Hey guys!!! I'm surprised that this ended up being my first diary entry of 2025, but in my defense, it is very hard to write directly about myself. I generally think that I am not as interesting as the things that I could write, and beyond that, I don't like being observed, but I am trying to get better about that. At any rate, I'll give a brief overview of how my life has been, keeping any depressing content at a minimum as I want the focus to be positive! Anyway, my life has been poor. Although there have been some good things, great things, in fact, the overwhelming majority of what has happened this year has been pretty bad. This I imagine to be a fairly common experience, especially where I live (the United States), but as I said, I would like to keep this diary entry positive, as I had an absolutely amazing time at the Vintage Computer Festival East!!!! There were tons of highlights, from attending a lecture with the guy who WROTE THE LANGUAGE C!!!!! To meeting some famous YouTubers (who were all very nice!!), and getting some awesome computers and accessories at consignment!!
First on the list, and probably the highlight of the trip, was attending a History of Unix lecture with creator of the C programming language, Brian Kernighan!!!! He was so much fun to listen to, very funny, and it was super informative!! I learned some things I didn't already know about the actual process of creating Unix, and some personal anecdotes from someone who was directly involved in development in that exciting era of computing!!! Beyond that, it is with great pleasure to inform all of you that:
and he was very nice!!! I met him in consignment while I was in line to buy a bunch of computers and computer accesories. We only talked for a moment, but he seemed super friendly!! I also met Action Retro, a YouTuber I like just as much as LGR, but who is not quite as famous. He was also exceptionally friendly, and we also talked briefly when I went to his booth to look at his modern mac built into a retro mac body.
I also saw a few other cool things, like a round table with various engineers who worked on the Amiga, a lecture on the history of computer sound with Burger Becky, and a few other things that were not quite as worthy of note, but I would not like to talk bad about out of respect for the presenters.
At consignment, I ended up spending close to 300 dollars on several awesome things that I had been in the market for for some time, namely: an old IBM thinkpad 360C, a Macbook pro from 2015, a 12 inch Macbook air from 2012, a dell quietkey keyboard, an acer netbook, and an AlphaPro Smart word processor!! Most exciting of all is I got a working Commodore 64, along with a few Commodore games and a joystick, and the height of the entire trip:
For those that don't know: for a number of years now, VCF East has a trivia game where you get a holepunch card with a few mulitple choice questions on it, and you have to answer them correctly in order to put yourself in a drawing to win 1 of 3 prizes. I have entered every year, but only this year in particular did I actually win!!!! Specifically, I won the 2nd place prize, the first place being a full new old box C64, which although I would have loved, I wanted less than just the foppy drive, as I had just bought a working C64 at consignment, and I felt it would be best for someone else. So, I got EXACTLY what I hoped I would win!!!! It really is the coolest thing that happened to me, right up there with meeting LGR and Action Retro, and attending the Brian Kernighan lecture. Not to mention I am typing this on my new macbook pro from 2015, which I of course installed Ubuntu onto. It really was just such a great time, and exactly what I needed coming from what has been an otherwise pretty rough year for me.I hope that all of you are doing well, and that you get wins like I did at VCF. I love you all very much!! Following are some pictures from VCF, along with some pics of the stuff that I got at consignment!!
