For the last 21 years, the collection of the former Computer Museum of America / San Diego Computer Museum has sat in the basement of the Love Library at San Diego State University.
It is protected from the elements, secure from theft or vandalism – safely preserved for future generations to use as a tool to understand the magnitude of technological innovation over the past 70 years.
Thanks to a generous grant from a Museum supporter in the summer of 2025, we have begun the process of indexing the collection, and have begun doing some additional fundraising and marketing to remind people that this amazing collection exists.
We believe it to be one of the largest repositories of Computer Revolution / Information Age artifacts and archival materials in the world.
Not just computers and other hardware, but magazines, hobbyist newsletters, software collections, books, manuals and more – all capturing a moment in time as engineers and programmers used transistors and integrated circuits to change how we manage information and data.
Along with similar advances in medical care (anesthesia and antibiotics), aviation, and food preservation, the development of computer technology has fundamentally altered the way that human beings spend their waking hours: How we work, how we learn, how we play.
The simple fact of the matter is that human beings lived much the same lives as their ancestors for thousands of years: Over the past 70 years, that has changed in ways our great-grandparents never would have imagined.
We believe the former holdings of the Computer Museum of America represent a tremendous resource for understanding the how and why of those changes. It is our hope that in the years and decades to come, researchers in fields as divergent as sociology and engineering, anthropology and history will be able to draw on this collection as they seek to both understand and explain to future generations just how the Computer Revolution came to be.
You can learn more about the Computer Museum of America in the History section from the top menu, and our ongoing efforts at the Current Projects page.