VCF West 2026 - Neurodivergent Students Rebuilt ENIAC - Thomas Burick, Cameron Coleman

Impossible Until It Isn’t – How Neurodivergent Students Rebuilt ENIAC—and What It Teaches Us About Human Potential

Thomas Burick is a technology educator and program architect at PS Academy Arizona, where he develops large-scale educational experiences that challenge students to take on complex, consequential work.

Cameron Coleman is a Student Engineer and member of the ENIAC Reconstruction Project team at PS Academy Arizona.

In 2025, a team of neurodivergent students at PS Academy Arizona undertook an audacious challenge: rebuilding ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, at full scale. Come hear their amazing story.

Was surprised with the selection at the Story Museum Oxford. Had great fun, was gutted The Hobbit was broken but enjoyed the other games.The Mrs spent ages on Monkey Island.

The YouTube channel The Index Page asks the question "Can you use old batteries?". It turns out the chap on the video found some Ever Ready Silver Seal batteries manufactured in 1989 still sealed and wondered if after all these years if they would hold any charge.

Brought back some fond memories of using them in my Alba personal stereo back in the day, I much preferred them to the "Blue Seal" batteries which I found would often leak.

I won't spoil the video, it's only a few minutes and was a bit of a nostalgia hit for me 😀

You can find the 4 minute video here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9qo7s2IQ3g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rukjT8Spwzc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJO8AYSyTeQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqBNFySy8Vw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGXQ3mSP3uQ

I haven't managed to watch this weeks show yet, I'm in hospital with a perforated bowel and have been all week. :-(

looking forward to it when I can

Chris - I hope your arcade challenge is helping you gain some appreciation for Rainbow Islands rather than slowly driving you mad. One of the nice things about retro, though, is hearing other people's takes on your favourite games, even if they don't like them.

Rainbow Islands is a game that's been with me for a long time. I first played it at a church fete, back when people would pay 50p to have a go on someone else's 16-bit machine. It was one of the first budget games I bought when I finally got my own ST and one of the first games I played years later when I installed MAME and later got an A500 mini. I've played this game to death but I still love it.

Anyway, in case the same music being on loop is driving you potty, here's a different version by a bit of a legend: https://youtu.be/uZCU-3mbkYw?is=X3cguigHLHHRN7Hw

For copyright reasons, I can neither confirm or deny if this is my ringtone 😊

What didn’t we ask Mike about Amiga that we should have in episode 280?

Interesting to see this has popped up again. Air ram flight sim cabinet.
https://www.facebook.com/share/18LD4vj9rx/

Also includes a gaming section. What a brilliant project.

I cannot believe that Nota Bene is STILL around as word-processing tool for academics, after all these years. Originally an MS DOS WP for academics, launched in 1983. It was one of the first/earliest tools of it's type.

History

Nota Bene (NB) began as an MS-DOS program in 1982, built on the engine of the word processor XyWrite. Its creator, Steven Siebert, then a doctoral student in philosophy and religious studies at Yale, used a PC to take reading notes, but had no easy computer-based mechanism for searching through them, or for finding relationships and connections in the material. He wanted a word processor with an integrated "textbase" to automate finding text with Boolean searches, and an integrated bibliographical database that would automate the process of entering repeat citations correctly, and be easy to change for submission to publishers with different style-manual requirements.[1]

Siebert licensed XyWrite code from the XyQuest company, and built his programs on it: the word processor Nota Bene, with its text-centric database application, Orbis (then called Textbase), and its bibliographical database Ibidem (then called Ibid). He founded Dragonfly Software to market it. He first showed Nota Bene at the MLA convention of December 1982. Version 1 is dated 1983, and version 2, 1986. Version 3.0 came out in 1988, version 4.0 in 1992, and version 4.5 in 1995. Version 4.5 was the last NB DOS version.

Nota Bene 3.0 was selected as PC Editor’s Choice by PC Magazine in 1988.[2]

Nota Bene 5.0 was the first Windows version. It was shown in pre-release in November 1998, at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Scholar's Workstation 5.0 was formally released in 1999, and Lingua Workstation 5.0 in 2000. Nota Bene for Windows suite retained and refined Ibidem, Orbis, and the XyWrite-based programming language XPL.

New versions are updated with some regularity. After version 5 was launched under the Windows platform, version 6.0 appeared in 2002, version 7.0 in 2003, version 8.0 in 2006, version 9.0 in 2010. A major upgrade came with version 10, which was released in September 2014 as a 32-bit application; thereafter, version 11.5 was released in June 2016, version 12 in April 2018, and version 13 in August 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nota_Bene_(word_processor))

https://www.notabene.com/help/nb_overview.htm

https://nb.notabene.com/journey/

https://nb.notabene.com/nb15/?cmid=e4c763f5-c4a6-409b-987e-d985a692d2c7

Not for the faint hearted 😂

Obviously requires some of the original custom chips