Imagine the loss, 100 years from now, if museums hadn't begun preserving the artifacts of the computer age. The last few decades offer proof positive of why museums must collect continuously—to document technological and social transformations already underway.
The Museum's collections contain mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, and handheld devices. A Cray2 supercomputer is part of the collections, along with one of the towers of IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in 1997. Other artifacts range from personal computers to ENIAC, the Altair, and the Osborne 1. Computer components and peripherals, games, software, manuals, and other documents are part of the collections. Some of the instruments of business include adding machines, calculators, typewriters, dictating machines, fax machines, cash registers, and photocopiers. |
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Selected Objects |
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1904 Replica of the Ritty Model 1 Cash Register
After the Civil War, as American cities and businesses grew, businessmen increasingly hired strangers to assist customers. It was all too easy for clerks and barkeepers to keep part of ...
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Altair 8800 Microcomputer
Not long after Intel introduced its 8080 chip, a small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) announced a computer kit called the Altair, which ...
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Apple II Microcomputer, “Black Apple”
This Black Apple, model number A2S1048B, was a version of the Apple II Plus made by Apple Computer, Inc. and sold only to educational institutions by Bell & Howell, at ...
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ENIAC Accumulator #2
The ENIAC was a large, general-purpose digital computer built to compute ballistics tables for U.S. Army artillery during World War II. Occupying a room 30 feet by 50 feet, ENIAC—the ...
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Hollerith Tabulating Machine
During the 1880s, the engineer Herman Hollerith devised a set of machines for compiling data from the United States Census. Hollerith's tabulating system included a punch for entering data about ...
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International Dial Time Recorder Clock
Showing up for work punctually, at an official time, became expected behavior toward the end of the 19th century, as more and more people worked for others rather than for ...
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Log Book With Computer Bug
American engineers have been calling small flaws in machines "bugs" for over a century. Thomas Edison talked about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s. When the first computers were ...
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Microsoft Windows NT OS/2 Design Workbook
This binder contains the original design specifications for OS/2 NT, an operating system designed by Microsoft that eventually became Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft's 16-bit operating system, Windows, ...
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Terminal Interchange from PANAMAC Airlines Reservation System
The PANAMAC, Pan American's first worldwide airline reservation management system, was installed in 1964, and used the IBM 7080 Data Processing System. PANAMAC linked hundreds of agent sets throughout the ...
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The Guardian IMY2KC Baseball Cap
In the early days of electronic computers, memory was not as efficient or inexpensive as it is today. To save memory space, programs stored as few digits as possible for ...
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Type Writer
Remington put its writing machines on the market in 1874 at a price of $125. The new Type Writer owed some of its identity to the sewing machines that Remington ...
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Xerox 914 Plain Paper Copier
Introduced in 1959, the Xerox 914 plain paper copier revolutionized the document-copying industry. The culmination of inventor Chester Carlson's work on the xerographic process, the 914 was fast and economical. ...
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Related Items from the Archives Center |
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Harvard University’s Computation Laboratory
Grace Murray Hopper’s papers, 1944-1965, include this photograph of where she worked from 1944 to 1949 on the early development of electronic computing.
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