COLLECTIONS

Rescued Treasures: A Curator’s Personal Account

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_By Dag Spicer

On December 8, 2006, the CMA CGM Hugo, three football fields long and one of the world’s largest deep ocean container ships, slipped into its berth at the sunny Port of Oakland.

Among its precious cargo of more than 8,200 forty-foot containers were six holding rare computer artifacts from a warehouse in northwestern Germany on their way to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, their journey sponsored by software leader SAP AG. These artifacts were rescued only weeks earlier by a “rapid-response team” composed of Museum volunteer (and native German speaker) Alex Bochannek and me, the Museum’s senior curator.

How did these rare objects make their multi-thousand-mile journey to the Museum and why?

TRACES OF THE PAST
This story begins in August 2006, when Siegfried M., a computer programmer and consultant from Dortmund, Germany, notified the Museum about a collection of rare computing objects in a warehouse near him. (For privacy reasons, I use only the initial of Siegfried’s surname.) The warehouse was on the outskirts of Castrop-Rauxel, a small town in an industrial area once rich in coal. The town was bombed with particular vigor by the Allies during World War II as it also had large chemical and explosives complexes—a “double score” for Allied bombers.

History is always present in Europe . . . and even during this mission, sixty or more years after the conflagration, traces of the past were all around us.

We determined that the Castrop-Rauxel warehouse was being used as an informal storage area by Gustav T., who apparently had hoped to establish a German computer museum of his own. Gustav appeared to have acquired a collection of items belonging to a professor at the University of Aachen and combined it with small computer collections from other sources. After some time, Gustav was faced with personal bankruptcy. As a creditor, it was now Siegfried’s intent to have a court-appointed administrator seize the collection and dispose of Gustav’s obligations to him through its sale.

It was at this point that Siegfried contacted the Museum as a possible buyer. We were certainly interested!

Being sensitive to issues of national pride, we ensured that other German museums had had a chance to look over the collection and potentially acquire items for themselves. This “ecosystem” approach is used by most museums to make optimum use of scarce resources. As long as something is preserved in a professionally managed and stable institution, CHM is agnostic about where items ultimately rest.

Siegfried and volunteer Alex Bochannek spoke on the telephone at length about the collection coming to CHM. Siegfried agreed to travel to the warehouse that weekend and take pictures of the collection in situ.

When we received the pictures, we were quite taken aback by the size of the warehouse and the scope of its contents. The warehouse was being shared with a construction equipment operator, and while it did have doors, they were left open all day and the warehouse contents were covered in dust . . . and, in places, bird droppings.

A quick meeting was convened with CHM board chairman Len Shustek, CEO John Toole, and vice president of operations David Dial to discuss next steps, if any. In a letter to the Acquisitions Committee of the Museum, I expressed my optimism at the opportunity:

Alex and I believe this to be an opportunity of enormous scale, diversity, and significance. The Museum has never had such an opportunity in its over three-decade existence to fill existing gaps in the collection, provide spares for possible restorations, obtain duplicate objects for loans or trades, and dramatically enhance the international scope of its collection.

We all agreed this collection had enormous potential and was at least worth a visit to assess it more closely. This was August 4. By noon on August 6, Alex and I were landing in Frankfurt—an airport of jaw-dropping scale—where we rented a car and then headed out onto the autobahn toward Dortmund. We arrived at our hotel in Castrop-Rauxel nearly twenty-four hours after leaving Mountain View.

THE WAREHOUSE
The next morning, Alex and I were to briefly meet Siegfried at the warehouse, which turned out to be a storage building of the German national power company, RWE. We were very excited, not knowing in what condition to expect the building or its contents. Once on site, we checked in with the locals who brought us into the building.

What met us was so overwhelming—so broad, so high, so deep—that Alex and I exchanged incredulous smiles, probably half out of fear, half out of joy. At the warehouse we briefly met Siegfried, a personable man who spoke superb English (like most Germans today), and then returned to the hotel to prepare for the first working day of the visit.

Considerable preparation had been made in advance at the Museum in Mountain View to identify as many items as possible from Siegfried’s initial photographs. Once on site in Germany, Alex and I worked to a 2m-by-2m grid system in which the entire collection (more than 14,000 square feet in area) was divided. The contents of each 2m-by-2m square were recorded in a notebook and included (where possible) manufacturer, model, and any other relevant information. About 20 percent of the collection contained pallets of documents and media (magnetic and otherwise) containing historical software. Some of these documents were unique—site planning documents and sales “requests for proposals” from universities and businesses wishing to bring computers into their organizations. These are rare and offer a great deal of information about business processes and their automation at a time when many organizations were making their first foray into computing.

