In Suburban Georgia, a New Museum Exhibit Puts Apple’s 50-Year History Under Glass

ROSWELL, Ga. — On a gray strip of asphalt north of Atlanta, parents shepherded children past a nail salon and chain restaurants and into what used to be a big-box store. Inside, the fluorescent glare gave way to cool gallery light and the glow of a rainbow wall of old iMacs. At the center of one glass case sat an Apple-1 computer on anti-static foam, a hand-lettered schematic signed by Steve Jobs mounted behind it.

A permanent Apple exhibition opens in Roswell

On Wednesday, the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art opened “iNSPIRE: 50 Years of Innovation from Apple,” a sprawling permanent exhibition devoted to one of the world’s most valuable companies — and to the half-century of devices that helped define personal technology.

Timed to Apple’s 50th anniversary, the exhibit fills more than 20,000 square feet in a converted retail space off Commerce Parkway in Roswell. Museum officials say it brings more than 2,000 Apple artifacts, prototypes and documents under one roof, in what they describe as one of the largest public Apple collections ever assembled.

The show’s opening coincides with the date Apple Computer Company was founded in Cupertino, California, on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. While Apple marked the milestone in its retail stores and online, one of the most ambitious efforts to freeze that history in glass and steel has taken shape more than 2,400 miles away, inside a suburban Georgia museum that started as one man’s personal collection.

“The idea grew out of my lifelong passion for collecting and preserving historic computers and technology,” founder Lonnie Mimms said in an earlier interview about the museum’s origin. Mimms, an Atlanta-area commercial real estate developer, has spent more than four decades amassing vintage hardware and is widely known among collectors for his Apple holdings.

The Mimms Museum’s growing footprint

The Mimms Museum, which opened to the public in 2019 under the name Computer Museum of America, already bills itself as the largest technology museum on the East Coast. It houses what curators say is the world’s largest collection of Cray supercomputers, along with mainframes, a space-exploration gallery and a chronological “STEAM timeline” that traces computing from the abacus to game consoles and early PCs.

The Apple exhibit is now its anchor.

From Apple-1 to iPhone — with interactive installations

Visitors enter iNSPIRE through a corridor lined with early Apple hardware and printed materials from the 1970s. One gallery centers on the Apple-1, the hand-built circuit board that launched the company. Fewer than 70 original Apple-1 units are believed to survive; Mimms owns five of them, a concentration rarely seen outside auction catalogs and private vaults.

Nearby, under glass, sits a single sheet of paper that has already become one of the exhibit’s most-photographed items: a handwritten specification for the Apple-1, signed by Jobs. Other cases move forward through the Apple II line, the beige Macintosh that starred in the company’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial, and the candy-colored iMac G3s that filled dorm rooms at the end of the 1990s.

Later sections devote space to the iPod family, with rows of the music players that helped propel Apple into consumer electronics, and to the original 2007 iPhone that blended a phone, music player and internet device into a single touchscreen slab. Prototypes and lesser-known products, like the Newton handheld and early portable Macs, appear alongside more famous hits.

The exhibit is not just static hardware. One corner houses a floor-length “iPod wall,” where visitors dance and watch their silhouettes rendered in the bright block colors of Apple’s early-2000s advertising campaigns. An interactive “iCloud floor” responds with shifting graphics to footsteps. Elsewhere, an iPad-powered drawing wall and a motion-based trivia game encourage visitors to swipe, tap and wave their way through the company’s history.

“Apple’s impact on our modern world goes far beyond devices — the brand has revolutionized the way we all work, create, communicate and even think,” Executive Director Rena Youngblood said in a statement announcing the exhibit. “With our iNSPIRE exhibit, we will be telling that story in a way that has never been done before, helping spark imagination and innovation for generations to come.”

Co-founder Karin Mimms, a former educator, said the museum sees the Apple show as part of a broader effort to capture technology’s rapid evolution before it disappears from daily view.

“Technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, yet its history is surprisingly fragile,” she said. “We’re trying to honor the past while inspiring the future.”

