Computer History Museum

Stop on Silicon Valley Tech Heritage Tour, a free self-guided tour.

This world-class museum in Mountain View houses the largest collection of computing artifacts in the world, with over 90,000 objects spanning computing history from 2,000 BC to the present. The museum's permanent exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, occupies 25,000 square feet and chronicles how computing evolved from the abacus through mechanical calculators to modern smartphones and AI. Highlights include working demonstrations of rare historical computers like the 1948 SSEM (Small Scale Experimental Machine), the world's first stored-program computer, and the 1969 NEAC 2203, one of the first Japanese computers. You can see an original Apple I computer, pieces of the first ENIAC, and Google's first server rack built from Lego. The Self-Driving Car Revolution exhibit features vehicles from Google, Tesla, and others. The museum hosts lectures by tech pioneers and offers docent-led tours. Special exhibits explore topics like game design, early networking, and computer graphics. The museum's restoration team maintains working vintage computers, offering rare opportunities to see these machines in operation. For anyone interested in understanding how we arrived at our digital present, this museum provides essential context about the innovations, failures, and persistent vision that created the information age. The gift shop offers unique computing-themed items you won't find elsewhere.