UWM Retrolab Unveiled

I finally got around to putting up some web pages for my Retrocomputing Lab in the history department at UWM (Holton Hall, 402). It's a working collection of about 20 personal computer systems from 1981 to about 2005. I'd been drawn back to hands on engagement with early personal computing technology when writing and researching A New History of Modern Computing. Then after I was scheduled to teach an undergraduate seminar based on that book for the UWM Honors College I realized that giving students a chance to carry out course assignments using some of the technologies they were reading about would greatly deepen . A silver lining to UWM's decade of relentless faculty downsizing is that the space crunch of the early 2000s is now a thing of the distant past, making a 400 square foot space in the history department's attic available for the purpose.

I worked on refurbishing a small collection in my attic during 2021, before moving it to campus early in the Spring 2022 semester. Here's why my attic looked like:

Since then I've been able to expand the collection considerably with equipment provided by UWM Surplus and donations from faculty and local community members. I'm not teaching the history of computing this academic year as I have a fellowship, but I'm continuing to open the lab on a weekly basis for interested members of the UWM community and to tinker with the collection to get more systems ready for use, add relevant primary sources to the binders accompanying each machine, install software, and so on.