Software engineer Josh Dersch, who owns more than 200 vintage computers and devices, is part of a growing community restoring machines like the Atari, Commodore and IBM systems that preceded today's laptops and phones. This year's Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View drew more than 3,500 attendees and marked Apple's 50th anniversary with a panel featuring co-founders Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.
Erik Klein, president of the Vintage Computer Federation, said demand is rising in online marketplaces, with rare machines like the Apple-1 fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars. Klein himself once had 150 systems crammed into his home before culling his collection, calling it an 'albatross,' and now organizes festivals instead of hoarding hardware.
Dersch's centerpiece exhibit was a restored Xerox Alto, the 1970s Xerox PARC machine credited as an ancestor of the modern graphical interface that reportedly influenced both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Sellam Ismail, who ran the first such festival in 1997 with about 150 hobbyists, has since helped launch similar events in Argentina, Germany and Switzerland, with more than a dozen festivals now spread across three continents.
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