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A rare collection of old computers was rescued in Castrop-Rauxel, Germany, after the Computer History Museum identified more than 2,000 artifacts gathered in a three-story warehouse, including mainframes, punched cards, magnetic tapes, diskettes, documentation, and equipment spanning decades of technological evolution
An abandoned warehouse in Germany held a collection capable of spanning half a century of computing history. The set, rescued by the Computer History Museum, gathered rare machines, media, and documents on an unusual scale.
The find occurred in Castrop-Rauxel, a city located northwest of Dortmund. Inside a three-story structure, the size of an airplane hangar, old equipment occupied much of the available space.
According to tomshardware, the pieces ranged from punched cards from the 1930s to more modern computers and accessories from the 1980s. There were also lesser-known machines linked to the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War period.
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A clue sent from Dortmund
The discovery reached the museum through a tax consultant from Dortmund. He sent large-format photographs of the location, clearly showing signs that there were rare computer artifacts there.
The images were enough to prompt an on-site investigation. Curators Dag Spicer and Alex Bochannek traveled to the warehouse to verify the real extent of the accumulated material.
What they found surpassed the simple idea of a forgotten storage. The building housed a mass of computers, peripherals, media, and documents organized in a precarious manner but with evident historical value.
Collection occupied an area of 1,100 square meters
Given the quantity of items, the team adopted a pallet system to separate, move, and prepare the collection. The set occupied an area approximately 22 by 50 meters, about 1,100 square meters.
Among the identified materials were mainframes, minicomputers, disk drives, line printers, and punched card equipment. Most belonged to the period between the 1930s and 1980s.
Large packs of disks, Diablo and RK05 models, paper tapes, magnetic tapes, DEC tapes, cartridges, floppy disks, and punched cards of 80 and 96 columns were also found.
The presence of code and documentation increased the importance of the set. These records help to understand not only the machines but also the systems and practices used in different phases of computing.
Origin linked to professor from the University of Aachen
Investigations revealed that the collection had been gathered by a professor and head of the electronics and data processing systems department at the University of Aachen.
He was still alive when the museum team arrived at the location in 2006 and would have been about 80 years old at the time. The professor died four years later.
This detail makes the story even more unusual. The collection was not just a pile of equipment with no known origin, but the result of decades of preservation by someone connected to teaching and research.
Even so, the material ended up stored like a lost treasure, in an abandoned building, until it caught the attention of those who recognized its historical relevance.
More than 2,000 artifacts headed to California
After comparing the found items with the existing collection in the United States, the curators documented and selected 2,056 artifacts.
The transport required a large-scale operation. The pieces were packed in containers and transported by truck from Germany to the final destination in California.
The total volume was equivalent to about seven truckloads of objects. The importance of the rescue led the museum to expand its collection and acquire a new temperature-controlled space.
Many pieces from the Castrop-Rauxel collection became part of the SAP Collection, linked to the Computer History Museum’s collection.
Rescue was interrupted by a World War II bomb
The operation also had an unexpected episode. The work was briefly interrupted after the discovery of an unexploded Allied World War II bomb nearby.
Castrop-Rauxel is located in the Ruhr region, an area marked by a strong industrial concentration and bombings during the conflict. The presence of this explosive artifact added a historical risk to the rescue.
Additionally, some machines showed the effects of abandonment. An old OCR machine had plants growing inside. Another punched card sorter became known as the “guano sorter.”
It was under bird nests on the warehouse beams, where it remained for years in a position not favorable for conservation.
Even damaged, these pieces helped demonstrate how physical abandonment coexisted with high historical and technical value preserved.
