The opening of the relatively young MicroXperts High-Tech Museum in St. Petersburg took place at the end of 2012. Since then, anyone interested in technology can visit the exhibition in their free time - the exhibition is open around the clock. And, thanks to the sincere enthusiasm of MicroXperts employees, visiting the museum is absolutely free.
Guests of the city will have no difficulty finding the MicroXperts High-Tech Museum on Kondratyevsky Prospect, 15. The building of the Yulmart Electronics Cybermarket, which houses the museum, is located next to the Komendantsky Prospekt metro station.
Exposition Start
The idea of creating an exhibition of obsolete equipment came to the mind of enthusiastic employees of MicroXperts. It was they who brought and placed several old devices in the window, one look at which nowadays causes a smile. Among these ancient devices was, for example, a tablet released back in the USSR and working on the Basic platform. And what a surprise for modern youth is a bulky memory module, the size of a small laptop. It was released back in 1985 and was then quite progressive.
Among the first exhibits of the MicroXperts Museum of High Technologies there is still a tetris forgotten in our time with a small screen and not very clear images of falling figures. But it was a favorite toy of schoolchildren of the previous generation.
The founders of the museum are Dmitry Fedorenko and Anton Kofanov, although many employees took an active part in creating the new exhibition.
Museum Development
The idea of creating the MicroXperts high-tech museum on the basis of the Yulmart electronics cybermarket was not only approved by the residents of the cultural capital, but was further developed.
Nowadays, more than eighty items related to the now rare technique are presented in its windows. And in the storage, covering an area of 600 m², there are more than 15 thousand rarities of varying degrees of safety. Residents of the city did not mind sharing old technical "artifacts" gathering dust on mezzanines or in garages.
In addition, the leadership of Yulmart announced a competition to search for the most unique exhibit. Gambling citizens brought copies of the first mobile phones, unusually heavy and with a large protruding antenna, old laptops and memory cards.
According to the exhibits collected at the MicroXperts Museum of High Technologies in St. Petersburg, one can trace the evolution of devices for listening to audio tracks. First, a large battery-powered cassette player that needed to be replaced frequently. Then the device for mini-disks, also unusually bulky and inconvenient.
In the windows, you can also look at and remember what the first video cameras and cameras using black and white film looked like. There are several once popular pagers that modern teens are unaware of.
It is difficult to list all the exhibits of the MicroXperts Museum of High Technologies, there are too many of them and each has its own interesting history. Let's try to stop at the most significant rarities.
Unique exhibits
Among the many items in glass cases, some attract particular attention. For example, the MK-90 programmable calculator with an LCD screen, which can rightfully be called the forerunner of today's popular tablets.
Or the well-preserved Sharp IQ-7000 electronic organizer, the existence of which many have forgotten. Also in the collection is the Apple Macintosh IIsi system unit, which is popular with connoisseurs of products from this company.
It is hard to imagine that recently there were video cards with only a few kilobytes of memory or huge modems with an extremely low, maximum 9, 600 bps, data transfer rate. In our time of high technology, these first devices are surprising and show what stood at the origins of modern familiar gadgets.
Unfortunately, the showcases of the exhibition are small and it is impossible to place rarities larger than 50 by 50 cm in them. Such large objects can only be seen in photographs.
The prefix designed by Steve Jobs
The most valuable exhibit of the MicroXperts Museum of High Technologies in St. Petersburg is the American Atari 2600, which first appeared on sale back in 1977. Once it was very popular, then it was replaced by the Sony PlayStation and Xbox 360 consoles. One of the main developers of this console was the talented inventor Steve Jobs, who subsequently made a revolution in information technology. Thanks to these first consoles, many people have become fans of video games. Surprisingly, the copy presented in the museum is still in working condition.
It is known that this rare surviving device was brought by one of the residents of St. Petersburg. MicroXperts management gave him a powerful modern computer in return.
The second life of obsolete technology
However, a variety of technological exhibits are not always in the windows of the MicroXperts high-tech museum. Often they are carefully transferred to various exhibitions dedicated to the development of modern technologies.
For example, in 2013, some objects were presented at the thematic exhibitions Geek Picnic and BitByte, where interested spectators always gathered around them.
Of course, the bulk of the collection is always available for inspection. In addition, there are already quite a lot of exhibits and it is impossible to arrange them simultaneously in small museum windows. Therefore, some items are stored in storage rooms and the showcase is regularly updated. Workers are trying to ensure that each rarity is shown to museum guests, because all this obsolete equipment actually represents great cultural, historical and even collection value.
