MGA’s technology museum plugs into past

If you want to wax nostalgic over a Nintendo GameCube or  listen to the clackety-clack of an IBM Wheelwriter keyboard, you can punch your ticket at the Museum of Technology.

If your fingers long to push the buttons on a TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder, then slide over and take a spin on a rotary dial phone, the corner room in the Middle Georgia State University library could be your happy place.

It is vintage Epson, Atari and Tandy. It’s all about microprocessors and monochrome monitors. Apple artifacts abound everywhere.

The Museum of Technology is free of charge and open to the public for self-guided tours during library hours. 

Don’t come expecting the Smithsonian, though. It’s not much larger than your grandmother’s kitchen. But rather than grandma’s collection of cookbooks, there are user guides for WordPerfect word processors and instruction manuals for Radio Shack gadgets.

“It’s important to have a connection to the past, and seeing and learning from the way we did things,’’ said Tina Ashford, an associate professor of information technology at MGA and the faculty curator for the museum.

Ashford and her son, Ryan, collaborated on the idea for a  museum after growing weary of an empty display case in the hallway at the university’s IT department. 

They filled it with a computer relic that had been gifted to Tina by a former colleague.

It wasn’t long before their idea needed more … er, disk space.

“I had been collecting old computer stuff for years,’’ said Ryan, a computer information technology instructor at Central Georgia Technical College. “Having grown up with the newer stuff, I found it interesting. It was a more fun time in computing.’’

Thus began the search for vintage video consoles and mature motherboards. They tracked down Commodore 64s and Atari 5200s. They found Apple iMac G4s and Epson QX-10s. 

Estate sales and eBay became their best friends.

They purchased a MacIntosh SE at an estate sale in Warner Robins. It was practically right out of the box …  as if it had been  “teleported” from the 1990s, Ryan said. 

Tina said many recycling centers do not accept computers and other outdated electronics. They often end up in the garbage and landfills.

The Ashfords are not immune to dumpster diving for computer antiquity.

“We’re junkers,’’ Tina said, laughing. “We’ve dug some out of dumpsters.’’

One man’s modem is another man’s treasure.

The Ashfords sought items of historical significance and restored them. They located an original MacIntosh from 1984 and an IBM RT PC workstation computer that was released two years later.  

A former student Tina taught in her first year at Middle Georgia State in 1998 contacted her about his collection.

“He asked if I was still interested in old computers, and I said, ‘Of course,’ ’’ she said.

He loaned the museum a rare and expensive Altair 8800 from his archive. It has special significance because of a local connection.

The late Ed Roberts was often referred to as the “father of the personal computer.” He developed the Altair 8800 in 1974. (It was featured on the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine in January 1975.)

Roberts was a member of the first graduating class at Mercer’s School of Medicine in 1986 and became a small-town physician in Cochran. (Middle Georgia State has a campus in Cochran.)

  He was Bill Gates’ first employer, and the Microsoft founder visited him in a Macon hospital when Roberts died in April 201o.

One of the most popular exhibits in the museum is a red rotary dial telephone. Students who stop by are often curious about how it looks, feels and even how to use it. 

Just for fun, Tina purchased a $49.95 Bluetooth adapter on Amazon that can pair the rotary phone with a cell phone. (There are also acoustic couplers that were once used to transfer data.)

The Ashfords said there are no plans to expand the museum, although with technology constantly being outdated and updated, it could easily outgrow its walls.

There are visitors old enough to remember party lines, pay phones, answering machines, floppy disks and cumbersome keyboards that can weigh more than a fat puppy. 

Some folks can recall when Microsoft Windows software was introduced with games – Solitaire and Minesweeper – as standard equipment, which helped teach a generation of computer neophytes how to use a mouse. (And how to not get much work done at the office.)

“I think there are a lot of lessons on what we did right and the missteps we took,’’ Tina said.

She said a lot of seemingly outdated devices are still being utilized. Until it was upgraded last year, San Francisco’s subway and light rail transportation system was running on 1980s technology.

“You would be surprised at how much legacy is still out there,’’ Tina said.