The museum’s origins date to 1968 when Gordon Bell began a quest for a historical collection and, at that same time, others were looking to preserve the Whirlwind computer. The resulting Museum Project had its first exhibit in 1975, located in a converted coat closet in a DEC lobby. In 1978, the museum, now The Digital Computer Museum (TDCM), moved to a larger DEC lobby in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Maurice Wilkes presented the first lecture at TDCM in 1979 – the presentation of such lectures has continued to the present time.

In 1999, TCMHC incorporated and TCM ceased operation, shipping its remaining artifacts to TCMHC in 2000. The name TCM had been retained by the Boston Museum of Science so, in 2000, the name TCMHC was changed to Computer History Museum (CHM).

The Computer History Museum claims to house the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world. This includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects such as a Cray-1 supercomputer as well as a Cray-2, Cray-3, the Utah teapot, the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, an Apple I, and an example of the first generation of Google’s racks of custom-designed web servers.

The collection comprises nearly 90,000 objects, photographs and films, as well as 1,200 m of cataloged documentation and several hundred gigabytes of software.The CHM oral history program conducts video interviews around the history of computing, This includes computer systems, networking, data processing, memory, and data-storage.

The museum’s 25,000 sq ft (2,300 m2) exhibit “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” opened to the public on January 13, 2011. It covers the history of computing in 20 galleries, from the abacus to the Internet. The entire exhibition is also available online.

The museum has a Liquid Galaxy in the “Going Places: A History of Silicon Valley” exhibit. The exhibit has 20 preselected locations that visitors can fly to on the Liquid Galaxy.

Other exhibits include a restoration of a historic PDP-1 minicomputer, two restored IBM 1401 computers, and an exhibit on the history of autonomous vehicles, from torpedoes to self-driving cars.

The CHM is also home to an extensive collection of software, curated by Al Kossow, a veteran of Apple Computer whom the museum hired in 2006. Kossow is responsible for preservation and accession of software in the museum, as well as for developing CHM’s software-themed exhibitions. Kossow was a contributor to the museum long before being hired full-time and is the proprietor of Bitsavers, a large online repository of historical computer manuals and archived software and firmware acquired from his own collection and through donations from his peers.

According to en.wikipedia.org; computerhistory.org. Source of photos: internet