The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on society.

The museum's origins date to 1968 when Gordon Bell began a quest for a historical collection and, at that same time, others were looking to preserve the Whirlwind computer.

[5] The Computer History Museum hosts regular public programs (currently under the "CHM Live" banner) with notable leaders (past and present) from Silicon Valley and the global tech sector, including past speakers such as Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt, as well as academics, historians, and others on the impact of technology.

[a] This includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects such as a Cray-1 supercomputer as well as a Cray-2, Cray-3, the Utah teapot, the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, an Apple I, and an example of the first generation of Google's racks of custom-designed web servers.

Designed for middle schoolers and up, it features multimedia and touchscreen interactives, including a software lab where visitors can explore coding hands-on.

[14] The CHM is also home to an extensive collection of software, curated by Al Kossow, a veteran of Apple Computer whom the museum hired in 2006.

Kossow was a contributor to the museum long before being hired full-time and is the proprietor of Bitsavers, a large online repository of historical computer manuals and archived software and firmware acquired from his own collection and through donations from his peers.

[15][16][17] In 2010 the museum began with the collection of source code of important software, beginning with Apple's MacPaint 1.3, written in a combination of assembly language and Pascal and available as download for the public.

[28] The interactive exhibit included a desktop computer, a giant monitor, a 25-foot (7.6 m) keyboard, and a 40-inch (1,016 mm) diameter trackball (initially planned to be a "bumper-car sized mouse") used by visitors to control the World Traveler program.

[29] This exhibit was closed on August 5, 1995, and re-opened as the Walk-Through Computer 2000 on October 21, 1995, to include an updated monitor, 3D graphics, and more interactive features.

The CHM Fellow Awards Program honors distinguished technology pioneers for their outstanding merits and significant contributions to the advancement of computing and the evolution of the digital age.