I had a wonderful time at the Vintage Computer Festival, the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, so many computers so many exhibits. I instantly fell in love with the a Vextrec computer once I saw and heard it in action. I got to see some of the collections from other museums like the Centre for Computing History who have some immaculate and rare computers and even Jim Austin’s Altair 8800 from his collection.

I was very fortunate to meet and chat with most of the speakers Chris Serle (The Computer Show) , Sophie Wilson (ARM processor and Acorn Computers) , Dylan Smith (the Tweeting spectrum) I even asked some questions during the Q&A’s for both Sophie Wilson and O.M.D. who gave an amazing Q&A and performance of some new songs and classics. The volunteers at the museum also took to giving presentations at the museum Peter Onion on the Elliott 803, Tony Frazer on the Witch, Delwyn Holyroyd on mainframes of the 1970s, Tony Sale on Colossus and our youngest volunteer Adam Bradley on the Cray series computers which the crowd loved.

I also gave two performances in the mansion which were good fun because of the small audience size, people could ask questions during, for the chip tune performance I even took them through the code for the visuals. The second show on Sunday was was a re-showing of Obsolete? and a Q&A which I am beginning to like doing more and more. For the rest of the time I was directing people round the museum and talking to exhibitors.

All in all it was a great weekend and good fun was had by all, I even picked up a second BBC Micro.

You can hear BBC’s Broadcasting House’s report on it here around 54 minutes in to the programs, also report on the event at the BBC Technology website here.