07/23/2025
Now time for our feature presentation!!!!!!!! Say hello to VCF SW 2025! Most of these people showcase their work online, some even have HTTP-compatible sites also... yet another great showcase of how the internet ain't dead on this edition of LIVELY INTERNET THEORY!
Since my website is geared towards older hardware too, see the plethora of options for watching below. Click here to watch on Youtube. (. . . . . coming in a bit.)
More options:
VCF SW 2025 was an amazing weekend! Easily the most fun I've had in a while! There were a ton of great people and projects there. It's always fantastic to walk around these shows and especially take the time to ask people about their stories with the software and hardware they have. You'll hear all sorts of fun tales. Of course, I have to highlight some of the projects in the video and others that I enjoyed:
Protoweb had a jovial little table at the show - they had computers from a few different eras, all HTTPS-incapable, connecting to their service, viewing various websites. I met its creator unknowingly and I said "oh man, I love this project." He said, "thanks!" And I said, "wait, YOU made this???" Hahaha.
In the beginning of my VCF video above, I start out with footage of this one guy showing off a computer from the 70s that only used vector graphics. It definitely looked cooler in person - not just compared to the low quality of my video, but also because any recording didn't capture the way the gun drawing the image lit up differently from the rest of the image. The guy was something else - he even made his own hardware to translate a flash storage device to the old hardware, meaning that the machine now had virtually unlimited storage. He made replicas of Battlestar Galactica graphics/programs. It was quite the sight.
The lovely folks at Genericable (HTTP compatible site!) had a great showing of resurrected Weather Channel units of various sorts, see my video for some of that. If you asked some of them, they talked about some of the work it took to reverse engineer the systems on these units to get them showing live weather data, it was nice to hear. I also appreciate that there are as many of them as there are - it sounds like an unbelievably niche subject to work to preserve, so we're glad that they do what they do.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are nostalgic for the old Weather Channel in the same way that I am. It was different from anything else on cable TV - the only other channels that played the same kind of stuff 24/7 were just home shopping networks. Flipping over to the Weather Channel to see it solemnly churning through the same 5 screens hour after hour in the middle of the night feels surreal to look back on. And then seeing the Weather Channel flip through different displays in those travel stations between states in the USA, another sign of its fidelity, its ubiquity... it's a strange thing to feel nostalgic for I feel like, but it's always the little things, ain't it?
Now this one was absolutely wild. SneakyNet set up all sorts of networking stuff throughout the event, including phone lines. There were a few phones set up around the event grounds that people could use for data and even some different phone lines they set up. A pamphlet had some extensions to call, some of which just did things like play Rick Astley or Plastic Love of all things lol. There was even an entire game to play on the phone, trying to find some codes by dialing different parties on a call... wacky.
This guy had some really cool Apple stuff, as seen in the video; you can kinda make out the name tag in some frames, given the low quality of my video... hehe
These peeps Alex and Will flippin' recompiled the entire Apple Lisa system and installed it on an actual Lisa again. Apparently Apple released the source code for the Apple Lisa for some??? reason??? but also didn't release any tools to DO anything with it when they released it??? They took around a year to do something with that code and recorded much of it and gave this talk about the process. I got to see this talk in person, fantastic stuff, the room was completely paaacked, they had to open an overflow room of people to watch a streamed version of their talk o_o
Wave Design had a nice collection of SGI stuff, running live demos of software from the time. Check out his Youtube channel linked there. Slightly unrelated, but for some reason there was also an entire room of odd computers along these lines, like Sun and NeXT systems.
Maaaan there were so many cool things at this show. PC-98 machines, hacked up Apple II computers, ancient networking stuff resurrected, crazy deals on old hardware, and also the largest consumer CRT TV running modded Smash Bros. Melee lmao (yes, the shank mods guy brought it, they rented a truck just to move it hahaha)
I definitely recommend going to one of the VCF shows when you can - they have a few across the country. Check out VCF SW's website here, they've already scheduled it for next year in Texas! If any of y'all ever go, let me know and maybe we could meet and you receive the special jojo2k badge of honor......
Oh, and about the quality of the video. I had a fun little Apple adventure of my own - bought a supposedly dead PowerBook "Kanga," bought a couple parts, tore it down, cleaned it up, and traded that away for a PowerBook G3 Pismo that already had OS X 10.4 Tiger on it, so I knew at that point I had to edit the video on there. Uhh... it may have taken a total of like 11 hours to render both versions of the video you see above ._. they could never make me hate you, PowerPC...
As always, thanks for reading :)
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