Computer History Museum

About

The museum's roots trace back to the 1970s, to a collection of vintage computers first displayed in the lobby of a Digital Equipment Corporation building in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Figures associated with DEC, including Gordon Bell, gathered the early machines that would eventually grow into a museum collection. The collection moved through Boston's Museum Wharf and Moffett Field in California before the museum settled into its current home in Mountain View in 2002. The building itself is a converted former Silicon Graphics facility at 1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard. Its permanent exhibition, "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing," traces the arc of computing from early calculating devices to the present. A restored PDP-1 minicomputer, an IBM 1401, and an original Apple I sit among the objects on display, letting visitors stand face to face with the machines that mark computing's timeline.