Upgrading the Computer History Museum

(page 2 of 2)

The museum, one of only a few of its kind in the U.S., boasts an impressive collection, including an original IBM (IBM) PC, a wood-encased Apple (AAPL) computer prototype signed by co-founder Steve Wozniak, Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) first pocket calculator, and one of Google's (GOOG) earliest servers. "The Computer History Museum has possibly one of the most interesting collections of equipment, and some of it's still running," Cerf says. But most visitors may be stumped without a volunteer guide. "If you don't have access to a docent, you may not get a lot wandering around," he says.

Former Digital Equipment executive Gordon Bell, now a researcher at Microsoft (MSFT), started the museum in 1979 with his wife, and the collection completed a move from Boston to Silicon Valley in 2000. The museum operates on a budget of about $5 million a year, drawn in part from a $38 million endowment that includes a $15 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Other income comes from events and the $85 million in donations the museum has raised in the past 10 years. Admission is free.

Interviews with Tech Pioneers

But the museum's board, which includes Bell and other computer-industry luminaries like former Palm (PALM) CEO Donna Dubinsky, has pushed management to do more with its artifacts, which include more than 300 "oral history" interview videos of tech pioneers including Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Wozniak, says Kirsten Tashev, the museum's vice-president for collections and exhibitions. The museum has been negotiating with friends of Steve Jobs to get the Apple CEO to tell his company's story on film. So far, it's had no success, Tashev says.

Hollar, who took over as CEO a year ago after launching educational Web sites at PBS and Pearson (PSO) over the past 15 years, says he wants to make the tech industry's pioneers more relevant to visitors' lives. Among America's roughly 12,000 history museums, "we're one of the few where the people who made the history are around to tell it," he says. Hollar hopes to double attendance to more than 150,000 within a few months of next year's reopening.

Yet the Computer History Museum's struggles to effectively narrate 60 years of technology innovation reflect the opaque nature of the subject matter. Individual companies including Intel (INTC), IBM, and HP have preserved swaths of their history. But overall, the technology field hasn't told its story as well as others like auto making, manufacturing, and aerospace, which boast archives like the popular Deutsches Museum in Munich; the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; and DuPont's (DD) Hagley Museum & Library in Wilmington, Del.

"There's work to be done" presenting the computer industry's history to the public, says Harvard professor Tedlow. "It's important to do that work now, because many of the pioneers are still with us, and in 10 years many of those folks aren't going to be."

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek in Silicon Valley.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.