Preserving the past

Annual Vintage Computer Festival - Southern California

I spent the last weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival - SoCal in Orange. For the second year in a row (and only the second year of VCF-SoCal, so I’ve been there for both), I pulled together a booth to tell the story of the Computer Museum of America in San Diego. (There is now apparently another CMA in Atlanta - but the two have nothing to do with one another.)

The CMA in San Diego was started in the early 1980s by Jim & Marie Petroff - who were IT consultants and kept seeing their clients toss their old systems the Petroffs helped them replace into the landfill.

They rented a couple storage units and began collecting these vintage systems - mostly minicomputers, with some mainframes. By the time I met them in 1989, the first generation of personal computers - your Tandys and Apples, Commodores and Ataris - were likewise being replaced by PCs and Macs.

In the mid-1990s, the Coleman College Foundation took over the museum from the Petroffs and leased a two-story building in downtown San Diego for us. The San Diego Unified School District used us as a field-trip partner, where sixth-graders could come learn about the technology that was rapidly reshaping our economy, society and culture.

By 2006, however, Coleman College was on the verge of bankruptcy and cut us loose. San Diego State University was interested in our collection, and took it - a couple semi-truck loads worth of historic hardware, software, documentation and magazines. It remains in storage at the SDSU Library, safe from the elements but sadly not on exhibit.

I’ll write more about the weekend later in the week - still exhausted from the experience (in a good way). Getting to meet computer pioneer Lee Felsenstein was a treat - as I mad to miss his 1998 induction into the Computer Hall of Fame, even though I was a member of the advisory board!

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