The Vintage Computer Festival East is a once-a-year museum exhibit in Wall, New Jersey that shows off vacuum tube and transistor computers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. While our own John Timmer visited the museum several years ago, we were long overdue to check back on the exhibition. VCF's newest addition made the trip well-worth it.

The incredible piece of big iron you see in the first picture above arrived yesterday. It's a one-of-a-kind analog computer built for MIT, so it doesn't really have a name or model number. Built by George A. Philbrick Researches in 1958, the volunteers at the science center have just taken to calling it "George."

After this relic arrived at the museum, volunteers were up late into the night assembling it just for the show. It's now mostly put together but non-functional. While many museums aim solely to preserve an item as is, VCF actually refurbishes the computers in its collection. A lot of work remains, but the group will clean years of gunk off the unit in hopes to eventually get George in working order. One of the first upgrades will be replacing the 400 Volt power supply with something a little more modern—and less lethal.

The whole computer is modular with patch cables connecting the functions on each panel. The unit is covered in holes about the size of a large headphone jack to receive the cables, and on the floor to the right you can see a panel that is just for patch cables. Each module served a specific purpose, for instance above the monitor you can see panels labeled "Universal Multiplier - Divider," and on the top left there is a panel labeled "Arbitrary Function Component" for options related to graphing. Apparently there is no "correct" configuration for the modules—engineers at MIT would rearrange the computer about once a week.

Beyond George, VCF hosts plenty more computing history. We saw a replica of an Apple I, along with a bunch of other early Apple computers. And visitors could find an early robot that would look right at home in Star Wars or even a piece of ENIAC.

Another highlight for us (third picture above) is a model of MOBIDIC. This "MOBIle DIgital Computer" was built into a semi-trailer, making it one of the first "mobile" computers. It actually required two trailers, and the model shows the one that houses the computing bits. The other trailer contained generators and power supplies just to power the thing—a computer that literally runs on gasoline! MOBIDIC's power requirements demanded that it be one of the world's first transistor computers, as vacuum tubes would need even more power.

The US Military funded MOBIDIC in the 1960s as a way to bring a computer to a problem, rather than use the horrible bandwidth at the time (the telegraph) to bring a problem to a computer. Manufactured by Sylvania, the device wasn't even a one-off. The company manufactured several for the Military, and Sylvania even offered a commercial version called the S940.

The real point of this giant rolling beast was to communicate on the battlefield. A MOBIDIC would collect data from multiple sources and distribute the information to those that need it. To make this happen, the Military developed an early computer communication protocol called "Fieldata," which let the Military's computers talk to each other. Fieldata's data formatting became the basis for ASCII, a common character encoding still used today.

If you're interested in seeing computers like this in person (and actually playing with them!), the Vintage Computer Festival East is open this weekend, April 18-19, in Wall, New Jersey. If you go, tell 'em Ars Technica sent you.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo