VCF West Exhibition (USA) with Amstrad CPC and SymbOS

[Prodatron]

The Vintage Computer Festival West is currently taking place in Mountain View, California, USA.
It's a trade fair that primarily showcases vintage computers.

https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-west/vcf-west-exhibits/
https://vcfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/VCF-West-Map-7-9-25-Main-hall-scaled.png

@prevtenet is presenting SymbOS, including on an Amstrad CPC 464, which is relatively unknown in the USA. But at least the monitor will be recognizable to many   .

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LambdaMikel is also there with his mobile CPC 464 and a lot of other stuff.

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(all photos by LambdaMikel)

[Gryzor]

Sounds like an awesome event, so nice to exhibit some CPC awesomeness on it!

[Prodatron]

TechJesse did a livestream walkthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/live/1Z-ipenv9wY?si=MeuKonMbVrWLlVwB&t=695

You can see @prevtenet at 11:36, explaining SymbOS!

For me it's still a weird thing, that Amstrad is completely unknown in the US (ok and SymbOS as well haha)

[dodogildo]

Awesome 

[gougoutt]

I went to the event, it was great!
The SymbOS stand was very well located, impossible to miss it.
According to the booklet, there was also an Amstrad CPC 464 portable exhibited - I did not see it though.
Talking about vintage, there was also a demo of the IBM 1401 computer at the CHM downstairs, really amazing.

[Prodatron]

• Here is a report from Prevtenet:

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• Brief VCF West recap: big show, 72 exhibits, 3500 attendees. Lots of Amiga for its 40th release anniversary, including a replica of the Amiga booth from at CES 1984 (with the original prototypes!)
  

I didn't get a ton of photos because I ended up needing my phone as a hotspot for the CPC, but TechJesse did a livestream walkthrough of some of the exhibits:



I show up briefly at 11:54 to explain SymbOS. This was still early in the day, it got extremely busy by mid-afternoon.

• VCF West happens at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, so the crowd is a mixture of hardcore vintage-computer people, retro gamers, Silicon Valley engineers, and an unusually large number of kids compared to other retro events I've been to. A few minor computer-history celebrities also tend to show up (this year I saw Dan Kottke - one of the first Apple employees - and Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the Sol-20 and Osborne 1).
• My SymbOS table was busy pretty much all day Friday and Saturday. A few people knew about SymbOS and came looking for me specifically (shoutout to LambdaMikel) but the vast majority had never heard of it. So, it was a fun experience getting to see how the "general public" (OK, nerds) reacted to SymbOS. A lot of people were drawn into the exhibit because they couldn't figure out what they were looking at, or even what era it was from: an "Amstrad" (very rare in the USA) with a cassette deck, running a weird monochrome version of Windows 95, except it clearly wasn't Windows 95, and why was there a ChatGPT icon?! Once they understood the concept, the next question was usually "how is that even technically possible?!" The System Monitor turned out to be a great visual aid for explaining how address spaces and context-switching work in the kernel. There were several homebrew-Z80 people who got really deep into the details of this, having never thought about multitasking on the Z80 before.
• Kids usually came up and started playing whatever game was onscreen: Solitaire and PacMan were popular, plus an unreleased clone of NES Tetris that I've been working on. Several kids (and adults) also got completely absorbed playing Longcat for 10-20 minutes at a time. I also wrote a small banner-printer app, which saw a lot of use - every time someone tried it, the sound of the dot-matrix printer would draw a small crowd (and usually a line of kids who wanted to try it next). Great fun for shows. I'll try to upload finished versions of Tetris and the banner app soon.

Predictably, everyone found numerous bizarre ways to crash the system (LOL). I was grateful that I took the time before the show to fix CPvM and Zym so they wouldn't leak memory when closed with the X button, or else I would have had to reboot even more often. The most common problem actually turned out to be response time: since loading apps takes a second or two, with no waiting cursor, people tended to think the system hadn't registered their click and would accidentally open five copies of ChatGPT (or whatever) and run out of memory. I also encountered several app bugs, including an instability in Launcher that I need to fix.


Overall, great success - my goal was to expose more people in the US retro scene to SymbOS (it's almost unknown here), and all the visitors' reactions were extremely positive.

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08/03/2025, prevtenet