Welcome to the 2nd Update mini-conference on Saturday May 4th, 14:00!

[Anke Stüber]

Hi all,

you're invited to the Update computer club's second mini-conference!
Just like last year [0], the focus will be on retrocomputing.

When:  Saturday, May 4th, 14:00
Where: Uppsala University, ITC building 1, room 1111 [1]

The entrance doors to the building are closed on weekends. We'll post a
phone number on the door that you can call to be let in.

You're encouraged to bring along friends and peculiar computer hardware!

Also, feel free to announce your participation so that we know a little
about the amount of interest for this gathering.

If you have any questions, contact zeltophil at update.uu.se or the Update
board at styrelsen at update.uu.se.

Hope to see you there,
Anke (zeltophil)

=== Schedule ===

14:00 – Opening

14:15 – Björn Victor (Uppsala University): Restoring global chaos –
communications interoperability of an ancient network protocol

I will describe and demonstrate Chaosnet, a networking protocol
developed for Lisp machines and ITS at MIT around 1975, and how its
various link-layer implementations for emulated and physical systems
(e.g. Symbolics 3600, CADR/usim, Lambda/ld, PDP-10/klh10, VAX/simh) were
integrated by developing a "bridge" program which interconnects them.
Chaosnet packets can currently be transported over Ethernet, IP, UDP,
TLS and named Unix sockets. This has allowed the creation of a "global
Chaosnet" which currently has 15-20 nodes. Its main hub is at Update.

15:15 – Herbert Lange (University of Gothenburg): A short history of
end-user programming

It is not always possible to draw a clear line between software
developers and end users. There can be situations where end users create
programs on their own, which can be called "end-user programming" (sv.
"anveckling"). Common examples are spreadsheets where advanced users can
develop elaborate code to perform relevant tasks, or macro languages.
Furthermore, methods have been developed to help potentially untrained
users to perform programming tasks like natural programming and visual
programming. This talk puts a spotlight on several historic highlights
where users are empowered to contribute their own ideas to the software
they are using.

15:45 – Break

16:15 – Angelo Papenhoff (Humboldt University of Berlin): A whirlwind
tour through PDPs

This talk will give an overview of DEC's early PDPs (1, 4, 5, 6) and
their spiritual predecessors, the TX-0 and Whirlwind I. The focus will
be on the instruction set and hardware organization of these machines,
with some notes on the historical context and the technology that was
used to build them.

17:00 – Pontus Pihlgren (Update): Get to know the PDP-8 through
emulation

The PDP-8 suitably has eight instructions. In this talk we will work
through the core instruction set and describe them in terms of
emulation. The end result is a working emulator in less than 1000 lines
of C code.

18:00 – Guided tour of Update's premises

[0] https://www.update.uu.se/wiki/doku.php/projekt:mini-conference#previous_conferences
[1] https://use.mazemap.com/#v=1&zlevel=1&left=17.6476257&right=17.6489132&top=59.8412592&bottom=59.8409189&sharepoitype=poi&sharepoi=380419&campusid=49