The history of the Computer History Museum

In the very first episode of what became the classic and long-running television series The Computer Chronicles, there’s a visit to The Computer Museum in Boston. The museum had already been running for some years - this visit is in 1983. The visit segment starts a couple of minutes in:

This was the very first episode of the Computer Chronicles, originally broadcast in September 1983, covering the history and ancestry of today’s PC.

Guests: Gary Kildall, DRI; Gordon Bell, DEC; Herb Lechner, SRI; Cyril Yansouni, HP

Products/Demos: HP 150 PC, Computer Museum, TX-1 Computer.

From TCM’s website, now found on CHM’s site, we have a timeline and this summary:

The Computer Museum was founded by Ken Olsen and Gordon and Gwen Bell in 1975. The first exhibit was in a converted closet at Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1979 it officially became an exhibition site operated by DEC in Marlboro, Massachusetts. It opened to the public in 1984 when the museum was moved to downtown Boston. In 1998, the museum was relocated to Silicon Valley and has been reborn as the current Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Read Gordon’s story of The Computer Museum’s evolution here.

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