# Ancient Web: William Bader Opened a 2002 Museum of Modems and Minicomputers William Bader's personal hardware museum preserves photographs and notes on acoustic modems, early PCs, Atari and Macintosh machines, and DEC systems. 2026-10-17 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: William Bader Opened a 2002 Museum of Modems and Minicomputers](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). William Bader's online computing museum begins with the sort of hardware that makes a modern Wi-Fi router look suspiciously like magic. [Visit William Bader's Museum](https://williambader.com/museum/museum.html). The hand-linked museum identifies itself as a collection with over 300 photographs and carries a July 2002 revision date. Its index is organized by equipment families: modems, early personal computers, DEC minicomputers, Sun workstations, terminals, programming tools, and the occasional Rubik's Cube. Bader uses small images and direct links rather than a modern gallery interface, leaving the descriptions to do a substantial amount of the work. ## When connecting required a handset The [110-baud modem gallery](https://williambader.com/museum/modem110/modem110.html) records a Bell System 113A unit made by Western Electric. Bader photographed its case, old four-prong telephone connector, dial mechanism, line buttons, interior circuit board, and labels. The reader can see a machine from the period when computers used communications equipment almost as physical as the telephone itself. One note observes that there were no Hayes-style AT commands: a person had to dial the phone number manually. Another says the machine did not survive a January 2002 move intact. The museum records damaged and dismantled objects as willingly as pristine ones. The [300-baud acoustic modem](https://williambader.com/museum/modem300/modem300.html) belonged to Bader's father. Bader recalls using it in the early 1980s with a Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal. To connect, someone dialed a number and rested a phone handset in the acoustic cups. The gallery includes photographs of the Novation DC-102A2's switches and circuits. Beyond the telephone equipment, the [index](https://williambader.com/museum/museum.html) points to a Franklin Ace 1200, a Zenith PC, IBM PC AT hardware, an Atari 1040 ST, an Apple Macintosh II, and a Sun SPARCstation IPX. A separate [DEC VAX history](https://williambader.com/museum/vax/vaxhistory.html) makes the archive more than a collection of personal computers; it reaches back to institutional computing systems and their operators. These pages are not formal conservation records, and the captions should not be mistaken for a complete manufacturer's service manual. Their value is more intimate. They record exactly what Bader had, how he remembered using it, and what he thought a future visitor would want to see. The Internet brought much of this equipment's era to an end. Its surviving photographs now explain how that earlier Internet was reached. [Explore the modem photographs and hardware index](https://williambader.com/museum/museum.html). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#Modems](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/modems/), [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#retrocomputing](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/retrocomputing/), [#hardware](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/hardware/), [#digitalhistory](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/digitalhistory/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-william-bader-opened-a-2002-museum-of-modems-and-minicomputers/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-17T18:17:35+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:05:04.340080+00:00 Description: A hand-built computing museum dated 2002 documents equipment that hobbyists used before plug-and-play networking and disposable devices.