The mission of the Computer History Museum is to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age. Dedicated to exploring the social impact of computing, the Museum is home to the world's largest collection of computing-related items, spanning from pre-computing objects, to semiconductors, hardware, software, computer graphics systems, games, networking, robots, the Internet, and beyond. Its growing collection also includes photos, films, videos, manuals, documents, publications, and marketing materials. The web-based catalog currently lists over 62,000 items.

The museum presents many public programs and has several exhibits for the general public in it's facility in Mountain View CA and on the web. It's archive and deep collection are available for use by researchers.

We are currently working on a large overview exhibit titled Computer History: The First 2000 Years, scheduled to open at the end of 2010. It will occupy 30,000 square feet in our physical building and many gigabytes on our website, with links to documents and videos from the collection.

The collection began in the late 1970s as a personal project of Gwen and Gordon Bell. It became public as "The Computer Museum" in Boston in the early 1980s. In the late 1990s it was moved to its current home in Silicon Valley.