VCF Midwest 2026

Julie I attended yet another great VCFMW this year. We had a good time visiting our favorite YouTubers and seeing some great gear. Julie didn’t do any soldering this year, but she did help me navigate the exhibit hall and keep an eye on the Free Pile. We met up with friends and a good time was had by all.

A New to Me Macintosh SE/30 #

The SE/30 was my big find of the Fest. I had been looking for a 68k series Mac, ideally an SE/30. I wanted one when they first came out, but they can be hard to find for a reasonable price in good condition. Before the show, I saw on the online trading board that Eric of Eric’s Edge was selling one, so I tracked him down right away and made the deal! This one is in great condition and upgraded with a BlueSCSI. I’m looking forward to tinkering with it and getting it online for next Marchintosh.

VT100 Deep Dive #

I picked up a VT100 a few weeks before VCF, but I really learned about it at the VT100 Deep Dive talk. It’s my new baby.

The Deep Dive talk went into how the VT100 was never a dumb terminal. It is really a tightly engineered computer with its own CPU, firmware, video system, keyboard protocol, expansion bus, and a bag of tricks. We walked through the hardware, firmware, video timing, NVRAM setup, smooth scrolling, double-width and double-height characters, and escape sequences that made the VT100 feel almost magical in 1978. He tied those choices back to things home-computer folks already know: memory maps, ROM routines, raster timing, character cells. I wanted one of these iconic DEC terminals because they were the template for decades of text-mode computing. The speaker was Richard Thomson, a vintage computing researcher who works on GPU raytracing at NVIDIA and, in his spare time, preserves display technology through the Computer Graphics Museum and the Terminals Wiki.

The Free Pile #

I was happy to reacquire these vintage titles from the famous Free Pile. I had copies of these “back in the day,” but unwisely recycled them at some point. Remember when one book could cover the “whole internet”?