This book analyses museums of computing in several pivotal dimensions. As institutions of cultural memory, they continue to play major roles in how we understand our mediated situation; there are many “missing narratives” in media history, and museums have been part of the response to those challenges. Yet media technology advances quickly, and a lot of the discourse about media is hype about present and future perspectives – it can seem as if rapid changes are the only constant, especially in computing. As museums became institutions that associate objects with learning to help us understand the world, they responded to the needs of the cultures that create them - but digital media pose a range of difficult questions in this nexus. Museums help constitute our collective understanding of the history of computing, and by the same token networked computing has come to complicate the role of museums. Examining the impressive expansion of the museum model also requires analysis of the extent to which the legacy of the museum is challenged by assumptions about obsolescence, forgetting, erasure in digital culture.

Peter Krapp is Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA. His research and teaching focus on the history of computing and on digital culture. Main publications include Medium Cool (2002), Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (2004), Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011), and the Handbook Language-Culture-Communication ( 2013). The latest is a book on Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (2024).