Computer History Museum recalls ‘astonishing’ retro haul recovered from abandoned German warehouse — over 2,000 artifacts spanning the 1930s to 1980s required s

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Computer History Museum recalls ‘astonishing’ retro haul recovered from abandoned German warehouse — over 2,000 artifacts spanning the 1930s to 1980s required s

Over 2,000 pieces were containerized and trucked back to California for the museum’s permanent collection.

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Watch On The above-linked blog and embedded video give readers a great overview of the scale of this retro haul. It was brought to the attention of the CHM by a tax advisor based in Dortmund. This helpful Dortmunder would go on to share a few large-format photos of the site, which seemed to confirm the presence of several rare computing artifacts. It was enough for the CHM to decide to fly an investigation team (curators Dag Spicer and Alex Bochannek) to put boots on the ground.

What the CHM team found is described as “astonishing.” The warehouse was a huge three-story design. With so much to do, the curators implemented a pallet grid system to collect the huge array of computer systems and peripherals . The resulting array of artifacts would take up most of the floor in a 72 x 165 feet (22m x 50m) footprint (roughly 11,840 square feet). Visit the source post, and you can “explore the treasure” by flicking through a large gallery.

As we indicated in the intro, systems and paraphernalia spanned computer punch cards from the 1930s, through obscure Cold War Eastern Bloc machines, to more modern European hardware from the 1980s. Investigations eventually pointed to this huge collection being assembled by a professor and chair of electronics and data processing systems from Aachen University. He was still alive at the time of this discovery for the CHM staff (2006), but would die four years later. One wonders how this massive collection became “a lost trove of rare computers abandoned in a warehouse” if the owner was still alive and well (he’d be around 80 years old at the time).

Back to the material discoveries, and the CHM says they found a wide array of computer media types: “large disk packs, Diablo and RK05 types, paper tape, punch cards (both 80- and 96-column), magnetic tape , DECtape, magnetic strips, cartridges, and floppy disks .” There was also a rich seam of code and documentation. However, it became clear that the bulk of the now palletized haul was "mainframes, minicomputers, disk drives, line printers, and punched card equipment from the 1930s to the 1980s."

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