SLO County Coders @ Vintage Computer Festival West 2026

This year a few of us from San Luis Obispo County Coders made the journey to north to Silicon Valley for the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

The CHM is worthy of a visit on it’s own. I’ve taken family and friends to it that were rolling their eyes on the way through the door but didn’t want to leave after. It’s a genuinely interesting museum!

Add in a festival for retro machines and you have a great day of tech and nerd culture.

The location of Mountain View is actually awesome if you can suspend your doomerism about big tech for a day and remember why you are here in the first place: because we love computers. Mountain View obviously is the belly of the beast and there are some worthy pilgrimages to make even outside of the Festival and CHM.

On the Friday before the festival we borrowed some Google bikes and toured around the town a bit at sunset. It was great to take in the sights of the Bay and… empty business parks? The ride left us needing transport back to the hotel so we took a Waymo: a self-driving first for the both of us. Also it turns out there isn’t actually anywhere to eat in Mountain View that isn’t a corporate cafeteria so In-N-Out nourished us the night before the festival.

CHM doesn’t open until 10am so in the morning we decided to make a quick visit to the previous site of the Shockly Semiconductor Laboratory the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Once we finally made it to CHM we were met with an enormous line. Apparently our first VCF was the largest so far. Good to know we are part of the problem! It wasn’t too crowded to be unpleasant, however. The consignment area was totally rushed, but I still managed to pick up an vintage keyboard that I will never use.

So many of the exhibits were amazing. A lot of the stuff on display was from before my time, but a lot wasn’t either.

My favorite room had to be the LAN party room, which had a bunch of 90s-2000s beige PCs with Unreal Tournament 99, Quake, and other era appropriate games. I got to play UT99 on a Gateway (my family’s first computer was a Gateway) on a glorious CRT monitor and speakers with fuzzy covers. Exactly how it was meant to be played, and made possible over 20 years later!

Another highlight was the Thinkpad lady who was somehow mobbed every time I went by her table, but still generously took the time to take a look at an old i-series I had been holding on to and tell me that it was a piece of crap. I hope someone picked it up from the free table.

There was also the guy with a tricked out Altair (or some similar mini computer) who became increasingly annoyed at James and I as we asked questions like “how do you program it”, “what does this button do”, “how do you even use it”, etc.

Finally, we did a tour of the museum itself. It’s always a treat.

The IBM 1401 Lab demo is particularly fun:

Here are some pictures James took of some of some very attractive machines:

All in all, a great trip not only to the event but to SV itself. See you next year!