Musée Bolo, Technology museum at EPFL campus in Ecublens, Switzerland
The Bolo Museum is a technology museum on the EPFL campus in Ecublens, housing a large collection of computers, software, and technical publications that document the history of digital technology. The exhibits span from early mainframe machines to more recent gaming consoles, showing how these devices changed across the decades.
Yves Bolognini began collecting computer hardware in 1995, but the museum itself was inaugurated on 19 June 2002 at EPFL, where only a few percent of the collection is displayed. The Fondation Mémoires Informatiques, founded on 19 March 2007 by Niklaus Wirth, Marielle Stamm and Jean-Daniel Nicoud among others, has managed the museum since. A full renovation in 2011 produced a new exhibition and publicly showed the rare CORA-1 and Thinking Machines CM-200 computers.
The museum is run by volunteers of the association Les amis du Bolo's Computer Museum, founded in 2001, who inventory and restore the machines; the Mémoires Informatiques foundation, created in 2007 by Niklaus Wirth, Marielle Stamm and Jean-Daniel Nicoud, manages it. The permanent exhibit "Programmed disappearance" opened on 10 November 2011 and shows the rarest pieces, including the Contraves Cora anti-aircraft fire-control computer and the Thinking Machines CM-200.
The museum is on the EPFL campus in Ecublens, with its main reserve of thousands of items stored near Lausanne railway station, so only a small share of the collection is on show at any time. The site is served by the EPFL railway station. The museum is run by volunteers of the association Les amis du Bolo's Computer Museum, and a visit is aimed at groups and schools as much as individual visitors.
The collection covers roughly 60 years of computing history, starting with machines from the postwar years. Many of the objects are still in working order, cared for by trained volunteers from the Mémoires Informatiques foundation.
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