Earlier this week, one of Ukraine’s largest privately owned computer museums, destroyed during the siege of . discovered news of the event after its owner, Dmitry Cherepanov, took to Facebook to share the fate of Club 8-bit.
“That’s it, the Mariupol computer museum is no longer there,” he on March 21. “All that is left of the collection that I have painstakingly collected over the past 15 years are just fragments of memories on the museum’s FB page, website and radio station”.
The collection includes more than 500 pieces of computer history, with entries dating back to the 1950s. visited the museum in 2018, described at the time as “one of the largest and most interesting collections” of Soviet-era computers found anywhere in the world. Cherepanov spent over a decade collecting and recovering many of the PCs on display at Club 8-bit. What makes the devastation of the museum all the more poignant is that it chronicles a shared history between Ukrainians and Russians.
Thankfully, Cherepanov is still alive, but like many residents of Mariupol, he has lost his home. If you want to support Cherepanov, he has a PayPal account accepting donations to help him and other Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, almost has been superseded by the conflict, making it the fastest growing since the second world war.
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