Technology History | 1401 North Shoreline — The Museum Started in a Coat Closet at DEC

The collection inside this building started in a converted coat closet in a Digital Equipment Corporation lobby in Maynard, Massachusetts, in 1975. Gordon Bell had spent years arguing that written descriptions of machines were not enough, and that somebody had to keep the machines. Ken Olsen, who ran DEC, wanted engineers to be able to see the equipment they had worked on ten years earlier. The closet became the Digital Computer Museum in a larger DEC lobby in Marlborough, opened to the public in September 1979. The name was a pun in both directions, digital computers and Digital Equipment. Maurice Wilkes gave the opening lecture, on EDSAC, which he had built thirty years before. It incorporated as The Computer Museum in 1982 and moved in 1984 to Museum Wharf in Boston, next to the Children's Museum: eleven thousand square feet holding Whirlwind, a thirty-foot section of SAGE with its air defence consoles, a UNIVAC I and Seymour Cray's machines. Roughly half the collection went west in 1996, to an old Navy furniture store on the grounds of Moffett Field. The Boston museum closed in 1999 and the rest followed. The Boston Museum of Science kept the old name, so the western institution took a new one and became the Computer History Museum. In 2002 its board issued a $25 million bond and bought this building outright. It had been Silicon Graphics' headquarters and executive briefing centre, put up as an architectural argument about the future by a company that then declined, which is why the museum now calls the building its largest artifact. A two-year renovation costing $19 million reopened it in January 2011 around Revolution, twenty-five thousand square feet across nineteen galleries. The lobby floor is a punched card rendered in white and dark grey. Among what it holds are two of the original ARPANET interface message processors and a rack of Deep Blue, objects that exist because somebody carried them out of a building before it was cleared. That is the whole argument of the place. Most of the sites in this history have no photograph, no plaque and no surviving room, and the difference is usually one person who decided not to throw something away. Photo: Almondox, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The museum's own images are not free to reuse; this one was taken by a visitor standing outside.