Screw folks who say you get "too excited" over getting things working. It shows passion towards what you do. Never change!

I sincerely hope that Thomas walks around those vintage computers with his pipe all the time. Adorbs.

We call the PDP-8 a straight 8 because it doesn’t have any letters after the 8 like later variants like the 8S which was a serial variant of the 8 which originally was powerful.

Since I am not able to travel in my current season of life, I really appreciate you giving us virtual tours of amazing places like this one, that have preserved the old computer technology. Keep up the great work!

I assumed "Straight 8" was to distinguish from the later 8E, 8A, 8I etc variants. Cue Scotty: "No bloody A, B, C, or D"

I personally love your enthusiasm! It's ridiculous for people to say you get too excited. Just the same, I love seeing vintage machines being kept alive! These are a unique opportunity to directly interact with the past, so I'm always happy to see it used!

HELLORLD! on paper tape is awesome!

Excellent seeing a PDP 8 in action. I spent hours in school programming the PDP 8E in PAL 8 assembly to do some simple math functions. Fortunately I was able to convince security that I wasn’t a threat as they normally booted you out of the lab at midnight. Unfortunately I did see the sun come up as I got my program to work properly. The boot loader to get the tape drive to spin up was about 20 steps with the front panel switches. I got to the point where I could boot the computer via the front panel from memory every time. Thanks for the memories!

The site also has a radio/radar/wireless museum too since it was used during WW2 for those purposes. A really fascinating intersection of history and technology to explore.

I learned to program on machines that booted from paper tape after toggling in the boot loader , it's great that you captured this process on video so that everyone can see the wonder of this process. It was such an amazing thing to watch a program load from tape especially if it was something you wrote, wonder "is it going to work".

Lots of memories here. I noticed the Digicomo on the shelf, a “computer” made up of plastic, wire, and short plastic soda straws, which was really a mechanical simulation of a few flip-flops. The PDP-8, and its older almost twin brother the PDP-5 were my second computers after an IBM 1620 at UConn in the early 1970s. One of my buddies got a summer job at a company which was entering ALL of their programs with the front panel. He became a real superstar when he showed them the RIM loader.

BUNNY! My daughters walked in just a the right time LOL

Thanks so much for the fantastic PDP-8 demo! It sure brought back memories. The PDP-8e was absolutely the first computer I ever laid eyes (or hands) on. DEC was trying to sell one to our high school. They loaned one to the school for a couple of months (!) and we nerds - aka computer club members - were totally enthralled. One word about octal: groups of three switches make a very natural way to load a number into the front panel. You quickly develop a muscle memory for the digits 0 to 7. Since you have to key in the bootstrap loader every time you power the machine up, you get lots of practice! Another DEC product of the same period was the Computer Lab. It's a patch board system with a handful of J-K flipflops and logic gates. If you ever get a chance to acquire one and restore it you should. DEC loaned us one of those, too, and our computer club sponsor actually let me take it home over the Christmas holidays. I learned a ton about digital logic by playing with that thing.

I've been lucky enough to go to the computer museum while they had the naval firing computer (forget model) running. The person running the paper tape had actually used the computer when it was installed, which was also cool. They also have a CRAY and a ton of old home computers. If anyone is going to VCF East, I'd highly recommend going to all of the museums at Infoage. The radio museum is great and the WWII truck museum they also have is really cool. IIRC they have an old "nuclear jeep" there. The trains and military museums/displays are really nice as well. Hoping to get back to VCF east next year. Great show!

Thanks so much for the tour. I'm a retired DEC FE and loved the trip down memory lane.

Thomas really leaning in to that retro style, I approve!

Great tour! So good to see these all up and running. In high school we had a PDP-8 with a VT-52, two 8" floppy drives, a line printer, and a CR-11 punched card reader. The card reader could read pencil marks on the cards so that we could write our programs on paper, mark them onto the cards, then run them as a batch job. If you could find and show us a punched card reader, that would be outstanding. We also had eight to ten Commodor PET with that awful keyboard.

@15:10 The Screen on the Commadore PET is Displaying Ferris Bueller's Student record..........Nice touch form the museum folks.

The "Zero" bit in a PDP-8 instruction is if the remaining address bits reference the current memory page or the "zero page" in the current field. A field is 4096 words, broken up into pages of 200(8) words. Zero page is literally the addresses from 000-177. So without resorting to indirect addressing, any memory reference instruction can only get to 400(8) spots in memory, but half of them are depending on what address the instruction is at, and the other half are a common pool of locations.

