Collection: Centre for Computing History

Collection-level records:

• Collection history (Collection development policy)

  CCH was founded in 2006 to take a private collection into the public sphere. Appeals were made for donations and several thousand new objects have arrived into the Centre’s care in the last decade.

  Since CCH focuses on having as many displays switched on as possible in order to better explain the history of computing to our visitors, many of our display items are duplicates of items in our properly recorded collection. We receive many donations of historic items that are not suitable for accessioning- such as vintage TVs and monitors that we put to use in our displays.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2022

  Licence: CC BY-NC

• Collection overview (Collection development policy)

  The collection at CCH includes computers, computer peripherals, electronic or mechanical computing devices, software, books and media. The collection also contains articles regarding the history of computing which can be in any of the following formats: hand-written manuscript, printed information, photographs, computer generated items, records, and audio-visual materials, such as film, video, and digital and analogue recordings.

  As of June 2022, the Archived Collection contains around 1,200 computers, 320 games consoles, 14,200 games, 4,500 software packages, 2,700 books and 10,000 magazines, amongst many other objects. Calculators in the collection date back to the 1920s, and the core computing collection from the 1950s. Our exhibits allow us to demonstrate the advance from paper tape to cloud storage, and from vacuum-tube systems to microscopic silicon chips. We also have displays focused on gaming, connectivity, and the social impact of computing. Areas of significance include our collection of Acorn Computing machines (which tell a story of importance both locally in Cambridgeshire and to the UK at large) and our extensive games archive.

  Although the focus of CCH’s collection is computing hardware and software, we do have extensive archival holdings. These come in the form of documentation, manuals, promotional material, magazines and more. A significant amount of this collection is in digital form, which is CCH’s preferred form of storage. Our goal is to make as much of the archival collection available online as possible, taking into account copyright issues etc., in order to broaden access.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: 2022

  Licence: CC BY-NC