Yesterday I took a trip to the first official Vintage Computing Festival in Britain. I was a little surprised to hear that it was the first, but I imagine that there are plenty of ‘unofficial’ gatherings too. This event was held by the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, which warrants a visit in its own right.

For the weekend’s festival, Bletchley was transformed into vintage computing heaven: a couple of marquees and the ground floor of the house were packed with computers of all makes and models, each one up and running and ready for some hands-on time. The vast majority were being used for gaming – chuckie egg was all over the place – but I did spot the odd word-processing application here and there.

I thought I’d post some pictures from two exhibits that really caught my eye.

First was the BBC playing the 1980s BBC Domesday project from laserdisc. Look right and you’ll see some video footage that we found having searched for ‘falklands’. I’ve read quite a bit about the BBC Domesday laserdiscs over the years (after the CAMiLEON project they’ve become digital preservation folklore), but seeing the content at stake, and interacting with it on a contemporary platform is something quite special. I also suffer from BBC Micro nostalgia (though this is a Master).

This other I’m including partly for nostalgic reasons (I loved my spectrums, and so did my sister and my grandfather 🙂 ), and partly because it amused me. Twittering from a spectrum! Whatever next?!

-Susan Thomas