A blog post, photo gallery and video from the CHM
With 2,056 total artifacts—1,127 of them physical objects—the acquisition was so large that it led CHM to expand its storage capacity
…we marked seven tractor-trailers’ worth of objects to make the trans-Atlantic voyage, through the Panama Canal, and back up the West Coast to San Francisco, where the trucks drove it to the Museum.
Short video overview of the find:
I wonder if they found any interesting software?
From the article:
The first rows (A0–C13) mostly contained pallets stacked with documents and media. Despite occupying only 20% of the area, these items consumed nearly 40% of our time. Their condition ranged from water-damaged and moldy to surprisingly well-preserved. We encountered a wide variety of media: large disk packs, Diablo and RK05 types, paper tape, punch cards (both 80- and 96-column), magnetic tape, DECtape, magnetic strips, cartridges, and floppy disks—most of which contained source code or applications, with a few holding data.
Also
On July 26, 2006, CHM curator Dag Spicer received an unexpected email from a freelance tax advisor based in Dortmund, Germany. It described what appeared to be a lost trove of rare computers abandoned in a warehouse in the town of Castrop-Rauxel.
Located in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region, the town was a center of coal mining and fuel production during World War II, and a frequent target of Allied bombing raids. Was it possible anything so important could have survived? The intrepid Spicer aimed to find out.
This is his account of what happened next.
[…]
Inside a three-story warehouse the size of a jet airplane hangar, we encountered hundreds of historical computing artifacts. Spanning from the 1930s punched card era to obscure Cold War-era Eastern Bloc systems to more modern German and European computing systems, the warehouse was a treasure trove, a real-world timeline of computing history.