I had the first compaq sold in new mexico. I remember carrying it on an airplane. I bought a 10 MB hard drive that I thought would never fill up.

20:00 Watching you key in values with the switches and lights on the PDP8,... magical. It feels like I'm watching curiousMarc and Carl and the Computer History Museum working on the IBM1140! 👍

Wow, this was all great, nice highlighting of the museum. & Thomas has it going ON

Come for interesting historic computers Stay for the vibes of the most excitable vintage computer lover Nice reporting and awesome museum! They totally should advertise in the VCF with photos of their interrior and by signs for the people who leave the VCF to also visit them on the way out. This way everyone gets the best of both worlds!

Oh wow! The Cosmac Elf single board computer! I personally just restored my original Cosmac Super Elf I bought 1977 to full working order. It was a fun job to do, although the original FND500 7-segment numeric LED displays are becoming a bit dim. I have searched for replacement (preferably more modern version), but so far not much luck (the newer ones need a different voltage and forward current). Anyway - It was fun to see all those different versions in this video. In the mean time I am restoring the second computer I bought many years ago as a kit (around 1979). This is the Acon Atom. This one has proven a more difficult little project. I got it halfway working so far. It proudly shows the "Acorn Atom" and prompt at start up, but does not respond to keystrokes. This is going to be a fun troubleshooting project in progression. It will be fun to see that one finally also fully working alongside my Cosmac Super Elf. I am not there yet, but it's going to happen...

At one point DEC actually promoted just how "mini" the PDP-8 was by showing it in the back of a classic VW Beetle.

VCF East XIX was awesome. Glad you could make it!

Holy crap, the museum has a Hammond Novachord?!? As a tube guy, you need to look at that instrument. It's nuts.

Really nice video! I have worked on an SGI Indigo 2 - and it was pretty dated at the time (2001-2003). I still really like IRIX. An Octane or Onyx would be a nice addition to your collection. Fran Blanche just released a video at the same time as yours showing the Univac in operation and the volunteers pulling the cards out and loading a tape up. It was really noisy with everything running!

Thanks for showing the Data General Eclipse S/140. I had about a dozen of those painted in Unisys colors, don't ask... Also, Novas, SuperNovas, Nova II, MicroNova, S140, S250, C330, Lockheed LEC-16, Honeywell DDP-516, HP 1000, PDP 11/44, VAX 11/750, Unisys V77-800. Then came all of the microcontrollers...

I had an account on the PDP-8/I in the computer science department at the local university for a couple of years while I was in high school. It was behind a glass wall, so I could see it blink its lights and spin its DECTape searching for files, but I couldn't actually touch the front panel. It ran TSS/8, a time-share operating system that could support up to 16 users on model 33 Teletypes. One of the TTYs in the computer lab had a paper tape reader and punch. I would go there right after school, and stay until "late" -- after midnight sometimes. I taught myself BASIC and PDP-8 assembly language from photocopied hand-outs from vol. 2 of the manual, and the instruction set quick reference card. So of course at one point I wrote an assembly program to print out my name in block letters on the paper tape. The paper tape is 1 inch wide; if you don't have any of the oiled green or yellow paper tape, you can use 1 inch brown paper tape (the gummed type that you moisten and use to wrap parcels up with brown kraft paper). It had a speech synthesizer attached too, so it could sing a couple of songs and recite poetry. That was a research interest of one of the CS profs.

That museum is awesome! 😍

Your exitement is one of the reasons I love your channel - nihl contentae barstidium! 😋

I'm fascinated by old weather channel tech!

Toggling instructions into memory evokes Spock's characterization - "stone knives and bear skins". The ancesters dealt with a primitive computing world for sure.

Thanks for the great recap of VCF East and the museum. I wanted to go, but was already taking time off earlier in the week for the eclipse and in a few weeks for a visit with my parents.

Maynooth University's first computer was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 with a card reader, 2 x demountable hard disk drives, line printer, console and 2 x VT-52 terminals running MU-BASIC under RSTS/E

Nice little cameo you have there of the UE 555 on display in the museum at around 09:00

Man, that Philbrick analog computer is a thing of beauty. If you really want to make an indelible mark on youtube vintage computing, do something with analog computers... anything really: there's a real lack of such content despite there being a resurgence of interest in them using modern techniques/components.

The strait 8 is the original, the later models had a letter after the 8.

That paper tape reader takes me back to my first job programming Ferranti FM1600B computers

I checked out the radio museum last year, was quite nice. Will have to check out the computer museum next it looks quite impressive. I saw some on youtube saying wang sold those computers as fully functional computers when in fact there were actually just the adding machine in a computer case.

