From a personal collection to an educational exhibit of the advancement of computer technology

At the School of Engineering of the University of Florence, the implementation of a small "museum" of computers and related equipment is underway. The aim is to make visible to the large student population of the Faculty as many as possible electronic devices and equipment related to the field of computers, belonging both the past and recent technology. The emphasis is to illustrate the fast rate of advancement in this particular field of electronics.The school has a quite large number of professors and technicians who, in the past, have witnessed the rapid change in technology. For some of them, when they entered the University, computers were made of big boxes requiring a dedicated space and personnel to operate them. They have seen the arrival of minicomputers and, later, of personal computers, tablets, etc. Not all the abandoned equipment was always thrown away; part of it remained on the shelves. At a certain point, we decided to collect the survived pieces as a coherent exhibit, which could also be a support to the teaching activities. Naturally, also objects coming from the external world have been added.The types of equipment in the exhibit include samples of microprocessors, memories, discs, systems of different sizes and power, as well as objects and equipment that the young people, e.g. the students, may not have seen; these include punched cards, punched paper tapes and magnetic tapes.As a complement to the exhibit, a document is pro-vided, in which all the exposed elements are described in some detail.In this paper, to give a taste of the little museum and the content of the document, we provide a short description of some elements it contains. Of course, these descriptions correspond, with some reductions, to those of the complementary document.