Software & Computer Museum is heading to WAWTech +Summer: retro gaming and a Commodore 64 workshop
On July 18, Warsaw will host WAWTech +Summer — according to the organizers, the city’s largest technology festival. We’re excited to share the good news: Software & Computer Museum will be there with its retro zone, and the museum’s co-founder Oleksandr Kovalenko will lead a workshop about the legendary Commodore 64.
If you happen to be in Warsaw that day, it’s a great chance to meet us far beyond Kharkiv.
What WAWTech +Summer is
WAWTech is a project by the Ukrainian IT community DOU that has grown into a major tech event in Poland’s capital.
The summer edition takes place as an open-air festival at the Tor Służewiec racecourse (Puławska 266) — one day outdoors, with no stuffy conference halls.
The organizers call it “not a conference, but a summer tech festival.” Several worlds live there at once: short keynotes and panel talks on the main stage, morning yoga and DJ sets, workshops nearby, FPV drone building, local AI stations, retro computers brought back to life, job speed dating, food trucks, a kids’ space zone, board games, ping-pong, and a Drone Lab by Liberty Ukraine Foundation where you can assemble a drone yourself.
All in all, the atmosphere is more festival than academic — and that’s exactly where we fit in.
Our retro zone
We’re bringing Retro Gaming Zone to the festival — an interactive space where classics of the last millennium are not kept behind glass, but switched on and played live.
The zone will feature:
🔹 8-bit Nintendo Famicom
🔹 16-bit Sega and SNES
🔹 Sony PlayStation 1
🔹 Commodore 64 home computer
🔹 a variety of handheld consoles
For some visitors, it will be their first encounter with the hardware their parents grew up with. For others, it will be a return to childhood, when loading a game from a cassette felt like real magic.
A joystick in your hand and the glow of an old screen make technology history feel very alive — exactly the kind of experience our museum is built around.
A computer that asks for nothing
The highlight of our participation will be the workshop “Commodore 64: No Cloud, No AI, No Subscriptions”, taking place from 11:30 to 12:30.
It will be hosted by Software & Computer Museum co-founder Oleksandr Kovalenko, who is also an IT Director at Plarium. Oleksandr was one of the three enthusiasts who opened Ukraine’s first museum of software and computers in Kharkiv in 2017, so he speaks about hardware history not from a textbook, but with a collector’s passion.
At the center of the talk is a machine that remains the best-selling home computer in history. Oleksandr will show how a device with 64 KB of memory and a processor running at around 1 MHz once outperformed Apple and IBM, became a cultural icon, and still fascinates enthusiasts today — including how an old C64 can be connected to the modern internet.
A few facts about the “people’s” computer
A few numbers help show the scale of the Commodore 64:
🔹 It launched in 1982 with a starting price of $595, far cheaper than the Apple II and IBM PC, and that affordability made it massively popular.
🔹 Guinness World Records recognizes it as the best-selling personal computer of all time. Sales estimates vary, but they are usually placed between 12 and 17 million units.
🔹 Its SID sound chip made C64 music iconic and effectively helped spark an entire chiptune culture, whose influence is still heard in electronic music today.
🔹 BASIC for the machine was licensed from a young Microsoft at the time.
The philosophy behind the workshop title was once captured best by Commodore founder Jack Tramiel: “We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes.” That idea — an affordable computer without cloud services, subscriptions, or smart assistants, fully owned by its user — is what turned the C64 into a phenomenon.
Why this matters to us
Software & Computer Museum began in Kharkiv in 2017 as a place where the history of technology could be not only seen, but felt. In May 2026, after a forced pause, we reopened our doors to visitors. That makes every opportunity to appear on an international stage especially meaningful.
For us, this trip is more than nostalgia. It’s a chance to tell a European audience about Ukrainians who preserve the history of technology, and to show that the mission is alive despite the war. It also reminds us that in the middle of the AI era, it’s worth remembering where it all began.
See you in Warsaw
If you’ll be in Warsaw on July 18, be sure to visit our retro zone at Tor Służewiec and Oleksandr Kovalenko’s workshop at 11:30.
Pick up a joystick, hear the story of the Commodore 64 from someone who knows it inside out, and see that classics never age.
Full agenda, festival details, and tickets are available at wawtech.io/summer.
See you by the Commodore 64!