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Computers and software rank among the newest of industrial technologies. Yet
their social and economic values have led to a very significant number of museums
and historical websites. This is due partly to the wealth created by computers and
software and partly to the donations and contributions of major companies such
as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and others for preserving the early knowledge
of the computing and software industries. Readers with an interest in computing
history are urged to visit as many of the museums as possible. The websites of the
museums also provided data for this topic, including several timelines of computer
evolution.
Boston Computer Museum
This museum opened in 1979 and operated as an independent museum until
1999, when it merged with the Museum of Science in Boston. The Boston Com-
puter Museum also started an affiliate in California in 1996, which evolved into
the current Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. (I founded
a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1984. While living in Mas-
sachusetts, I made many visits to the Boston Computer Museum with colleagues,
friends, and relatives.)
In the 1970s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a major competitor to the Silicon
Valley region of California as a hotbed of computer and software research, thanks
in part to MIT and other Massachusetts universities.
The museum received some materials from the Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC) Museum, which had been started in 1979 by Gordon Bell and Gwen Bell.
In 1982, the museum became a nonprofit corporation and soon opened a facility
on the Boston waterfront.
Between the materials on display at the Boston Science Museum and the Com-
puter History Museum in Mountain View, California, the bulk of the Boston Com-
puter Museum's exhibits are still available. However, the demise of the actual Bo-
ston museum and its reemergence in Silicon Valley shows how computing and
software technologies shifted from east to west between the 1970s and 1990s.
Computer History Museum;
www.computerhistory.org
This museum is now located in a large and impressive building in Mountain
View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The museum started as an offshoot
of the Boston Computer Museum but soon outgrew its parent. Eventually, the
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