Mention the term "museum" and you might think of old, dusty, and out-of-date. But now a $100 million historic center dedicated to the world's youngest industry, computing, is arising just north of the Silicon Valley.

The first major partner in the proposed NASA Research Park development project in Mountain View, CA has found a permanent home in the shadow of Moffett Field's historic Hangar One, a former docking base for blimps that's so huge fog has been known to form inside.

Initially, in a temporary "Beta Building" scheduled to open next summer, and later in a $100 million permanent home due for completion in 2005, the Computer History Museum is consolidating technology's artifacts into one new facility -- an important component of the multi-billion dollar NASA Ames Research Development project just 10 minutes north of Silicon Valley.

The museum is an anchor in a massive development project that plans to add three million square feet of housing, office and retail space that will transform the old Moffett Field naval station properties into a world-class, shared-use educational and R&D campus.

"The construction cost of the Beta Building is $2.6 million. The capital and endowment campaign for the permanent building project is $100 million. We have presently received cash and pledges of $50 million -- all from individuals," said Karen Mathews, the museum's executive vice president.

The Computer History Museum will move what's the largest ever computing artifacts collections into the 41,000-square-foot Beta Building which has 22,500 square feet for artifact storage, 9,000 square feet for exhibits and events, and 9,500 square feet for office space -- doubling the museum's current space and increasing opportunities for more public access, according to Leonard J. Shustek, chairman of the museum's board of trustees.

"For the past few years, museum staff, collection, exhibits and programs have been located in five, distributed buildings at Moffett Field. The Beta Building will allow us to consolidate into one main space while the permanent building process is completed," Mr. Shustek said.

The museum's collection archives were once part of the Boston's Computer Museum, which closed to the public in 1999 and then joined with Boston's Museum of Science.

The Computer Museum, as the physical entity it once was, no longer exists at 300 Congress Street, Boston or at the Museum of Science.

The bulk of Boston's former Computer Museum's five separate collections -- more than 50,000 individual objects, including hardware, films, photographs and historical software, as well as extensive document archives -- now reside at the Computer History Museum in Moffett Field.

The Computer History Museum's permanent building, still on the drawing board, will ultimately offer 114,000 square feet of museum space when it's constructed next door to the Beta Building. The Beta Building will be demolished once permanent museum facilities are open, according to the museum's executive director, John Toole.

"Right now 100 percent of our funding is individual donations. Later we'll be looking for grants and corporate donations," said Mr. Toole.

In addition to the museum, the 213-acre NASA Research Park also will house the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, a University of California at Santa Cruz campus, San Jose State University's Metropolitan Technology Center and the California Air and Space Center.

The park is part of a still larger development that includes the Ames Research Center facilities on 240 acres; a 95-acre parcel north of Ames and a 952-acre parcel including the airfield and property to the east of the airfield.

Last week, museum officials also named computer historian Michael R. Williams as head curator, San Francisco architecture, engineering, and construction firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, Mendenhall, Holmes and Narver as Beta Building's designer and the San Francisco interior design and graphic design firm Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis to design the museum's permanent facility.

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Published: December 19, 2001

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A journalist for 35-years, Broderick Perkins parlayed an old-school daily newspaper career into a digital news service offering editorial content and consulting services. Perkins' San Jose, CA-based DeadlineNews Group includes the flagship news site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate, personal finance and consumer journalism, and a backshop, the Deadline Newsroom.