Very interesting, thanks, that diy paper tape reader writer looks very nice

@23:20 that wardrobe is as fly as the machine you are sitting next to.

26:00 - Hello are you scared? - HELLIAM!

That PDP8 was absolutely amazing to see. Loved the switches and the lights showing what was going on. Imo something like this would really help kids (and me) understand what the computer actually does.

That a mega machine was ahead of the time . I was worried there be no rabbit to see cause your out of town .. boy I was wrong .. A cotton you can pet ! Wow ! I raised a cotton tail but you could not pet it. She was litter trained and lived with us for year . I finally released her to the wild r and she did well !

The "7777" trick is something that a LOT of older computers and microcontrollers used. Store the address of the routine you want the computer to start with at the highest location in memory (the boot/reset vector) and you can store the actual code anywhere you want. Microcontrollers usually execute the instruction at the top of program memory by default after a reset.

AAhh...this explains why you weren't at the Meet And Greet in Grand Prairie this weekend! 😉 Good to see the stuff at VCF East! Thanks for the tours!

I am sorry you didn’t stop at our 8-Bit Desk Clones From South America exhibit. There were some wild clones like an Apple II in an Atari 1200 case. Maybe next year!

I enjoyed reading 'The Soul of a New Machine' by Tracy Kidder years ago, which is the story behind the development of the Data General Eclipse, so neat to see the museum has one.

Thanks for a wonderful video.

I love the museum because when it's NOT festival time you can try any of the turned on machines (not just behind glass)

thank you it was educative and awesome .

Thanks for the coverage on Core64 David. I'd love to talk about getting cores and tubes connected. After all, those tubes are what necessitated the blazing speeds core memory enabled...

"I'm not an electrical engineer" I've been an electrical engineer for 10 years, you're more electrical engineer than I am.

My guinea pig says hi to your cornucopia bunny :)

The Programmed Data Processor (PDP-1) is a high speed, solid state digital computer designed to operate with many types of input-output devices with no internal machine changes.

I was there too, great fun

Amazing !...as usual !

That looks fantastic :)

I live locally...but unfortunately wasnt able to make it this year, I am looking forward to attending in 2025

I got to finish my own Nabu modem project some time... x.x it's pretty far along after all; but there was next to no concrete feedback on my last updates.

Very much liked the PDP stuff, I'm currently building a PiDP 8/I so really interesting stuff.

Epic video, man. More Bendix, including a cool souvenir, and the PDP-8 were highlights for me. That's a very interesting computer, and one I wish I could afford to house and feed. The Amiga was something else I always wanted but couldn't seem to afford. If you want another possible source for projects, look into the B2600 Workstation from HP. I supported a fleet of about 20 of these at my old job, and devised an imaging server using an old Dell Poweredge 2600 (yeah, the model number is a coincidence). It made possible the saving of whole disk images from these workstations. We were still using these workstations when I retired to operate production processes. I hope I can make a VCF if one comes to a location close enough. This is just too cool.

Id love to see what you can do with the NABU. I don't have a ton of time after my job so mine is sitting neatly in it's box still. It is a really cool piece of Canadian PC history.

Would love to see you at vcfmw this year.

Props++ for the mention & great video! Chat soon :)

12:28 'Hunt the Wumpus' now there is something I have to get back to and get that running on my SWTPC6800 clone I made 'quite a few years ago'.

Adrian Black gets very excited too when he gets a computer working again

My middle school had some of those PETs. I think they would run out of memory playing Space Invaders.

Vintage computer enthusiasts are the only people who can say "do you want to come back to my place and see my Wang" and not be creeps. ^-^ And another vintage computer geek would be "Hell yeah! Show me that Wang!" ^-^ I am laughing SO hard right now...

i stuck my head into the musesum while i was there but it was too many people in there to even realize you were in there.

Didn't make it this time but next time I hope to show up and see everything

If that PDP-8 program is not "hellord," i will be seriously disappointed. And i was not disappointed. ^-^ I really need to make one of these VCF events. I want to buy stuff, and i don't have the time to troll ebay or local thrift shops.

I wonder if there are any working examples of the Texas Instrument TI-980B mini-computer still working? They were stunning looking machines!

Really, really amazing! Great tour of the VCF 2024 exhibits and super tour of the vintage computer Museum run by Doug Crawford. His museum is like a "Disneyland of Vintage Computing." Lots of fun to watch and quite educational too. Great job at the restorations and an impressive collection of important machines. (How do you keep them all so clean?) Excellent tour and narration! Thanks for sharing this! ~ VK

We used to upgrade those Compac luggables through 386, 486 and then Pentium. All had custom data acquisition cards.... Those where the days.....

