The Computer Museum was a Boston, Massachusetts museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three different locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum.
Gordon and Gwen Bell, with the assistance Digital Equipment Corporation, founded the Digital Computer Museum in a former RCA building, Marlboro, MA in September 1979. The Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Museum Project was started in 1975 with a display of circuit and memory hardware in the lobby of DEC's Main (Mill) Building 12, Maynard, MA. The director appointed to lead the museum was Oliver Strimple, who moved from the Science Museum in London. In spring 1982, the Museum received non-profit charitable foundation status from the Internal Revenue Service.
In Fall 1983, The Computer Museum, which had dropped "Digital" from its title, decided to relocate to Museum Wharf in downtown Boston, sharing space with Boston Children's Museum in a renovated wool warehouse. On November 13, 1984, when the Museum officially opened to the public at its new location, the initial exhibits included the Whirlwind vacuum tube computer, the SAGE computer room and the story of Cray computers. Also given prominent display was Gordon Bell's 20-year timeline of major inventions, software developments and benchmark applications.
Visitors could sit at computers and ask questions of ELIZA, watch robots or enter the gift shop and purchase cartoonist Vernon Grant's Computer Cartoon postcards.
An exhibit on digital imaging was prepared by Geoffrey Dutton of Spatial Effects:
- Dr. Oliver Strimpel and Geoffrey Dutton planned and executed a number of exhibits for the computer graphics gallery, "The Computer and the Image." Static exhibits he produced included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, the holographic animation American Graph Fleeting and A Visualizer's Bestiary, a tableau of real-world objects that have vexed programmers attempts to render them naturalistically. Dynamic exhibits included Tempest over a Teapot, featuring Allan Newell's original ceramic teapot alongside an Adage frame buffer display of a Bezier model of it, both responding to changes in lighting that viewers create with switches. The exhibit A Window full of Polygons depicted the view of downtown Boston that visitors see from the gallery on a large pen plotter that renders the buildings' silhouettes with changing colors and patterns. We also composed descriptive text panels and technical documentation and guided Museum staff, vendors and volunteers.[1]
As the Museum began to focus more on activities for children, the exhibits included a two-story walk through a computer, a virtual fish tank and a robot theater. The Museum had, at that time, the single largest collection of robots, many of which were one of a kind. As the interactive exhibits continued to develop, artifact collecting continued in the background.
In 1996, the museum established The Computer Museum History Center in Moffett Field, California, which changed its name to the Computer History Museum in 2001.
When the Boston Museum closed in 1999, its artifacts and exhibits became part of the collection of Boston's Museum of Science, and in February 2000, the remaining historical artifacts were sent to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.[2]
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