VCF West ran August 1–2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The museum building was completed in 1995 for Silicon Graphics as its executive briefing center and showroom.
The show occupied four distinct spaces. The main exhibit hall held the bulk of it, with tables around the perimeter and several clusters of tables in the middle. Smaller rooms nearby handled consignment sales. The corridor between the exhibit hall and the auditorium was given over to vendors. Tucked in the back was the freebie room, where attendees drop off hardware, books, and ephemera for anyone who wants them. Tim Swenson brought a stack of Tandy books he had ended up with from the Bill Miller collection and did not need. They did not last long.
The exhibits cover a wide range: Xerox systems, a great many Ataris, Macs, early PCs, gaming consoles. One exhibitor showed nothing but Iomega drives.
Two exhibits sat next to each other and will interest anyone on the British side of the hobby. The first was a Sinclair collection assembled by a British ex-pat: a replica MK14, ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum, Spectrum+, Spectrum +3, and QL, with a TS1000 and TS2068 present but unpowered. Tim had met him at VCF West in 2024, and left a few copies of ZXzine with him to hand out. Beside him was another ex-pat showing Acorn machines, including a BBC Master and an Archimedes. He noted that Acorn did sell some systems in the US, but very few; Tim’s own BBC Micro, bought years ago back in DC, had come out of the Baltimore Public School District.
Tim met with Greg Bennett at the event. Greg was only the second person from the Timex/Sinclair user group he has met in person.
Among the vendors was a seller of old computer books, where Tim picked up a first edition of Programming Perl — still sealed, with the quick reference guide — for three dollars.