Our fourth exhibition at VCF Southeast, and the first show to which Gertie was brought.
Where: VCF Southeast 11.0, in partnership with Southern-Fried Gaming Expo at the Marriott Renaissance Waverly in Atlanta, Georgia
When: July 19 – 21, 2024
Exhibit: Midrange Madness!
Explore the world of big IBM business computers from all eras of computing history – see a FULLY WORKING System/34! Plus enjoy the System/36, and multiple AS/400s and iSeries! Print out cool text art with our line printers – hammerbanks and all! PLUS, learn about VCF/400 – the system that’s powering ALL of our exhibit kiosks this year! See? Business computers don’t have to be boring!
Recap & Photos
This year was one of our most ambitious years yet. Not only was this Gertie’s first public exhibition, we brought nine different machines, plus two line printers and a whole host of terminals. And if that wasn’t enough? We wrote our own custom software for the show, built a LAN and a Windows Server 2003 domain, and put terminals and Active Directory-joined laptops on everyone’s exhibit tables as part of the VCF/400 Exhibition Software! For ourselves, we even wrote a game for the AS/400 and debuted it here – check out the GitHub page for WRDL/400 and install it on your AS/400 today.
Before the Show
One of the big headlining features of our exhibit this year was the VCF/400 Exhibition System. We built this software to allow exhibitors to have a richer, more interactive table placard on each of their exhibits. One of the VCF Southeast traditions is to give away awards for the show, so we also built an interactive voting system where Southern-Fried Gaming Expo visitors could nominate an exhibit for one of our awards, and we also built a comment system and connected it to a receipt printer so visitors could leave nice messages for our exhibitors. Here are some early screenshots of VCF/400 as it was being developed.
Our first VCF/400 test comment!
Here are some pictures of the VCF/400 public infrastructure being set up. We set up a Server 2003 Active Directory domain on a Mac Pro and handed out Terminals Services logins to about 30 domain-joined laptops that were distributed out to exhibitors. The final picture is from one of our monthly computer club meetings where we invited club members to stress test and break VCF/400.
The Show Begins
Gertie finally made it to a show, alive and well! At least, until we melted our step-up transformer down. We bought three 5251 terminals, two connected to Gertie running BASIC and FUNLIB, and the third connected to an AS/400 Model 520 running our VCF/400 exhibit user. Also on display were a 5211 and 6400 line printer, connected to Gertie and a System/36 respectively, and our collection of AS/400 Portables just on display for fun.
WRDL/400 also made its debut here, which was actually running off the AS/400 Model 520. We had not yet backported WRDL/400 to OS/400 V3.
Here are videos of S/34 BASIC in action (running our version of the C64 10 PRINT program), and our 5211 line printer printing a directory listing.
VCF/400 terminals were on everyone’s table this year, all connected back to our AS/400 Model 520. Most people opted for a laptop on their table, but a few people opted for a phone line or a glass terminal on their table. The 5251 in the first picture is special because…
…it was running a modified version of LEARN/400 that behaved like a slideshow system! This was at the VCF Southeast information and consignment table advertising all the different exhibits, sponsors, and such at the show. Here is an early look at the slideshow.
‘Ambition’ is probably the best word to describe this year’s show. We threw a lot at our table this year and it showed. It was a lot of work to put it all together, but it sure was fun doing it!