VCFB 2018: Short Report

As you might know by now, I attended the VCFB 2018 in Berlin. I had an exhibit and a presentation. I was most kindly mentioned on a popular German news page. I met many nice people.

The location was held at and co-organised by the German Museum of Technology  which was enough space and resources to support this event in a succesful way. Speaking of success: 2600 visitors have been counted, even more than last year.

Things-to-see-and-hear-wise, it was equally interesting. All the presentations were recorded and are available. There were many interesting exhibits. To me, the most interesting was “Smalltalk, Unix, Plan 9” by Angelo Papenhoff.

He showed off:

• A Xerox Alto simulator (Contralto) showing a very early version of Smalltalk
• Research Unix (Bell Labs) and their GUI for it(!)
• Plan 9 and its 9front forks (they develop the system further despite the fact that there is noone “official” from the original project left)

He gave also a presentation on “The GUIs of Research Unix and Plan 9” (German).

For the next year, I offered to contribute to the organization of the event, so maybe next year there will be more information on this event in English.