25:40 We had a ‘visual header’ program on our paper tape based Elliott 903 at university in London in late 1970s. There was an epic piece of tape text on the computer room door that took me three years before I got the joke (I thought it was just profound before that): NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE A TOOTHLESS BUDGIE!

Thank you for carrying me back to my Youth

Your plans for the UE-2 are pretty hardcore, haha 9:00 well, it looks familiar, doesn't it? They have a bigger WANG than yours! Hellorld on a paper tape was so much fun, while I'm trying to get C64 BASIC to display big one on the screen using pokes and iteration. Still no cigar but I'm getting there... and will make a video when I get it. opefully it happens RealSoon.

TBH I thought this year's VCF East was a little timid compared to last year's. I parked in the main lot(!) and there were a bunch of empty tables where there had been exhibitors on Saturday. I did get to see you working on the Hawk, which was cool.

Oh cool, a framed cover of the 1974 first edition of Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib" on the wall behind the two of you in that last shot. A very formative book for people of a certain age. "You Can And Must Understand Computers NOW!". Nelson was very savvy at the time about the hopes of the AI transcendantalists. See p. DM 12 (of the "Dream Machines" upside-down second half of the book): "Time out for THREE COMPUTER DREAMS: "AI" (Artificial Intelligence); "IR" (Information Retrieval); "CAI" (Computer-Assisted Instruction). It's time for awe to be replaced with the critical eye." "The God-Builders! ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ...sort of" "COMPUTERS DON'T ACTUALLY THINK. You just think they think. (We think.)" "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: the unrolling carpet. (But how far will it go?)" "Well-understood techniques, 'solved' problems (Impressive, startling and/or hokey demonstrations; Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Qubic; Sentence generation) -> Current Research (Pattern Recognition, Neuron Nets, Heuristics, Simulation of minds & stuff) -> a long, long way -> Mysterious & Sexy Terra Incognita, Unknown & Unlikely ('Turing Test'; Chess: Morphy, Fischer; Self-organizing systems) -> Turing-Barrier (Can it somehow get past? Brute-force methods foiled.) -> El Beyondo. Gods! Supergods! Omniscience! Plus ca change. Nelson is now a very old man. I wonder what he makes of all the current AI ai ai ai.

Bunnies! 😍

What about the train rooms!? They are (or used to be?) in the same building as the computer museum, just down the hall. Playing with model train at MIT is essentially how the internet was born, dealing with half vs full duplex and switches.

I remember programming the PDP-8 machine code was a pain in the butt because you can only conditional branch within the current memory page and to escape the page you have to jump. This was fixed in the PDP-11 with its plethora of memory addressing modes.

Nice that he gave a shout out to Tech Time Traveller. I love his vids, and he's Canadian

I would LOVE to see a demo of this analog computer at 10:29 That CRT looks like it has some long persistence phosphor on it with an orange filter over the front to help with contrast. It would probably work on it's own as a vector scope. If you remove the orange filter it will probably look like a P7 cascade phosphor they used on a lot of radar tubes.

The PDP8 only had 8 instructions if you counted them the way DEC counted them. One instruction was effectively a NOP but external logic was used to make that the I/O instruction. The "operate" instruction did things like shifting and clearing so you could make a claim of more than 8 instructions if you counted all the combinations you could make.

@4:32 I think I built one of those in the past 😉

It must be amazing to play with such an old wang that still works.

The guy with the pipe can be trusted. A good programmer should always be a pipe smoker. Have you notice that since people stopped smoking, computer sucks?

I'ts called the 'straight 8' rather than the 8/E or 8/S, etc. But the hat tip to the old Lincolns or Oldsmobiles is intended.

Those diodes are silicon. There's no germanium in those flip chips. There's a bunch in the older "system modules", though.

The Commodore Amiga is great

The buttons on the Wang computer, Wang calculator and PET look like they wouldn't be out of place on a certain vintage of cash register...

The TRIAD System Mini computer, Was that related to later triad systems for running hardware stores?

Somebody needs to make a NIC for that Strait 8 PDP/8.

"Streight 8" designates it as a base unit, 8S, 8M, 8I, or 8 Lab.

Have yet to see a Honeywell or Cincinnati Milacron. We have seen some Data Generals recently.

How about VCF Midwest, September 7-8, 2024 in Schaumburg, Illinois (suburb of Chicago)?