The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on society.
The museum's origins date to 1968 when Gordon Bell began a quest for a historical collection and, at that same time, others were looking to preserve the Whirlwind computer. The resulting Museum Project had its first exhibit in 1975, located in a converted coat closet in a DEC lobby. In 1978, the museum, now The Digital Computer Museum (TDCM), moved to a larger DEC lobby in Marlboro, Mass. Maurice Wilkes presented the first lecture at TDCM in 1979 – the presentation of such lectures has continued to the present time.
TDCM incorporated as The Computer Museum (TCM) in 1982. In 1984, TCM moved to Boston, locating on Museum Wharf.
In 1996/1997, The TCM History Center (TCMHC) in Silicon Valley was established; a site at Moffet Field was provided by NASA (an old building that was previously the Naval Base furniture store) and a large number of artifacts were shipped there from TCM.
In 1999, TCMHC incorporated and TCM ceased operation, shipping its remaining artifacts to TCMHC in 2000. The name TCM had been retained by the Boston Museum of Science so, in 2000, the name TCMHC was changed to Computer History Museum (CHM).
In 2003, CHM opened its new building (previously occupied by Silicon Graphics), at 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd in Mountain View, California, to the public.
The Computer History Museum claims to house the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world (the Heinz Nixdorf Museum, Paderborn, Germany, has more items on display but a far smaller total collection). This includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects such as a Cray-1 supercomputer as well as a Cray-2, Cray-3, the Utah teapot, the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, an Apple I, and an example of the first generation of Google's racks of custom-designed web servers. The collection comprises nearly 90,000 objects, photographs and films, as well as 4,000 feet (1,200 m) of cataloged documentation and several hundred gigabytes of software.
The museum's 25,000-square-foot (2,300 m2) exhibition "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, opened to the public on January 13, 2011. It covers the history of computing in 20 galleries, from the abacus to the Internet. The entire exhibition is also available online.
The museum has several additional exhibits, including a Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840s and constructed by the Science Museum, a restoration of a historic PDP-1 minicomputer, and a new exhibit on Google Street View and the history of "surrogate travel".
Former media executive John Hollar was appointed CEO of The Computer History Museum in July 2008.
In 2012 the museum began with the collection of source code of important software, beginning with the APL programming language. In February 2013 Adobe Systems, Inc.donated the Photoshop 1.0.1 source code to the collection.
A computer museum is devoted to the study of historic computer hardware and software, where a museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment", as defined by the International Council of Museums.
For the former Boston museum called "The Computer Museum" see The Computer Museum, Boston.
Some computer museums exist within larger institutions, such as the Science Museum in London and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Others, such as the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the American Computer Museum in Bozeman,Montana, the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge are dedicated specifically to computing. Some specialize in the early history of computing, others in the era that started with the first personal computers such as the Apple I and Altair 8800, Apple IIs, older Apple Macintoshes,Commodore Internationals, Amigas, IBM PCs and more rare computers such as the Osborne 1. Some concentrate more on research and conservation, others more on education and entertainment. There are also private collections.
The term 'museum' has expanded in common usage to encompass online collections, in much the same way other activities have made the transition ('Online shopping', 'Online Gallery' etc.). Online Museums range in type and quality from those that collate and preserve material to those that simply display photographs of hardware from other sources. They are distinct from traditional museums mainly in that the exhibits can not be physically touched or interacted with in the traditional sense.
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