Founding
The Computer Museum of America was founded in the early 1980s in San Diego by Jim and Marie Petroff. Jim was a sales consultant with IBM, often working with bank branch managers to upgrade their computer systems. Even in the late 1970s, Jim was taken aback that when asked what the client wanted done with their current system after the upgrade, they often responded that it could be thrown away.
Out of their own pockets, the Petroffs rented a large rental unit in the Clairemont Mesa neighborhood and began storing older systems in there to preserve them for future generations. They also incorporated the museum as a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation, so people donating their systems could claim them on their taxes.
In the late 1980s, they also arranged to have some of the smaller items – such as a MITS Altair 8800 – displayed in glass cases on the campus of Coleman College in La Mesa.
In 1991, the Petroffs hired a part-time acquisitions manager to manage all the donations being offered to the growing museum as word began to spread. Within a couple of years, three more storage units had been added, in San Diego’s North County, East County and South Bay regions to facilitate the donation process.
Coleman College
In the mid-1990s, the cost of maintaining the four storage sites and paying the acquisitions manager was still being paid by the Petroffs personally. Coleman College expressed interest in taking over the Museum, and the Petroffs gifted it to the nonprofit school.
A new, large warehouse was leased, and the existing collection moved from the storage units into this new central location in San Diego’s Mission Gorge neighborhood.
Beginning in 1993, the Museum had begun exhibiting at the annual San Diego Computer Expo, sponsored by the San Diego Computer Society. This was a chance to bring historic artifacts out of storage and share them with the larger community. By 1995, the Computer Society had partnered with a local weekly magazine, ComputorEdge, as co-sponsor and the renamed California Computer Expo moved to San Diego’s newly expanded Convention Center on the harborfront. (See our California Computer Expo page for more photos of our exhibits.)
In 1995, Coleman College hired a full-time executive director for the Museum, David Weil. David began planning for a move to a new dedicated location in downtown San Diego, at the intersection of C Street and Sixth Avenue.
Downtown
The move downtown allowed a much larger portion of the growing collection to be exhibited for the public. A grand opening was held, and the small Computer Hall of Fame the Petroffs had started in the late 1980s was expanded with new classes in 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004.
Financial struggles
Coleman College’s student body was drawn in large part from military veterans using their G.I. Bill benefits, and foreign exchange students. After the 9/11 attack on the United States, these two pipelines offered far fewer students and enrollment steeply declined.
Shortly after, the college closed both its San Marcos campus and the downtown museum building. A small selection of artifacts was exhibited in a former lounge at the school’s La Mesa campus (which had formerly been the home to the La Mesa Bowl bowling alley). The rest of the collection was returned to the warehouse.
San Diego State University
In 2005, Coleman College announced that it could no longer support the recently renamed San Diego Computer Museum, and staff and volunteers were given 30 days to wrap up operations. Several other museums were approached, but all replied that they were only interested in taking a few select items and had no use for the rest of the collection.
When the San Diego State University Library’s Special Collections staff expressed interest in acquiring the entire collection, museum staff and volunteers agreed that this best met the expectations of all those who had donated to the collection over the years. It took several trips of a full-size semi-trailer to move the collection to SDSU, but it has been protected from the elements and securely stored ever since.
VCF SoCal, CGU and the future
In February 2024, the former museum acquisitions manager, Jim Trageser, signed up to exhibit a few items at the Vintage Computer Festival SoCal in Orange, California. Drawing from his own collection some items that were similar to those in the museum collection at SDSU, he found his two tables immediately adjacent to a similar exhibit from the Paul Gray PC Museum at the Claremont Graduate University in the Los Angeles area. In addition, the CMA and PGPCM representatives were both on a panel discussion about computer preservation at the conference.
The executive director of the PGPCM was intrigued by this history of a lost computer museum. As CGU and SDSU offered a joint doctoral program, the two schools thus having an existing working relationship, the PGPCM executive director arranged to tour the former CMA collection at SDSU after the Vintage Computer Festival SoCal.
We have photos and a link to the video of the panel discussion on our VCF SoCal 2024 page.
When the former CMA was invited to exhibit again at the 2025 VCF SoCal, it was decided to create a display focused on the history of the CMA itself, with copies of CMA newsletters and brochures, and a slideshow of photos from CMA exhibits through the years.
The Paul Gray PC Museum was again next to ours, and the executive director not only spoke of her excitement at the size and breadth of the former CMA collection at SDSU (which she had visited), but brought along the CGU professor who oversees the Paul Gray PC Museum. (See our VCF SoCal 2025 page for photos and a link to another panel discussion that the CMA representative sat on.)
Two months later, both current CGU and former CMA staff were able to tour the collection at SDSU – finding it as we’d left it in 2005. (See our 2025 SDSU Visit page for more photos!)
Later that summer, a former museum donor made an anonymous gift that allowed CGU and SDSU to craft a research project for CGU graduate students in the Museum Studies and Archival Studies programs to begin cataloging and indexing the collection. That work began in January of 2026. (See our Cataloging and Indexing Project page for more photos.)
For the third annual VCF SoCal show in February, 2026, SDSU allowed former CMA staff to borrow items from the collection to share. See our VCF SoCal 2026 page for photos and more details.
We will update this site as more progress is made on the cataloging project by CGU students, and will also profile noteworthy pieces as they are re-discovered.