A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol.
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The destruction was highlighted by Mark Howlett on Twitter, and confirmed by the Ukrainian Software and Computer Museum account, which operates museums in Kharkiv and Kyiv. The owner of the Mariupul collection, Dmitry Cherepanov, is reportedly safe, though his collection of computers, consoles, and assorted tech from fifty years of computing has been wiped out.
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I’d like to acknowledge the great human tragedy that is presently happening: the death, injury, displacement, separation and destruction. And while doing that I’d also like to ask that we avoid discussing current affairs here: anything upsetting or controversial runs a risk of starting unnecessary and off-topic arguments. One person’s statement of the obvious is another person’s challenge to common sense. We should not divide ourselves.
Meanwhile here is a short video of the museum from peaceful times:
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On the grand scale this can seem like a triviality. These are not lives. This is not a storehouse of food, or a place of great wealth that would ruin communities and lives. This was just… Things. Old Things not a whole lot of folk care about. As @EdS said. We have to acknowledge that devolving into current events out of scope is… inviting problems.
That said I feel the computing museum getting destroyed is relevant here given the whole ‘early soviet computing’ aspect. I mean evne if you reduced it down to ‘oh a bunch of knockoffs and clones’ there is value in seeing what the infancy of the home digital era looked like east of the curtain. Just like seeing what arcades were like over there.
This is sad news, but… it is sadly relevant to our interests. A lot of those machines have a whole hell of a lot of charm to them really.
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