The escalating war in Ukraine has destroyed a museum devoted to retro computers.
Earlier this week, the owner of the Club 8-Bit museum in Mariupol, Ukraine, reported the tragic news on Facebook page. “That's it, the Mariupol computer museum is no longer there,” wrote Dmitry Cherepanov.
“All that is left from my collection that I have been collecting for 15 years is just fragments of memories on the FB page, website and radio station of the museum,” he added.
Founded in 2003, the Club 8-Bit museum contained a collection of over 120 retro computers, many of them ZX Spectrum systems, which were popular in Ukraine and Russia during the 1980s. Gizmodo documented the museum two years ago in a video, which shows that Club 8-Bit also had an extensive collection of retro keyboards and video gaming systems.
The museum also had an Apple IIc computer, Compaq Portable III, Atari 400, and many Soviet-era computers from the 1980s and 1990s. “In total, more than 500 exhibits of the IT sphere from the 1950s to the early 2000s” were located at the museum, according to Club 8-Bit’s website.
The destruction of the museum occurred as Mariupol is facing an intense siege from Russian military forces, which have been shelling residential buildings across the city. In his Facebook post, Cherepanov added: “There is neither my museum nor my house. And it hurts, but I will definitely survive it and find a new home.”
In a reply on Facebook, Cherepanov thanked users for their sympathy and said he plans on launching a web hosting service platform in the meantime.