The Computer History Museum, based in Mountain View, California, looks like a fine way to spend an afternoon for anyone interested in, well, the history of computers. And if that description fits you but you’re not in California, then rejoice, because CHM recently launched OpenCHM, an excellent online portal designed to allow exploration of the museum from afar.
You can, of course, just click around to see what catches your eye, but if that feels too unfocused, you can also go straight to the collection highlights. As you might expect, these include a solid selection of early computers and microcomputers, along with photos, records, and other objects of historic import. Several objects predate the information age, including a Jacquard loom and a copy of The Adams Cable Codex, a fascinating 1894 book that catalogs hundreds of code words that were used to save space when sending messages via cable. Happily, there’s a full scan of the same book at the Internet Archive, because the CHM’s documentation on the latter is rather minimal.
This is the case throughout the site. In fairness, OpenCHM is still in beta, and hopefully the item descriptions will be fleshed out as the site develops—but as it stands, their terse nature means that some of the objects on show are disappointingly inscrutable. For example, it took a bit of googling to work out what on earth a klystron is, and the CHM’s description isn’t much help, noting only that “This item is mounted on a wooden base.” (For the record, a klystron is a vacuum tube amplifier that looks cool as hell.)
Still, such quibbles aside, there’s a wealth of material to explore here, and on the whole, Open CHM makes doing so both easy and enjoyable. It provides multiple entry points to the collection. In addition to the aforementioned highlights page and a series of curated collections, there’s something called the “Discovery Wall”. This is described as “a dynamic showcase of artifacts chosen by online visitors”, and it’s certainly interesting to see what catches people’s attention. At the time of our virtual visit, items on display on the Discovery Wall included an alarmingly yellow Atari t-shirt from 1977, a Tamagotchi (in its original packaging!), a placard from the 2023 Writers’ Guild strike (“Don’t let bots write your shows!”) and a Microsoft PS/2 mouse, the mere sight of which is likely to cause shudders in anyone with memories of flipping one of these over to pull out the trackball and clean months’ worth of accumulated crud from the two little rollers inside.
Perhaps the single most poignant item we came across, however, is a copy of Ted Nelson’s self-published 1974 opus Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which promoted computer literacy and the liberation Nelson hoped it would bring. The document is strikingly forward-thinking—amongst other things, it predicted hypertext, of which Nelson was an early proponent—but the technoutopianism on display seems both charmingly innocent and painfully naïve today. “New Freedoms Through Computer Screens”, promises the rear cover. If only they knew.
