Fun, games and storytelling were the order of the day at this year's 10th Vintage Computer Festival in Silicon Valley, which also celebrated what's held to be the first personal computer. It's a real wayback machine called the LINC, restored in a joint project between a team in St. Louis, Missouri, and the extraordinary Bay Area mountain museum, the DigiBarn Computer Museum.
Seeing the computer running again was quite a spectacle -- how easily could you reboot a 10-year-old PC, let alone a midlife one? Another highlight was the panel remembering 1962, and being stopped from over-reminiscing by threat of a deftly wielded, hooked stick. Luckily the celebration cake was more recent, and arrived complete with personalized digital art decoration. This drew almost as much interest as the LINC.
