See you at VCF Midwest 21 this weekend!

We're packing the truck for Schaumburg. This weekend, September 12-13, the Retro Tech Foundation has a table at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 21 at the Schaumburg Convention Center - the biggest vintage computing show in the country, and still free to attend.

Come say hi, grab some merch, and enter to win a Macintosh SE/30. Entries are taken on an Apple IIgs, naturally. We'll be talking about the museum's Grand Opening on November 14, showing off what we've been building, and looking for the machines still missing from The List. If you've got an Apple in the Chicago area that deserves a good home, come talk to us.

Save the date: Grand Opening, Saturday, November 14

After a spring of visits by appointment, we're ready to throw the doors open. On Saturday, November 14, the Retro Tech Foundation Museum in Watertown, CT holds its Grand Opening - a free, drop-in open house. No tickets, no RSVP.

Walk the Timeline through nearly five decades of Apple, step into our recreation of the Crist Drive garage, visit the 80s/90s bedroom, and get your hands on machines that still boot. Full details are on the Grand Opening page. Bring a friend who remembers their first Mac.

Rebuilding the garage (with a little help from Daniel Kottke)

The centerpiece of the museum is a full-scale recreation of the Jobs family garage on Crist Drive, where the first Apple-1 boards were assembled and tested in the summer of 1976. It has been a summer of framing: the first roof panel went together at the end of July, and the walls, the workbench, and the period details have been following.

Getting it right means leaning on a handful of surviving photographs - including original Apple 35mm slides recently scanned and shared by the Applefritter community - and on Daniel Kottke himself, who assembled and tested Apple-1s in that garage and has been generous with his memory of what was actually in it. One example: the "burn-in box" used to stress-test finished boards turns out to have looked nothing like anyone assumed, and our exhibit is being reworked to match his description.

A favorite detail: the poster on the garage wall in the famous 1976 photo is "Mr. Spock," a 1973 line-printer image made by Samuel Harbison at Princeton. We tracked down the original print file and re-rendered it at full size - overstrikes and all - for the exhibit wall.

The collection, by the numbers

We ran the numbers on the archive this month, and they surprised even us. The collection now holds 1,573 artifacts representing 877 unique models: 624 computers (374 unique) and 949 accessories (503 unique). That includes 316 Apple computer models - 67% of every computer model Apple has ever shipped - along with 81% of all pre-Intel Apple computer models, 71% of pre-Intel accessories, and 53% of all Apple accessory models.

In February 2025 we announced 270 computers and 490 accessories, so the collection has roughly doubled in eighteen months - almost entirely through donations. Every one of those machines is on the shelf, not in a crate: the archive is part of the museum, and visitors are welcome to pull a computer down and boot it.

The gaps are getting harder to fill, which is where you come in. The List shows every model we're still hunting for. If you have one, we'd love to hear from you at info@retrotechfoundation.org.