Vintage Computer Festival Europa

I spent the last 3 days in Munich on the VCFE festival, which was meant for old computer collectors. If you had an old computer or some interesting piece of hardware, you could expose it on this place.

A part of the Kiberpipa (Cyberpipe) museum took 3 of the old Yugoslavian computer systems (Iskra Delta Triglav, Iskra Delta Partner and Galaksija) and went on the road. After hours of driving we were in Munich.

We were in Munich already on Friday even that the event opening was on Saturday, because we had 3 machines to prepare for the exposition. The place was crowded with people helping to prepare the event. Even though we were in Munich on Friday we had to wait the next morning, because the hall was not prepared before 12:00pm, so we went to sleep.

The next morning we woke up, took the train to the expo, fixed the machines and waited. We realized that the Europa in the name was not the right word to describe the public of the event, because everything going on on the place was in German, so we didn’t understand a lot. That’s why we took some time for ourselves and went sightseeing.

We can say, that the main event was the tour trough the cray-cyber collection, consisting of many mainframe computers guided by John G. Zabolitzky, Alexander Mann, Freddy Meerwaldt and Wolfgang Stief.

There were mainly home computers like ATARI, Commodore AMIGA and some other of that kind. For me the best examples were a Robotron terminal, a Digital AlphaServer and a MicroVAX.
I must say that the exposing machines were amazing but the organization of the event was awful and meant for the German population.

Anyhow, beer was good! :)

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