VCFB 2025 Presentations Association Press Archive

Deutsch

Short presentations

The presentations take place in a video conference. The recordings will be released on media.ccc.de afterwards. The open discussion will not be recorded.

NCR/32 – An Early 32-Bit CPU Architecture

One of the more unknown early, commercially available 32-bit CPU architectures was NCR/32 from NCR. The first computer this was available in was the 1983 NCR 9300 system. NCR/32 had two aspects that were special: First, it consisted of only 40.000 transistors, and second, it used an external microcode memory and had the microcode commands documented. This allowed third parties to exchange the microcode and have the CPU e.g. execute Forth code natively.

Language: English
Fritz Hohl

Soviet UNIX and the Way to the Internet

What is DEMOS? Some people in the post-Soviet countries would say it is an Internet provider, but its name came from the Soviet UNIX variant created in the late 1980s. If we use modern language, DEMOS was a "fork", created by Soviet engineers using sources they could obtain. UNIX gave a boost to connecting computers – first together using modems, and later, a historic call to Helsinki connected the Soviet Union to the Internet. Unfortunately, the big Soviet machines are not available anymore – we have to use FPGA simulation.

Language: English
Eugene Bolshakoff

The Long Road to Linux (and UNIX) in Our Pockets

Our modern life is currently absolutely unimaginable without pocketable computing, the smartphones and tablets that we carry around and use extensively every day. I want to emphasize one specific thing about it: Google's Android OS runs on top of the Linux kernel, and Apple's iOS at its core is BSD UNIX. But how did we end up here? In this presentation we are going to explore the long and somewhat bumpy road of Linux and UNIX in the pocketable computing landscape, where Microsoft once held indisputable dominance. Our journey will be accompanied by some notable examples of commercially available smartphones and PDAs bringing UNIX-like operating systems to miniaturized scale.

Language: English
Azer Abdullaev

Tour of the Update Computer Club's New Space!

In 2022, the Update Computer Club loaded many tonnes of computers, peripherals, spare parts and documentation into cars, trucks, backpacks, and on pallets and moved to a new space. Some of you might remember our tour of the old space back in 2021 and will enjoy an update of Update's living quarters. See our exhibition with microcomputers, minicomputers and an arcade machine, our cosy kitchen, and electronics lab with instruments and tools.

Language: English
Pontus Pihlgren

Assembly and Commissioning of the EAE 182 in a PDP-8 Classic

The PDP-8 Classic consists of 1250 individual transistors and has 4096 x 12 bits of core memory. The only arithmetic operation it can perform is 12-bit addition. However, an extension, the "Extended Arithmetic Element" (EAE), is already pre-wired on the backplane. This allows for integer multiplication and division. Using existing old R modules and 6 newly implemented R212 modules, we attempted to install the EAE in the PDP-8 and get it up and running. To do this, we had to delve deeply into the transistor technology of the second generation of computers, which was based on discrete components.

Language: German
Klemens Krause

The Ulti-PET – A modern PET replica

The Ulti-PET is a modern replica of the Commodore PET that can still be manufactured today using new parts. It replicates the entire PET series from 2001 to 8296, plus a whole range of enhancements such as SD cards, USB mouse or keyboard, RS232, (fast) serial IEC bus, dual SID, and much more. The presentation outlines a brief history of the computer, its features, and concludes with a simple demonstration.

Language: German
André Fachat

Solar Eclipse Prediction: Antikythera Mechanism vs. Kepler, Realised in Lego

This project evaluates the accuracy of the ancient Antikythera mechanism in predicting solar and lunar eclipses. By recreating the mechanism using Lego technology, an experimental platform was created to compare its predictions with those of modern Keplerian astronomy and the reconstructed original data. The results confirm the remarkable accuracy of the ancient device, but identify systematic errors resulting from the deviation of the underlying cycle model from Keplerian elliptical orbits. The Lego replica thus serves as a unique educational tool for visualising the evolution of astronomical models.

Language: German
Simon Daumalle, Werner Gruber, Peter Reichl

Forth and Lisp From Scratch – For the PDP-1

Two programming languages that continue to fascinate many hackers are Forth and Lisp. Both are traditionally quite minimalistic and, in a sense, implemented in themselves. But how does that work? The lecture will explain how to bootstrap a Forth system in machine language and then use Forth as a basis for building a Lisp system. This linguistic tower building will be demonstrated on the PiDP-1, a replica of the PDP-1.

Language: German
Angelo Papenhoff