Ancient Web: Dave Dunfield Built an Online Museum of Working Computers

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Dave Dunfield's collection begins with a useful distinction: keeping an old computer in a closet is not quite the same as preserving what made it work.

Visit Dave's Old Computers

Dunfield says he has worked in computing since the mid-1970s, watching whole machine architectures come and go. His site documents restored and collected systems through photographs, technical notes, manuals, and software. Its front page groups equipment by family rather than by the kind of modern nostalgia that puts every beige box in one basket.

The S-100 section, for example, lists actual expansion cards by manufacturer and model. Some entries provide downloadable manuals; a zero beside a card means he may hold documentation without possessing the physical board. That small notation is museum cataloging, not decoration.

An archive with an engineer's fingerprints

The collection ranges from Altair and IMSAI machines through Apple, Commodore, Sinclair, DEC, and early IBM-compatible systems. Dunfield's PC collection includes an original IBM 5150 with the early cassette interface and a second-generation 5160 XT; his notes explain why those distinctions matter.

The DEC gallery covers machines such as the PDP-11/03 and MicroVAX systems, putting the equipment in the lineage from large minicomputers to desk-sized machines. Elsewhere are vintage calculators, slide rules, disk controllers, terminals, and homebuilt projects.

Dunfield also explains why he does not attempt to collect every PC-compatible computer: there are simply too many. He concentrates on early, notable-brand, and unusual examples, while retaining certain machines because of their usefulness in his embedded-system development work. The result is a personal collection with a clearly stated collecting policy.

Several pages also identify donors, reminding visitors that this is not a magical warehouse where equipment materializes without human help. People saved the hardware, passed it along, and contributed manuals.

The website's homepage gives a last-updated date of March 11, 2020; individual pages and downloads are still the important artifacts. Although the root address can be unreliable in some modern browsers, indexed interior galleries remain available.

A machine that boots is one kind of survival. A photograph, a service manual, a part number, and the owner's reasons for keeping it make that survival understandable to everybody else.

Explore the computer collection and downloadable documentation.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.