Last week, Club 8-bit, one of Ukraine’s largest private computer museums, was destroyed during the siege of Mariupol. Kotaku reports that he became aware of this sad situation after the owner of the museum, Dmitry Cherepanov, took to Facebook to share the fate of Club 8-bit.
The post, published on March 21, said: “That’s it, the Mariupol computer museum is no more. From the collection that I have accumulated for 15 years, only fragments of memories from the museum’s FB page, website and radio station remain.”
Club 8-bit’s collection included more than 500 pieces of computer history, with items dating back to the 1950s. Also, the museum contained the largest and coolest collections of Soviet-era computers.
It has been reported that the Mariupol Computer Museum in Ukraine, a privately owned collection of over 500 items of retro computing, consoles and technology from the 1950s to the early 2000s, a collection nearly 20 years in the making, has been destroyed by a bomb. pic.twitter.com/7xKi3yYjth
— Lord Arse! (@Lord_Arse) March 23, 2022
It took over a decade for Cherepanov to collect and restore many of the PCs on display at Club 8-bit. What makes the destruction of the museum even more poignant is that it has documented a shared history between the Ukrainian and Russian people.
Fortunately Cherepanov is alive… However, like many residents of Mariupol, he lost his home. Since the start of the war, nearly 10 million people have been displaced by the conflict, and it is thought to be the fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II.
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