Dawn of Digital Exhibition

By Mario Cruz

An exhibit of vintage computers from my personal collection at Moonlighter FabLab. On view October 2025 through February 2026. Restoration support from Miguel Corteguera.

About the Exhibit

Dawn of Digital is a working selection of early personal computers, gaming consoles, and one minicomputer from my private collection. It runs at Moonlighter FabLab in Miami from October 2025 through February 2026.

These are not props behind glass. Most of them power on. Some have been recapped, repaired, or rebuilt. The point is to see how computing made its way into homes, schools, and small businesses, and what those machines actually felt like to use.

What's on Display

The TRS-80 Model 3 (1980) is Radio Shack's all-in-one home computer with a built-in monitor and dual floppy drives. The iMac G4 (2002) is the lamp-arm design, still one of my favorite computers ever made. The Commodore VIC-20 (1980) was the first color home computer to sell a million units. The Kaypro II and the TRS-80 Model 100 were early portables, the kind people actually carried around.

The gaming side includes the Atari 2600A and the Magnavox Odyssey 2. Both put video games in the living room for a generation that had only seen them in arcades.

The largest piece in the exhibit is the PDP-11/70 (1975). I started my career replacing PDPs with PC servers in data centers. Pulling them out gave me years to appreciate what they were, and I fell in love with the engineering. The PDP is part of why I started collecting.

Why I Started Collecting

The collection started to preserve the machines that got me into computing, programming, and the career I have today. The Atari 2600, Atari 800, and Atari ST were part of that. So was the first XT, which I built myself. My friend Miguel Corteguera built one too.

One TRS-80 in the exhibit came from eBay. Another was offered to me by a visitor at Maker Faire for the cost of shipping. He wanted it to go to someone who would care for it.

Some of these machines have been on display at Maker Faire Miami every year since 2017.

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