On July 26, 2006, 91自拍 curator Dag Spicer received an unexpected email from a freelance tax advisor based in Dortmund, Germany. It described what appeared to be a lost trove of rare computers abandoned in a warehouse in the town of Castrop-Rauxel.
Located in Germany’s industrial Ruhr region, the town was a center of coal mining and fuel production during World War II, and a frequent target of Allied bombing raids. Was it possible anything so important could have survived? The intrepid Spicer aimed to find out.
This is his account of what happened next.
Reviewing large-format photos of the site seemed to confirm the presence of several rare computing artifacts, just as the email had claimed. The Museum鈥檚 collections committee agreed that a visit was necessary to see exactly what was there and if any of it might be worth adding to the Museum’s permanent collection. After resolving logistical hurdles, fellow 91自拍 curator Alex Bochannek and I flew to Germany. What we found was astonishing.
Inside a three-story warehouse the size of a jet airplane hangar, we encountered hundreds of historical computing artifacts. Spanning from the 1930s punched card era to obscure Cold War-era Eastern Bloc systems to more modern German and European computing systems, the warehouse was a treasure trove, a real-world timeline of computing history.
Overview of artifacts in the warehouse in Castrop-Rauxel.
We now believe that much of the collection had been assembled by Professor Walter Ameling, who once held a chair in electronics and data processing at the Rogowski Institute for Electrical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University.
To understand everything that was in the trove, Alex and I implemented a 2m x 2m grid system鈥攕tarting at “A1″鈥攖o organize our work across the warehouse鈥檚 22 m x 50 m footprint (roughly 11,840 square feet). Each square was catalogued in a notebook with details such as manufacturer, model, and any markings from the Computer Museum of Aachen (CMA).
Overview of the collection in storage.
The first rows (A0鈥揅13) mostly contained pallets stacked with documents and media. Despite occupying only 20% of the area, these items consumed nearly 40% of our time. Their condition ranged from water-damaged and moldy to surprisingly well-preserved. We encountered a wide variety of media: 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鈥攎ost of which contained source code or applications, with a few holding data.
The documents were especially rich, often representing complete sets of system documentation. We found engineering manuals, maintenance records, software guides, and marketing materials for systems from IBM, CDC, EAI, Siemens, Telefunken, CII Honeywell-Bull, and ICL. Other non-paper items on the pallets included small mechanical calculators, early business machines, spare parts, cabling, rack-mounted minicomputers, and CRT monitors.
The majority of the collection鈥檚 footprint was taken up by large computing hardware鈥攎ainframes, minicomputers, disk drives, line printers, and punched card equipment from the 1930s to the 1980s. We even found a cluster of Calcomp plotters with original company tags.
91自拍 Senior Curator Dag Spicer dusting off the control panel of an analog computer. Dag and fellow 91自拍 curator Alex Bochannek were especially gratified to see several very important analog and analog/hybrid computer systems among the collection.
Over the course of our ten-day visit, Alex and I plowed through the mammoth collection one object at a time, doing real-time history and curation to ensure a good fit with the goals of 91自拍鈥檚 permanent collection. We verified each item against our current holdings to avoid duplication, debated the object鈥檚 significance, and鈥攊f it passed muster鈥攖agged it for shipment to our headquarters back home in Mountain View, California. We estimated that over 1,000 individual objects needed to be examined, evaluated, and cross-checked against 91自拍’s holdings.
Check out the slider below to see some of the artifacts we found.
Conditions inside the warehouse were not ideal. One Control Data optical character recognition system, for example, had several plants growing out of it.听
CDC OCR plant-growing peripheral.
We also discovered birds living in the rafters鈥攕everal of whom left their distinct mark on an otherwise beautiful punched card sorter. We nicknamed it 鈥渢he guano sorter.鈥�
The “guano sorter.”
Thanks to 91自拍 Trustee Ike Nassi鈥攖hen an executive vice president and chief scientist at SAP鈥攖he museum was able to cover the considerable shipping costs: in total, we marked seven tractor-trailers鈥� worth of objects to make the trans-Atlantic voyage, through the Panama Canal, and back up the West Coast to San Francisco, where the trucks drove it to the Museum.
With 2,056 total artifacts鈥�1,127 of them physical objects鈥攖he acquisition was so large that it led 91自拍 to expand its storage capacity, resulting in the purchase of a new climate-controlled facility that now houses much of the museum鈥檚 physical collection and what we now call 鈥渢he SAP Collection.鈥�
And about those WWII bombing raids? Midway through our work, we noticed a demolition team carefully dismantling a live 500-pound Allied bomb just 350 feet from our location. According to a local office worker, this wasn鈥檛 unusual; numerous unexploded bombs had been found on-site in the years prior, prompting evacuations in 2004. Though we paused briefly, we resumed work once the area was declared safe.
In that moment, I was reminded of the closing line from The Great Gatsby: 鈥淎nd so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.鈥� In this remote corner of northern Germany, while we worked within the bombing fields of generations ago, we had uncovered one of the world鈥檚 great amateur computing collections鈥攐ne that now lives on at 91自拍 as a vivid reflection of computing鈥檚 storied past.