17MMvHr9 On Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 1:44 AM Alexander Pierson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Howdy,
I don't know about you, but I find myself looking at photos of past VCFs for a number of reasons, and not just photos I took, or from events I attended. It affords us an opportunity to see community members, speakers, exhibitors, etc. who might no longer be with us. I can think of a few names off the top of my head who have passed on, yet remain immortalized in event photo sets. We can see how things have changed within the hobby, but also machines that sometimes haven't come back on display in a long time. Personally, I like finding photos of myself for posterity (and maybe a little prosperity), or what my exhibit looked like. People work hard putting those exhibits together, and finding out that someone else cared enough to take a few photos of it can mean the world to the exhibitor. I think it's important that we keep record of vintage computer festivals just as much as we keep records of the computers we celebrate. Plus, many of these events have gotten so big that if you miss something, the only way to see everything is in retrospect through the lens of someone else.
The problem I've encountered is that finding these galleries has been difficult at times, especially the farther back you go. They're scattered across the web, and things like link rot, domains going away, image hosting shifting like sand -- these all contribute to the history getting harder to find. You've also got walled gardens to contend with, and not everyone having solid free image hosting options available to them.
So I made a directory of all the links I could find from every VCF I could find:
https://www.commodorez.com/vcfarcgal.html
East, West, Midwest, Southwest, Southeast, Pacific Northwest, SoCal, UK, Europe, Italia, Zurich, Lite, and whatever else is out there that I'm forgetting, I want links to all of it. I've been asking folks I know, as well as pulling from links provided by the VCFed and VCFMW to get it all centralized and easier to traverse. Is this a perfect solution to the problem? Certainly not; it's far from archival. But hopefully it's a step in the right direction. While I'm not looking to host content for others, I am interested in making it easier to find this stuff in the future.
Here's where you come in: Do you have a link to a public VCF photo gallery that's not on my list but should be? Maybe an article about the show? A video? Send that link my way! Though I do ask that you check first to see if it's already on there...
Thanks!
-Alexander 'Z' Pierson