Celebrate 50 years of Apple at this quirky Roswell museum
Apple has been one of the most important tech companies of the past half-century, since Steve Jobs began making computers in his home in 1976.
Lonnie Mimms, one of the largest real estate owners in metro Atlanta, has been tracking Apple’s journey since he was a young man and became a massive computer collector in the 1980s. He began showing the best of his collection to the public in 2019 at the Computer Museum of America, now renamed Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Roswell next to the Aurora Cineplex.
In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary this month, he has opened a sprawling 20,000-square-foot permanent celebration of the company. It covers Apple’s humble beginnings, rapid rise, near death and enduring legacy.
“Apple has incredible mass appeal while the majority of computer companies have come and gone,” said Mimms in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The company changed entire industries: music, mobile phones, retail, even packaging.”
Building out a tribute to Apple
The Apple exhibit inhabits a space once filled by the Funny Farm Comedy Club and Startime Entertainment sports bar and arcade, which shuttered in 2009 and remained empty for more than 15 years.
It took two years to build out, costing millions of dollars, largely out of Mimms’ own pocket.
That included an “enormous unexpected plumbing problem,” underneath the building, he noted. which opened as Roswell Mall in 1974 with a Kmart and Richway, two years before Apple existed. Malon D. Mimms Co. now owns the entire property, parts of which may be redeveloped.
Mimms broke out the Apple exhibit into nine parts with plenty of interactive elements. Visitors can play a 1970s version of the arcade brick game “Breakout,” journey through an Apple II text-based version of “Oregon Trail” and dance with silhouettes of themselves in homage to the iPod ads from the 2000s.
There’s a large cylindrical art piece featuring magazine covers about Apple. a wall packed with all styles of iPods and a display of iMac G3 models in every color ever made. That translucent, egg-shaped all-in-one desktop G3 was a pivotal product Jobs created after his return to Apple in 1998.
“Were it not for those iMac G3s,” Mimms noted, “Apple may not have survived.”
Rena Youngblood, the museum’s first and only executive director, said attendees have been amused by a display featuring everyday items made obsolete by the iPhone including a Rolodex, a boom box, a typewriter, a rotary phone, a flashlight, a camera, a calculator and an atlas.
“It’s so simple,” Youngblood said. “Everybody knows what their iPhone does. But when you put it together like this, it’s incredible.”
She spied a mirror in the grouping and laughed.
“Yep,” she said. “We use our iPhone camera to see if we have spinach in our teeth.”
The collection of early Apple memorabilia is thorough.
Mimms owns six of the approximately 200 1976-era Apple I computers which were basically fully assembled motherboards minus a casing or any accessories. Five of them are shown at the exhibit. He is especially proud of a supersized 8-by-5-foot replica of Apple I created by his daughter Caroline Gryder.
Also on display is the second check ever written from Apple dated March 17, 1976 and signed by Jobs and co-creator Steve Wozniak. Amusingly, the dollar amount written out ($100.97) doesn’t match the numerical total $116.97. “I’m not sure if that makes it more valuable,” Youngblood said.
The museum has the very first Apple II floppy disc drive in existence with a serial number of “1,” which Mimms considers the exhibit’s most significant artifact. And Mimms procured a handwritten ad Jobs wrote that was used as a template for the first Apple I magazine ad. It was purchased at auction in 2023 for $175,759.
Key Apple players weigh in
Apple didn’t endorse the exhibit, but didn’t discourage it either. “Apple says they only look forward, but every Apple employee we’ve talked to says, ‘This is so cool! We love our past!’” Youngblood said.
Several key original Apple players came to the exhibit’s grand opening in March, including Ron Wayne, the man who wrote the incorporation papers for Apple in 1976, and three of Apple’s first 12 employees.
“I knew several of the early folks that worked there,” Mimms said. “Nobody is getting any younger, so this was a really good time to do this.”
Randy Wigginton, Apple’s sixth employee and first software engineer at a mere 16 years old, said he was impressed by the thoroughness of the exhibit.
“I love that they included not just the greatest hits, but the misses like the Newton,” a failed personal digital assistant in 1993 and precursor to modern tablets and smartphones, Wigginton said. “It’s a great walk down memory lane and for younger people, it will be, “Wow! They produced that?’”
Mimms wonders if Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011 at age 56, would enjoy the exhibit. “He probably would but not admit it,” he said. “He was so ingrained not to look back.”
He hopes to have Wozniak come at some point. “He would have trouble getting past the first room,” he said. “He’d have so many stories!”
Mimms, who saw his first computer (an IBM 36) at the Fernbank Science Center in 1971 as a child, owns one of the largest computer collections in the world with more than 500,000 items. Only a tiny fraction is on display at the museum.
He recently bolstered the museum’s holdings by buying most of the contents of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s museum. Last year, 60 semi-trucks worth of memorabilia from Seattle were shipped to Atlanta.
The museum includes three other permanent exhibits: a technology timeline, a tribute to space exploration and a focus on supercomputing.
“This is very much a passion project,” Mimms said. “I want to build credibility so donors can see it’s real. This is not just a bunch of stuff on a shelf. This is a real museum.”
Since it added “art” to its name, the museum has also hosted temporary art exhibits featuring artists like Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí and rock photographer May Pang.
While the location is not an obvious home for a museum, he wants to build audience via word-of-mouth, special events and marketing.
“Our hope,” Mimms said, “is to reach as many people as possible and once they leave the museum have that spark of inspiration to do something great.”
The museum drew 25,000 people last year. Youngblood hopes the Apple exhibit will help double that number this year.
“Right now, it’s a really secret gem,” Mimms said.
This Saturday at 2 p.m., David Pogue, author of “Apple: The First 50 Years” and “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent, will be speaking at the neighboring Aurora Cineplex theater. (Another event is happening at the Mimms museum itself.)
His coffee table book explores the history of Apple, chronicling every major twist and turn of the company, with plenty of delightful bits of trivia. Pogue has covered technology for four decades.
“The secret formula of the book is origin story after origin story,” said Pogue, who purchased one of the first Macintosh computers in 1984 at Yale University on a student discount for a mere $1,250 to compose and arrange music.
He convinced Apple to allow him to speak to current employees, enabling him to chronicle not just the well-covered first 35 years of Apple but also the past 15 years while Tim Cook ran the company. (Cook just stepped down.)
“I hope this book sets the record straight,” Pogue said. “There are so many bogus stories out there.”
IF YOU GO
David Pogue book stop to promote “Apple: The First 50 Years”
2 p.m., Saturday, $10 for entry, $50 with the book for non-members, Aurora Cineplex, 5100 Commerce Pkwy, Roswell.
Mimms museum, including the Apple exhibit, is open noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. $16-$22. 5000 Commerce Pkway, Roswell, mimmsmuseum.org
About the Author
Rodney Ho writes about entertainment for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution including TV, radio, film, comedy and all things in between. A native New Yorker, he has covered education at The Virginian-Pilot, small business for The Wall Street Journal and a host of beats at the AJC over 20-plus years. He loves tennis, pop culture & seeing live events.
