Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) maintains the record of the longest computer conference, which dates back to 1976. Since the advent of personal computers, TCF has been providing supplier space, exchange meetings, seminars and keynote speeches. But until now, all this knowledge only applies to those who are willing to follow the tour in the northeast of the United States, because it has jumped between different venues for decades.
Or at least it used to be. Like the 2019 coronavirus disease, TCF is forced to virtualize in many events, which means that for the first time, all talks are actually recorded. Over the weekend, organizers announced that all talks and demonstrations in 2020 and 2021 were uploaded to a new YouTube channel and promoted to a global audience.
Bill Gates worked at TCF in 1989
Two years may not sound like much, especially considering that there are more than 40 years left to count. However, due to the large amount of content in the annual activities, TCF YouTube channel is currently hosting more than 80 lectures, from live music performances to deep diving on Apollo navigation computers and quantum computing. No matter what you are interested in, you are likely to find one or two speeches about it in this impressive series.
When we visited this legendary Conference for the last time, our only real complaint was that all the speeches were not recorded. The six hour event was packed with more than 40 speeches, and participants could only see a small part of them. The nature of virtualization obviously makes it much easier to save all these incredible content for future viewing, but it is unclear whether the organizers can maintain this momentum in 2023, when TCF is expected to be available again.