MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Silicon Valley’s shrine to the computer has finally upgraded to version 2.0.
On Thursday, the 35-year-old Computer History Museum unveiled a $19 million overhaul, making this small city some 40 miles south of San Francisco a destination for anyone interested in the evolution from the abacus to the iPhone.
“We are living through the time of transition, from there being no computers anywhere to there being computers in everything that we touch,” said Leonard J. Shustek, a venture capitalist and chairman of the museum’s board. “We owe it to the future to preserve the artifacts and stories of how that happened.”
Housed for two decades in Boston, the immense and growing collection of hardware, tech trinkets and ephemera was moved in 1996 to Silicon Valley, where it occupied various makeshift locations and served as a go-to place for technology insiders to reminisce about the heady, built-in-the-garage computer era.
Much of that history is reflected in a new exhibit, “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing,” which includes items like the first disk drive, I.B.M.’s hulking Ramac from 1956, Apple’s early personal computers like the Apple II, robots, the first arcade video games, a stack of Google’s earliest computer servers and even a table-size computer sold by Neiman Marcus in 1969 to store recipes for busy housewives.
The museum curators generally stick to a 10-year rule, meaning they wait a decade to determine what items were pivotal enough to warrant a place in the history of computing. “It’s always very difficult when you’re in the moment to know what’s going to be important and significant,” Mr. Shustek said. While the museum already owns items like the iPad, and monitors social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook, it is waiting for the dust to settle before it tells the definitive story of technology in the first decade of the 21st century.
The revamped home here is financed by donations from technology heavyweights like Bill Gates, Hewlett-Packard and the computer chip maker Intel. But curators at what is billed as the largest computer history exhibition in the world have tried to be patient with those less tech savvy. In March, the museum will become even more accessible by uploading its collection online, providing digital access to images, videos and information on tens of thousands of items.
“The story of computing and computing history is important to tell for people who may be curious how that smartphone that they’re addicted to or that computer on their desk came to be,” said John Hollar, the museum’s president and chief executive.
A walk through the exhibit vividly demonstrates what Frances Allen, a museum fellow who developed computer programming languages for I.B.M. in the 1960s, called “the incredible shrinking machine.”
The museum is a darling of Silicon Valley luminaries; its board, donors and fellows include a who’s who of tech royalty. At a recent museum preview, the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was on hand to gush over his favorite gadgets.
And while the museum seems to have found its rightful home, the collection, like the technology it covers, is always capable of rapid and unpredictable change.
“Fifteen years ago, we moved to Silicon Valley because this is now the center of the world for computers,” Mr. Shustek said. “Maybe in 15 years, we’ll move it to Shanghai, follow the innovators.”
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