Why such a museum?

Since the Sixties, there was a very significant evolution in the means of calculations of the electromechanical type then electronic.

This fast evolution transformed with the daily newspaper the prefessionnelle life of many Europeans. Indeed, it touched all the economic sectors, increasing the productivity, removing employment in certain fields and while creating in other. Transforming the nature of work deeply and, at the bottom, upsetting our ways of life, us plunging in a world " whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere " (MC LUHAN).

A person whose professional life started in the Sixties probably knew several types of machines and, if the name of its profession remains unchanged, its way of exerting it is basically different.

There have been 5 generations of hardware for this time, whose at least 3 first are in the process of disappearance:

1. Calculator,

2. Card-oriented computers,

3. Great centralized systems.

2 following generations: minicomputing, then microprocessing continue to exist but in a form quite different from their initial form: the apparatuses built initially are not used any more since 15 year old meadows.

However the European manufacturers were trés present at the time of these various phases having then acquired thanks to marks of reference of significant shares of market which they largely lost since (Bull, Nixdorf, ICL, Olivetti). It is significant to keep trace of the European products of this time: their historical value is all the more significant since their dévéloppement corresponded to a political will of the government to take a lead in the market of the data processing. For example the " calculation plan " launched by the general one OF GAULLE to France in 1964.

The sets which the museum wants to gather combine the three following criteria:

1. Their function is identical because they process the data by using the electric power,

2. The materials used are the same ones at each time, plastic metal and matiére,

3. They belong at the time contemporary, of 1940 to our days.

The first Européen museum of data processing has the role to gather, protect and present these sets.