Our fifth exhibition at VCF Southeast, and the second show to which Gertie was brought. This time she ran all weekend!
Where: VCF Southeast 12.0, in partnership with Southern-Fried Gaming Expo at the Marriott Renaissance Waverly in Atlanta, Georgia
When: June 20 – 22, 2025
Exhibit: Midrange Madness: big.LITTLE Edition
Midrange Madness returns – bring the clown car! Experience Gertie, the 800-pound System/34, play games, print art, on a tiny terminal and printer! Play with the world’s smallest AS/400, connected to a gargantuan 5251 block mode terminal and 6262 hammer bank printer! Play Wordle/400 and sign our guestbook! Come learn about the computers that used to – and sometimes, still – drive the world of business!
Recap & Photos
VCF Southeast 12.0 was a bit of a scale-back for us – bringing nine different machines plus all the support hardware was just a bit too much for us. Still, we brought Gertie back again and this time brought a better step-up transformer and this time she ran the entire show.
Our exhibit name this year was a play on the ARM big.LITTLE architecture – our theme this year was simply to connect an AS/400 Portable – the world’s tiniest AS/400 – to the biggest peripherals we had (a 5251 terminal and a 6262 hammer bank printer), and Gertie to the tiniest peripherals we had. Our print demos were run entirely off the AS/400 Portable using a tool we wrote, and we also updated WRDL/400 to run on OS/400 V3R2.
We also brought a BOScom TCP/IP remote twinax controller connected over a VPN link to one of our AS/400s back at the office. This ran two terminals at the show – an amber InfoWindow running WRDL/400 and a few other AS/400 games, and a VGA logic module connected to a projector running the LEARN/400 autoscroller software that advertised our exhibit on the wall behind us.
(Can you tell we like vtubers?)