Scheduled speakers at the VCF Southwest 3.0

 

  • Phil Ryals, Vice President of Engineering, Museum of Computer Culture

    Phil’s three careers span more than 40 years. He spent 20+ years in the telecommunications industry, mostly in data and networking. For 8 years he taught and consulted on object-oriented software development. He retired in 2007 as technical lead of the HP.com Operations team, having spent 10 years running HP’s corporate web servers. Phil has a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Information Technology. He programmed his first computer in 1962..

    • PDP-8/S Restoration - Saturday, 11 A.M.


      Challenges encountered in restoring to operable status a second- generation (no integrated circuits) computer built in 1965.  From trash (the PDP-8/S was found in a dumpster) to operating museum artifact in a few easy lessons.

    • Design and Construction of the RC-3 Relay Computer - Sunday, 10 A.M.


      RC-3 is an 8-bit computer with a 16-bit address bus. All its logic elements are electro-mechanical relays (some 418 of them). Only the memory uses semiconductors. There are 421 lights on the front panel and 134 switches. It runs at the blinding speed of 6 Hz.

  • Austin Roche - Vice President of Development, Museum of Computer Culture

    • The son of Datapoint co-founder Gus Roche, Austin worked for Datapoint for 5 years as a development engineer. He has spent 35 years in electronics development and is currently a hardware design engineer for Dell Inc.

    • Austin will present two historical documents, a Datapoint investor pitch showing the first integrated desk top computer and evidence that TI made an 8008 compatible CPU for datapoint before intel announced the 8008.

  • Gil Carrick, Director,Museum of Information Technology at Arlington

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    • The History of Computing - Saturday at a time TBD and Sun. at 11 A.M. In the 1970s the IBM Speakers Bureau had a packaged presentation that their managers could give on request. It consisted of over 100 35 mm slides covering the history of computing from 1600 to the modern era of large electronic computers. Unfortunately, the copies of this presentation that remain today are badly deteriorated. A copy was given to MITA. Mr. Carrick has recreated this presentation in PowerPoint with all new images gathered from accross the World Wide Web. Additional material that has been discovered since the original IBM presentation was created has also been incorporated.

  • Boisy G. Pitre

    • Libre809 - Saturday, 10:00 A.M.


      The Liber809 is a microprocessor upgrade for the Atari 800XL/1200XL/130XE. It combines the power of the Motorola 6809 with the superb graphics and sound hardware of the Atari 8-bit platform.

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