Computer History Museum recalls ‘astonishing’ retro haul recovered from abandoned German warehouse — over 2,000 artifacts spanning the 1930s to 1980s required seven tractor-trailers after a WWII bomb scare
Source: Tom’s Hardware
The Computer History Museum (CHM) recalls one of its biggest ever retro treasure troves, rescued from an abandoned warehouse in the town of Castrop-Rauxel, situated North West from Dortmund, Germany. Images show an outstanding amount of retro gear taking up much of the space within an aircraft hangar-sized triple-story warehouse. These artifacts would include relics spanning computing eras, starting way back in the 1930s up to the 1980s. After much work, briefly interrupted by the discovery of an unexploded WWII bomb nearby, over 2,000 museum pieces were containerized and trucked back to California.
Artifacts Discovered in Castrop-Rauxel, Germany - YouTube
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.”
Finally, after cross-referencing current CHM stock in California, the curators documented and collected 2,056 total artifacts. To give you a physical idea of how big this Germany-to-U.S. shipment was, the CHM says it came to about “seven tractor-trailers’ worth of objects.” Such was the size and consequence of these finds that the CHM even decided to expand and purchase a new climate-controlled facility. You will find many of the Castrop-Rauxel pieces in ‘The SAP Collection.’
The CHM’s Germany trip wasn’t without incident. The blog post also tells of an unexploded Allied bomb being found nearby and stopping their work. If you looked at the map for this town, you would probably have spotted that it lies in the Ruhr region, which was bombed heavily in WWII due to its high concentration of manufacturing. The curation team also snapped some fun pictures of hardware, which didn’t age very well. One old OCR machine had plants growing out of it, and another punched card sorter was nicknamed the ‘guano sorter.’ That machine had been in an unfortunate position under birds nesting in the warehouse rafters for a number of years.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.