Digibarn Curator Bruce Damer's visit to the Smithsonian
National Museum of American History - Behring Center

The Microcomputer Exhibit

On January 9, 2003, DigiBarn Curator Bruce Damer paid a visit to the Information Age exhibit at the Smithsonian Instutition's National Museum of American History (Behring Center) in Washington DC. There is a limited personal computing collection on display, as part of a much larger exhibit on the Information Age.

I have to say that they did a good job for the space allocated but there is no timeline nor any real context to the machines shown (surrounding literature is fairly disconnected from the artifacts). For some reason the Sol-20 is displayed on the floor under the table holding the Apple-1 and Altair 8800. We hope the Smithsonian can devote more space and care to the topic of the personal computing revolution in the future.

The line of PCs, pretty small collection on display	Image55a.jpg
Early Sun Workstation	Image55c.jpg
Three systems on the "Home Brew" table, Apple I in very fancy wooden case, Altair 8800 and, sigh, the Sol-20 on the floor	Wax model of "typical" homebrewer
Image57.jpg	Image57a.jpg
Image58a.jpg	Closeup of Apple I
Closeup of Altair	Sol-20 on the floor
Display from a distance	Short description of microcomputing

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