Carlson Stevens from mad-gear
had an exhibit of Famicom stuff:
the original Famicom
a keyboard for the Famicom
the BASIC ROM that used the keyboard, and a trackball
and two newer Famicom models
Evan Koblentz had these interesting early portables (and many more):
The folks from the
macmothership had:
an Apple Lisa; this is the first time I've seen one in person
and the original 128k Macintosh; ditto!
these interfaces are painfully slow by todays standards, but in
the early 80s this was state of the art
My favorite exhibit was David Gesswein's PDP-8/a:
I never knew a PDP-8 could be that small. He also had an awesome
huge pen plotter:
I was dumb and forgot to photograph it - these 2 images are
courtesy of
Mike Lowen
Michael Pearson had my next-to-favorite exhibit, including this
cool Heathkit educational analog computer:
it's just some OP-AMPs and variable resistors on a plugboard! I
wish I had one when I was a kid; I might know how to design with
OP-AMPs if I had.
There were also some neat talks. I missed a few because I only got there at 1, but Ray Holt had a great talk about designing a microprocessor before the Intel 4004 - for the Navy F-14 flight computer. It was a 20 bit pipelined machine running just under 10k instructions per second. Shipped in 1970 - 2 years before the 4004. If you've got an F14A lying around :-), give Ray a call - he didn't get to keep an example of his work.
Last but not least, I won a Digicomp 1 replica as a door prize.
In short, you should have been there!