In March 2022, Dmitry Cherepanov learned of the damage caused by yet another Russian bomb in Mariupol, Ukraine – the city under fire since the early days of the invasion a month before. By that point, more than 2,000 civilians had been killed. Power, running water and gas supplies had been lost, a ceasefire had collapsed and food was scarce.
But now Cherepanov discovered that the retro computer museum he curated, It8bit Club, had also gone, obliterating a popular attraction that housed more than 120 computers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, along with dozens more artefacts.
“I’m very upset. It’s been a hobby of my life,” the 45-year-old told NPR in the wake of the strike. And, while the damage may seem trivial in comparison to other events in Ukraine, it nevertheless represented a further loss of Ukrainian history and culture.
Today, the memory of the museum continues on a website (it8bit.club) that pays homage to many machines familiar to computer users in the West and quite a number that aren’t.
But what was the early computing industry like in
Ukraine? Keen to learn more, we tried to contact Cherepanov, but his mind is understandably on other things right now. We did, however, speak to Kyiv resident and computer enthusiast Dmytro Panin, who has also been displaced by war.
In his case, he had fled the capital with only a backpack of essentials (among them a Raspberry Pi and E Ink screen, which he turned into an air
