Upgrading the Computer History Museum

The Silicon Valley institution is beginning an ambitious effort to improve the way it tells the story of computing and of such tech pioneers as HP, Apple, and Google

By Aaron Ricadela

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The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., is a geek's paradise. Its warehouse-style exhibit room is laden with old Macs, supercomputers, and reel-to-reel storage tapes.

It houses relics like a five-ton mechanical calculator from the 19th century and curios such as the "kitchen computer," a hulking red-and-white recipe-storing machine with a built-in cutting board that was sold by Neiman Marcus in the '60s. The museum has witnessed 15 wedding receptions of couples who chose to celebrate amid the mainframes and minicomputers.

Yet much of the museum, which houses one of the world's largest collections of tech arcana, remains barely accessible to a broader audience, and draws just 80,000 visitors a year. (Just down the freeway the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose drew nearly 630,000 visitors last year.)

Version 2.0

So the Computer History Museum is taking early steps in an ambitious effort to catapult its collection into the 21st century.

On July 1, visitors got their first glimpse at what the museum's chief executive, John Hollar, calls "Version 2.0 of the Computer History Museum." A new exhibit, "The Silicon Engine," is a 50th-anniversary history of the invention of the silicon chip that ushered in the modern era of computing (see "Retelling Computer History"). The display will feature a mini-theater with a narrated movie that tells the story of the people and companies that built the chip industry. Audio listening stations let attendees delve into deeper information about topics, and artifacts including electronics and engineering notes lay clearly labeled beneath glass display cases.

The more professional approach to showing some of the museum's 100,000 artifacts and hundreds of hours of video footage—most of which are currently socked away in storage—is a preview of techniques Hollar and his curatorial staff will use in an overhaul of the entire museum scheduled to open in October 2010. The renovation will double the museum's exhibit space to 25,000 square feet and aim to help visitors construct a story line around the collection, says Hollar.

It's a quantum leap for a museum that currently provides scant information alongside the collected computers and provides only glimpses of the people behind the cavalcade of musty machines. "Who they are, how they did it, what they had to overcome to do it—that has to be translated for the general public," says Harvard Business School historian Richard S. Tedlow, who became the museum's first "resident scholar" in January. "That's the gulf the industry has to bridge if it's to tell its story in a way that's understandable to the general public."

Telling the Tales

Hulking, careworn mainframes and supercomputers sit behind railings in a cavernous room that's just a step more polished than a storage area. Bunches of old PCs stand stacked on industrial metal shelving with only small labels identifying them. There's a dearth of the kinds of hands-on, interactive displays that are de rigueur in museums today.

Making the computer industry's history more accessible to the public could help jog interest in computing at a time when the U.S. is perceived to be falling behind in engineering. "There's a diminished interest in the student population in science and technology," says Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, who has donated money to the museum. "If you lose track of where things come from, you're doomed to make the same mistakes again."

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