Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a major museum of the History of Computing based in Mountain View in Silicon Valley, focused on preserving and presenting the artifacts and stories of the Information Age - computerhistory.org

SEARCH 37.4142930, -122.0774488 Computer History Museum, 1401, North Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, 94043, United States Computer History Museum’s physical home is at 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, California, and the museum publishes practical visiting details (hours, directions, admission) on its site - computerhistory.org

# What it is known for CHM’s signature permanent exhibition is Revolution, a large-scale walk through computing history from early calculation to modern digital life, organised as a sequence of galleries with landmark machines and stories. - computerhistory.org

A big part of CHM’s value is its research-and-preservation layer, including a substantial program of recorded interviews with pioneers, where the “why it happened” sits alongside the “what was built”.

CHM also foregrounds Software as history, with a dedicated effort to collect, preserve, and interpret software, archives, and “software-in-action” narratives rather than treating code as an invisible footnote - computerhistory.org

# Why it matters CHM is one of the most important public institutions for making the computing revolution feel like human history: contingent, political, economic, playful, and messy, rather than a tidy timeline of genius inventions.

Its museum-history page usefully frames CHM as the result of decades of collecting and institutional evolution, not a single founding moment, which is a recurring pattern in how computing heritage survives at all.