Keyboard Builders' Digest / Community
Mariupol computer museum destroyed
Dmitry Cherepanov's private museum of retro computers in Mariupol, Ukraine, has been destroyed.
Published March 24, 2022
On March 21, Russian aggressors destroyed a private museum of retro computers in Mariupol, Eastern Ukraine.
According to Dmitry Cherepanov, collector and owner of the Club 8-bit, the exposition of the museum consisted of more than half a thousand computers, consoles and other devices – even arcade games lately.
I jokingly call this museum a nursing home for elderly computers – Dmitry, 2019.
Unfortunately, this nursing home, the collection which included Soviet electronics, computer technology from around the world, peripherals for these devices, such as joysticks, and where visitors could also play on some of the exhibits, is now gone.
Well, that's all, the computer museum of Mariupol is no more. :( All that remains of my collection that I have been collecting for 15 years is just fragments of memories on the FB page, the website and the radio station of the museum. I will try to continue to support the RetroBit website and radio, but life will now have completely different priorities. There is neither my museum nor my home :((( and it hurts, but I will definitely survive it and find a new home! – it8bit.club.
The collection's website with datasheets and photos of the items is still available here: https://it8bit.club/.
Gizmodo's Alex Cranz described the museum as "one of the largest and coolest collections of Soviet computers in the world". Fortunately enough, they also shot a short film in 2019 so, in addition to the photos on the website, here is a video tour of the former museum:
Dmitry's post reporting on his situation went viral and he received a lot of positive feedback.
Thank you all for your sympathy and support. The loss of the house and the museum is a tragedy for me. But that's not all I lost. I also lost my business, which I built for many years and which, fortunately, I can restore to start a new life. So if I can be useful to someone with my service, I will be glad. I am engaged in the launch and support of sites on my own platform, which I have been writing for 5 years.
The business in question is this one I guess: https://www.facebook.com/webit.site/
While Dmitry did not explain what exactly happened, the museum was apparently destroyed during Putin's and Russia's "special operation" on the territory of Ukraine – a shameless, unprovoked aggression against a neighboring democratic country.
You can find some options for supporting Ukraine in the top bar or here.
Published on Thu 24th Mar 2022. Featured in KBD #71 (source).
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