How big is “the biggest”? A claim with caveats

The museum and some promotional materials have described iNSPIRE as hosting “the world’s largest collection of Apple products” or the largest such collection ever placed on public display. Independent reporting has noted that the claim is difficult to sustain.

In Italy, the All About Apple Museum in Savona, created with help from local user groups and former employees, has cataloged more than 9,000 Apple items and is widely described by European and U.S. outlets as the most comprehensive Apple hardware collection in the world. In the Netherlands, a new Apple Museum Utrecht, opening this week, also advertises an extensive array of Macintosh and iOS devices, including a wall of 100 iMac G3s.

Museum officials in Roswell now emphasize that iNSPIRE is one of the largest public Apple exhibits and say they are not attempting to compete with institutions overseas.

“We’re incredibly proud to be able to share one of the most significant Apple collections with the public on a permanent basis,” Youngblood said in an interview ahead of the opening. “This is about access and education, not about rankings.”

Nostalgia, design — and a classroom pitch

The decision to devote 20,000 square feet of permanent floor space to a single corporation’s products places Mimms alongside other brand-centered museums such as the World of Coca-Cola in downtown Atlanta or the BMW Museum in Munich. Like those institutions, iNSPIRE leans heavily on design, advertising and personal nostalgia.

Interpretive panels and programming emphasize how Apple’s product design, typography and marketing campaigns intersected with broader changes in music, photography and communication. “Technology and art have always been intertwined,” said Elaine Pelaia, the museum’s director of operations. “We want visitors to see that great technology is not just functional. It is expressive and human.”

For many visitors on opening day, the appeal was straightforward. Parents pointed out the beige boxes they used in college; teenagers laughed at the size of early laptops; grandparents paused at early home computers their offices once bought at great expense.

“I saved up for months to get one of these,” said one attendee, gesturing toward a row of original iPods. “My kids have no idea what it meant to carry 1,000 songs in your pocket back then.”

The museum is betting that those emotional connections can be turned into classroom lessons. The Mimms Museum markets itself aggressively to school districts across Georgia, offering field trips aligned with state standards in math, science and social studies. Curriculum materials use objects from the Apple exhibit to teach basic principles of computer science, entrepreneurship and design.

“A museum should be more than a destination. It should be a community asset,” Youngblood said. “If a student comes here, sees an old computer or a phone and suddenly realizes, ‘People built this; maybe I can build something too,’ that’s the outcome we care about.”

In the run-up to the opening, the museum invited the public to participate in a “Show Us Your Apples” social media campaign, asking people to post photos and stories about their first or favorite Apple devices under a common hashtag. Selected submissions are displayed on screens inside the exhibit, turning what could have been a one-sided corporate chronicle into a partial oral history.

A cultural bet on repurposed retail space

The Apple show arrives as Roswell and other Atlanta suburbs pursue cultural projects to diversify their economies and draw tourists. City and state promotional materials cite the museum, nestled in a shopping center off a busy corridor, as an example of how defunct retail space can be repurposed into museums and event venues.

Apple’s story, meanwhile, continues to unfold far from the glass cases in Georgia. The company has shifted its business toward services and wearables, faced antitrust scrutiny in the United States and Europe, and is adapting to new forms of artificial intelligence and competition. None of that is front and center in Roswell, where the focus is on the first 50 years.

For now, the museum’s galleries offer something more tangible. In one room, a first-generation iPhone sits next to its packaging. In another, a beige Apple II hums to life on a desk, its green cursor blinking patiently on a cathode-ray tube. Children lean in close as parents explain that, once, this was what the future looked like.

As the ribbon-cutting ceremony wrapped up, Youngblood watched a school group cluster around an original Macintosh and an early laptop. “We’re used to thinking of these devices as disposable,” she said. “But they’re also primary documents of our time.”

On Apple’s 50th birthday, those documents now have a permanent home in an unlikely corner of suburban Georgia, waiting for a new generation to decide what kind of world they want to build on top of them.