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by ghaff 730 days ago
It's tough. When the Boston Computer Museum closed down a number of years back, its holdings were sold off and I don't think most of them were ever put on display. Admittedly, a lot was just random "old computers" at that point, but it costs money to display properly. No one is getting any real benefit from putting them in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse someplace.

MIT ended up with the K&E slide rule collection at one point. Apparently they've merged it with a recent donation and it may be on display at their new facility but it pretty much sat in storage for years as far as I'm aware.

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As far as I know the bulk of the Boston Museum was put on a train to California where it became the start of the Computer History Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum

Some of it went to the Museum of Science in Boston--I think the Whirlwind was there (not sure if still on display). But, yes, a lot went to the Computer History Museum. Not sure there's much on display. Latterly, a fair bit of the collection was various donations from local computer companies demonstrating things like graphics and the computers themselves weren't necessarily uniquely important or interesting.