Most of the collection, however, was hardware—it took Alex and me ten days to survey it—ranging from Depression-era mechanical punch card office machines to mainframes and minicomputers.

While we worked away, after a few days Alex asked what the backhoe operator, who had been working just outside the building near us since we arrived, was doing. He was, to my chagrin but Alex’s bemusement (bravado?), looking for unexploded World War II ordnance. An unexploded 500-lb. bomb had been located only a week before we arrived, about 1,000 feet away from where we were working. As I noted, history in Europe is everywhere, and even here—more than sixty years later near a warehouse in a small town—Allied bombs were still being found.

On Day 5, representatives from the German moving company Hasenkamp visited us to discuss how to ship whatever items we decided ought to be sent on to Mountain View (later indicated by a yellow sticker as Alex and I walked around the collection one final time). When they arrived, they had the same smile Alex and I had had on our first arrival: Was it fear? Disbelief? Amazement? They were to return twice more before we left.

WHAT TO SAVE WHAT TO LEAVE
We now began the most difficult part of the adventure: deciding which items to save and which to leave behind. With a budget already stretched, we had the task of taking “only” seven ocean containers’ worth of cargo. Alex and I had a great deal of support from CHM software curator Al Kossow, who put his research skills to great effect, whether it was looking up obscure German data processing equipment or commenting on the desirability of obtaining particular software. Vice president of operations David Dial was also critical in navigating the intricacies of international freight forwarding. Due to the span of computer history represented by the collection, the thousands of individual objects, the distances, and possible customs issues involved, this team approach was absolutely mandatory for success.

Alex and I displayed Marine-like discipline in not opening boxes at random and exploring their contents—much as we would have liked to! Sadly, on a project of this scale, one must make instant decisions or end up saving nothing. We did allow ourselves fifteen minutes of “unstructured playtime” each day, which we spent opening random boxes as fast as we could in hopes of finding some highly interesting object. We were usually not disappointed. A 1950s Anker-Werke accounting machine (shown on page 8) and a 1960s AEG-Telefunken computer system (pictured on page 9) were just two objects from the rescue mission.

I think it’s a good thing Alex and I did not understand the scope of the collection beforehand or we may have become discouraged. Now, we not only had to arrange for shipping the items we wanted halfway across the world, we had to arrange for proper recycling of the electronic waste from the items we did not retain (mostly common microcomputers). Europe has very strict recycling regulations but, thanks again to Alex, we were able to navigate the shipping and recycling smoothly. Prior to final recycling, CHM also invited several German computer clubs to look at the items we did not take and to consider bringing them into their own collections.

As Alex and I finished tagging all the items coming to Mountain View on Day 9, we were glad to be leaving the respiratory problems, bird droppings, mold, rat poison, and occasional dead bird behind. We left early the next morning for the return flight to San Francisco. When the Hugo finally pulled into the Port of Oakland, we were reminded of those days in the warehouse. Now we begin the multiyear process of inventorying and creating catalog records for each of the many thousands of objects in the donation. CHM also moved ahead by a year its planned purchase of off-site warehouse space to accommodate the German donation.

WORKING AGAINST TIME
Every day, year after year, the Computer History Museum works against time. Every year many thousands of tons of computer equipment are disposed of in the world’s landfills—a problem unforeseen in the utopian days of early computing. Many of these items are rather uninteresting, mass-produced IBM-compatible machines of which the Museum has sufficient exemplars.

But others are truly worthy of being saved. Although we cannot know absolutely, it seems certain that extremely rare (in some cases unique) items from computing’s early days are in this same waste stream. I say it “seems certain” because the few rescue missions with which CHM has been involved have had outstanding results—but have also left all involved with a feeling of “Wow, that was close!”

This incredible fragility of our world’s material traces—hardware, software, the ideas behind them, the marketing materials, the people involved who can (for a while) be interviewed for an oral history—makes the window for preserving computing history especially narrow. While the delicate nature of artifact discovery and preservation is well known to archaeologists (from whom all museum curators draw some of their DNA), computers present unique challenges—first of which is a form of consciousness raising, so that old computers are not automatically considered to have no value.

Missions like this one are central to the Museum’s purpose of being home to the world’s largest and most important collection of computers and computing-related objects. While some may say CHM was lucky, it has always been my view that luck is merely the intersection of preparation and opportunity. As this German adventure shows, CHM remains prepared to preserve computer history at a moment’s notice.

I would like to dedicate this article to Alex Bochannek, who has volunteered at CHM for ten years and without whose generosity of spirit and language skills this acquisition simply could not have taken place. Alex is also a patient and fun travel companion. The entire Museum also thanks software industry leader SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, which made an outstandingly big-hearted gift of $250,000 to CHM for the shipping and logistical support of this collection. Thank you both. _Dag Spicer