When the two curators from the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley first saw the German warehouse, they couldn't believe it.
Hundreds of square feet of space was packed with hundreds of boxes of every shape and size, some sealed, some open; some neatly stacked, some spilling their contents over their sides. In among the boxes were computers huge and small and related machines. Some were in excellent shape, those near the warehouse doors and exposed to the elements rusting and covered in bird droppings.
They would have 10 days to explore every piece of machinery and every box to determine which bits of this computing Aladdin's cave would be shipped back to California to be carefully archived or put on display, and which would go for scrap metal a week later.
They would have less than a week to pack and prepare for international transport, the seven, 13 x 10 x 10ft shipping containers full of items they decided to keep.
This, says the history museum's executive director and chief executive John Toole, is an extraordinary collection of computing history that will now find a new home in Mountain View at the museum. About 70 per cent are items that chronicle the development of computing and related machinery in Europe, and about 15 per cent are old IBM machines - all of it destined for meltdown until someone in Germany at the last moment thought to contact the American museum.
"It turned out to be a real treasure trove of international things. Someone had collected these things over many, many years and shoved it all in the warehouse," says Toole. "He was just a fanatical kind of collector, as some of us here tend to be."
The collector apparently had been unable to continue to pay for the warehouse and had been ordered to clear the premises.
"No one in Germany had appeared to want it," says Toole.
Once the containers arrive in California, Toole says it will be a long, arduous task to closely assess each item, catalogue and archive it. One of the first priorities will be to unpack any boxes with media - items such as disks and tapes - because they are the most perishable and conservators will want to see if data is intact and salvageable.
Other items will go into storage for about a year as the museum finalises its new offsite storage plan and creates room for a new centrepiece exhibit, a computer history timeline promised for 2009, to be "guest curated" by eminent computer historian and former London Museum of Science curator Doron Swade (see above).
Toole marvels that such a collection of material was available at all. There are no experts buying and selling collections of computing items in the way that one finds expert museum dealers in art or other areas of science and history. That means one can stumble across such a find as the German collection but also that such collections can easily be lost as most people do not recognise their value.
Toole knows of only one professional auction held so far of computer items - objects belonging to J Presper Eckart and James Mauchley, credited with building the first computer, the Eniac, in the US during the second World War. They all went for prohibitively high prices, he says.
With the German acquisition - the largest the museum has made - Toole notes the Computer History Museum will have the biggest and broadest collection of European items in the world.
"The important thing is one, that they're saved, and two, that we now have the ability to use these things and to send them around the world for exhibits."
www.computerhistory.org
