On our next visit to the Bay Area, we hope to have the time for a trip to Mountain View, to see the Computer History Museum there. Although, if we wait long enoujgh, we may not have to go father than Palo Alto, where, we foresee, a Frank Gehry building will house the collection.

“We are living through the time of transition, from there being no computers anywhere to there being computers in everything that we touch,” said Leonard J. Shustek, a venture capitalist and chairman of the museum’s board. “We owe it to the future to preserve the artifacts and stories of how that happened.”

Housed for two decades in Boston, the immense and growing collection of hardware, tech trinkets and ephemera was moved in 1996 to Silicon Valley, where it occupied various makeshift locations and served as a go-to place for technology insiders to reminisce about the heady, built-in-the-garage computer era.

Much of that history is reflected in a new exhibit, “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing,” which includes items like the first disk drive, I.B.M.’s hulking Ramac from 1956, Apple’s early personal computers like the Apple II, robots, the first arcade video games, a stack of Google’s earliest computer servers and even a table-size computer sold by Neiman Marcus in 1969 to store recipes for busy housewives.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2011 at 6:50 pm.