In the late 1980s, a look around our little apartment in Ocean Beach revealed I had a problem. A computer problem.
I had my 8-bit Atari 800, a next-gen 16-bit Atari ST, a DOS ’386 clone, plus an old Commodore 64, an old Atari 400, and handful of handheld devices.
It seemed a shame to simply toss them, so I went to the San Diego Computer Society — an sort of umbrella group under which the San Diego Atari Computer Enthusiasts was organized — to see if there was any interest in starting a local computer museum.
Not only was there tremendous interest, but I discovered that the small but influential Computer Museum of America was already housed at Coleman College’s La Mesa campus, with exhibits in both the central foyer and in the former restaurant. (Coleman College had purchased the old La Mesa Bowl, building classrooms where the lanes had formerly been on either side of the main, central area.)
Jim and Marie Petroff had started the museum as a passion project — and both were very charismatic and persuasive. I soon found myself hired as acquisitions manager, spending my weekends and evenings going to look at potential donations.
Within a couple years, the Petroffs — who I believe mostly self-funded the museum in its early years — were renting storage units around San Diego County to allow me to keep valuable artifacts out of the landfill.
Select pieces would be rotated into the displays at Coleman College. I remember we had an IMSAI, which was an Altair clone, and a Brunsviga mechanical calculator, some punch cards, and an RCA Cosmac Elf.
We managed to get the local papers and the weekly computer magazine to write us up, and soon we had more offers coming in that we could possibly accept.
We did take select duplicates, because our goal (eventually realized) was to have a larger, dedicated “living museum” where visitors could sit down and use a working vintage computer: And so we had multiple Apple IIs, Commodore PETs, Ataris and Tandys. The thought was they wouldn’t last forever, and the more we had in storage the longer our concept could work before we had to put valuable artifacts under glass where they could no longer be touched.
It was actually a brilliant concept (and I wish it had been mine): Looking at a computer tells you nothing about what it was like to use it. When we eventually got our own building in downtown San Diego, we had signs at the entrance reading, “Please - do NOT keep your hands to yourselves!”
Students would come in on field trips, sit down at a Kaypro computer running “WordStar” (and early word processor), and look up in bewilderment wondering where the mouse was. We had charts at each station — showing the codes you would type in to indicate a boldface word or italics, how to save a file to a floppy disk, how to print.
We had another station where you could log in to a dial-up bulletin board system — which was running off another vintage PC there in the museum.
But before we got to any of that, we had a few exhibits at Coleman College, the Petroffs’ vision and generosity, and my 1990 Mazda 323 hatchback for doing the collecting.
Typically, it worked out fine. The back seats folded down, and so even the largest vintage Diablo line printers would fit in (although getting them back out over that lip on the hatchback was a challenge), along with any personal computer we ran across.
But it wasn’t always vintage PCs and videogame consoles that were being donated.
We had a huge Nixdorf mainframe with a data entry station that had horizontal sliders like something on the bridge of the USS Enterprise on “Star Trek” — fortunately, that donor delivered it to us.
But another time we got a call from a small business that was upgrading from a mainframe computer to a set of desktop PCs and servers.
I showed up on a Saturday morning, pulled into the parking lot, and found my way to our donor who was busy disconnecting everything and piling it by the front door.
This computer — it may have been an IBM 370 series — had a main processing unit housed in a cabinet the size of a home refrigerator.
I backed my Mazda up to the door as close as I could, popped the hatch, folded the back sets down, and slide the front passenger seat as far forward as it would go.
The donor and I were just able to slide the computer through the hatch by laying it on its back. It didn’t go in all the way, but I carried tie-down ropes for this purpose, and so we secured both the computer and my hatch.
We got all the peripherals — the hard drive, keyboard, video terminal — packed in around it and I was on my way.
I don’t recall how I got it out of the car once I got to the storage unit.
But so far as I know, that computer is still part of the old CMA collection we deeded to the San Diego State University library when we lost our funding from Coleman College about 18 years ago.
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