If the Apple II Plus, TRS-80, Timex Sinclair, NABU, mainframes, dot matrix printers and punched tape programs pique your curiosity, then you’ll want to attend a festival that’s bringing rare, nostalgic and vintage technology to the University of Texas at Dallas.
Now in its third year, the Vintage Computer Festival will run June 20-22, 2025 at the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at the University of Texas at Dallas, 2501 Drive G, Richardson, TX 75080.
The festival is hosted by the Vintage Computing Collective of North Texas, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to preserve computing history through education, outreach, conservation, and restoration.
V.c.c.N.T. Secretary Jay Crutti says the festival has a wide range of appeal, from the nostalgic glance back at simpler technology to a look at the fascinating accomplishments of past programmers who worked in a tightly constrained programming environment.
“It’s kind of like a combination between a science fair, a trade show, and an educational symposium, he says. “We have exhibitors who set up computer systems of various vintages and either demonstrate them or they kind of show off some of the old equipment and talk about what was notable about it.
“We also have presentations where guest speakers come and give presentations on various topics that are related to vintage computing. There’s also kind of a flea market aspect as well. There’s a lot of trading and buying and selling of systems that occurs. So, it’s kind of a mix of a flea market with a trade show and educational symposium with presentations.”
Among systems making an appearance at the festival will be the ever-popular Commodore 64, Apple II, and Tandy Radio Shack home computers from the 1980s. But Jay says festival goers can expect to see lesser known systems that are every bit as important to the evolution of the computers that have brought us our modern ubiquitous tech and devices.
“There’s one member of our group who is a collector of Soviet, and not just U.S.S.R., but even computers produced in some of the federated countries,” Jay says. “So, he has machines that are all from the Soviet Bloc countries. For us in the West, some people didn’t even realize that the Soviet Union had computers that were kind of homegrown, home-developed systems, and much less have ever seen one. So, I think within the community, the most excitement tends to be seeing and using and learning about systems that were extremely rare or completely unknown.”
Jay says that another fan-favorite in recent years was the 1980s Nabu P.C. from Canada, an 8-bit computer that had no secondary storage as it connected to and downloaded games directly from a cable T.V. provider long before the internet was a common word.
“It would be hooked up to your T.V. and it had an adapter which today we would kind of refer to it as a cable modem, but it had an interface box that would connect to the cable system which allowed you to play games and kind of do a lot of things that today we would think of as prototypical internet-type tasks,” Jay says.
And although small, limited P.C.s were introduced to the public as early as the 1970s, few people ever had a chance to see the truly powerful machines from the era that were known as mainframe computers, Jay says. Filling up a room with their hardware and accessed from remote terminals throughout a store like Sears or an institutional or government setting, these computers date back to 1960s with programming that was often stored on physical tape or cards with data punched as holes in the paper stock. Loading a program with such a media could take hours, or days.
“There’s not many of them that still exist, but that’s the kind of computer that was extremely powerful and interesting, but that the average person has likely never seen one or gotten to use one. So, there’s also a lot of people in our community who get very excited about the idea of these mainframes or big server computers that were common in industry and commercial and research settings,” Jay says.
More than just a curiosity or walk down memory lane, the computers featured in the festival serve a present purpose, Jays says. Modern programmers can accomplish a great deal with sloppy code, and users may never notice because of the vast speeds of today’s hardware. But, writing code for a vintage computer with comparatively limited R.A.M. forces contemporary programmers to build efficient code that does more work with fewer lines. And many modern programmers have taken to revive older systems with fresh code in order to sharpen their skills.
Additionally, says Jay, there are circumstances that call for expertise in past systems as those systems are still employed in crucial tasks in government and industrial settings.
“In the Pacific Palisades fire just a few months back in California, there was an A.T.&T. telephone central office there that served all the Pacific Palisades area. And it was running old switching equipment that had not been rebooted in more than 30 years,” Jay says. “In fact, in the fire, the documentation that was needed to reboot the telephone switch was burned and lost even though the equipment itself was protected in the way the building was designed. Essentially, a member of our community had to do some consulting and instruct them on how to reboot this system that had not been restarted in more than 30 years.”
The festival will also feature vintage gaming systems, speakers who will present on topics that range from rebuilding vintage O.S. to the first sprite chip, hands-on demonstrations and an opportunity for like-minded tech savvy people to meet and greet.
For a more information on the festival, a schedule of events and tickets, visit the Vintage Computer Festival Southwest website.
