A Festival of Retro Stuff in 2025. RetroFest '25!

Years ago, one of my colleagues came into the little office I occupied with another colleague and excitedly told me he'd just got some great concert tickets.

"I'm going to Manic Street Preachers at the NEC!" he said.

"Wow, great! I'm going to the NEC soon, too." I replied.

"What are you seeing?" came the logical question.

"Oh. Bear in the Big Blue House..."

Bear!

The reason I tell this story is because the Crashed offspring have left or are getting ready to leave home so I no longer have to admit to anyone that my weekend would consist of being entertained by an 8-foot Disney bear who has a mouse and a teddy for friends. And not forgetting Luna of course. (The highlight of the trip was buying a pair of 'Bearnoculas' so Crashed Jr1 could see the stage properly. 😊 )

Instead, I can tell people that I went to Swindon to spend my Saturday in a huge room filled with lots of old computers. Yay!

RetroFest '25 is the first event (of many I hope) at the STEAM centre in Swindon. In case you hadn't guessed STEAM is a railway museum which looks great although, this time, I didn't go in to the museum itself. 

The event took place in a single large room off to the right of the museum entrance. A goody bag was handed to me as I walked in. Mrs Crashed got one too, so that was double swag for me. 😊  If you are into your retro computers then you would recognise a fair few of the attendees, if not by sight, certainly by name.

Binary Dinosaurs (https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk) was my first port of call. I wanted to say hello as Adrian had been a big help in my efforts with the Torch XXX and it was good to meet finally. He had several rare machines on display including the Jupiter Ace and Lambda IQ8300.

The Ace is an oddity from the 1980's as it actually uses 'Forth' as it's built in language rather than BASIC. No doubt the team behind it felt that BASIC was not the way to go(to) - see what I did there? - and that we were all really maths nerds at heart. It failed and, as per the info on Adrian's site, the company went under a year or so after release.

I have to be honest that I'd never heard of the Lambda computer at all. It is basically a clone of the ZX81 with a slightly better keyboard. 

On the picture you can also see the Laser 200 with a current status of 'cursed'. 😄 This one is still not working despite Adrian's best efforts!

And, last but not least, the Commodore P500, a MOS 6509 machine that disappeared quickly as the sales of the Commodore 64 accelerated far in excess of Commodore's expectations. A super rare and interesting piece of Commodore history (and an early sign of CBMs potential for management idiocy...).

Old (but gold) computers

Lisa. A computer priced as if made of gold.
(c$31,000 when released!!)

CPT 8250

The display of the CPT also features a subtle Easter egg for anyone who follows Usagi Electric on YouTube. I wonder if he ever realised what an impact a programming error might have on us retro nerds?

'hellorld'

Next I managed to get a demo of a prototype unit that interfaces into a CPC46x machine over at the Flamelily table (https://shop.flamelily.co.uk/). This little unit allows disk images to be used simply with the Amstrad. Other than my lack of experience using disk commands on the CPC machines (it was noisy too and my middle aged ears struggled to hear a couple of instructions) it looked great and I can't wait for the final product to be available as my CPC is one machine that has not had much love recently.

My arm trying to type on the CPC.

By this point it was getting very busy so I didn't get too many more opportunities to talk at length with anyone but I did see several familiar faces and a familiar hat. I said 'Hi' on the way past.  

Lee from "Lee Smith's Workshop",
and Yawning Angel Retro from
er..."Yawning Angel Retro" 

I did manage to get a demo of the Prestel and Micronet setup which was very interesting. As the flyer said, "Online shopping before the internet". The history is really, really interesting and shows how the UK was at the cutting edge of online services, even before the French minitel. I guess we just weren't ready for it ("But your kids are gonna love it" - Marty McFly, November 1955).

Micronet, Prestel et al.
I always wanted to get on to Micronet...

One thing I did notice as we wandered around was that there were rather a lot of Sony TV/monitor units. I assume because they were a very handy size of CRT. And I completely agree. I have a six inch Sony TV that is really handy for plugging composite into. Mine is certainly missing some of the inputs of the ones in use at the show, but it's a Trinitron and it's aweswome. I digress..

Some more photos of the excellent exhibits:

Commodore Max - A precusor to the more successful 
Commodore 64

Atari 2600 (heavy sixer?) with CompuMate attachments.
A membrane keyboard is supplied with the cartridge that has
BASIC, Music Composer and Magic Easel 
(source: Wikipedia)

A barrel load of EPROM readers/writers and other cool
stuff including a couple of Newbrains (top right).
I actually have a DataMan S4 next to my bed (true story).

A Torch Unicorn - effectively a hard disk
for the BBC Micro. My Torch Triple X comes
from the same stable (ya think?)

A more 'modern' Atari. Still about 30 years old!

VT2500 Terminal. A classic.

The Grand-daddy of them all. The Altair 8800.
This one has a cool perspex case so you can see all the S100
bus goodness. Nice.

Various early games consoles including (L-R):
Philips G7000, Philips G7400, and Creativision.

That's a lot of calculators. I think one of these 
models got me through GCSE maths...

Commodore SX64. The screen quality really
is quite something given its age!

Bright and crisp. A great CRT display.

Time to get (Psion) organised. I have some of
these in the garage with loads of programs.

Very 80's. A Vectrex vector based games system and an
Apple Macintosh. Special appearance by the Amiga 600
sneaking into the side there.

'Swag' from the show, including the
BluesSCSI v2 I bought from Flamelily.

I had a great time at the show. Next year I might head over for the Sunday when things might be a little bit less busy than the Saturday. But it was well worth a visit and, most importantly, I got to meet Binary Dinosaur who is lending me something precious that might give me an exciting update on the Torch XXX. Watch this space! (And the PCBWay pens are awesome!)