Museum of Business History and Technology

Hidden within the otherwise mundane offices of a legal software firm you’ll find an impressive collection of office machinery through the ages.

There are hundreds of typewriters here, including, purportedly, all the machines ever made by Remington, starting with the mechanical Sholes and Glidden typewriter from 1873 (which looks like a sewing machine) and ending with a late computer-based typewriter from the 1980s. 

You can stroll through full aisles of cash registers, calculators, telephones, telegraph devices, pencil sharpeners, and time clocks, as well as tons of ephemera: advertisements, old articles, merchandise. An old copier resembling a clothes drier sits right next to the fabled Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper copier. A Chinese abacus shares the aisle with an early electronic pocket calculator from Texas Instruments.

The collection includes an assortment of teaching implements too, making once advanced technology such as QWERTY keyboards and ten-key calculators easier to understand and master. You can also find here, in no particular order, typewriter perfume, a slide rule for musicians, and one cash register from the Old West (it’s basically just a scale for weighing gold).

The Museum of Business History and Technology comes from a collection of Thomas A. Russo, who once worked at Remington Rand, and started collecting office equipment three decades ago. Many of the artifacts, mechanical or later electromechanical, help understand the technological progress that led to the modern, electronic office technology that surrounds us all.