The Monash Museum of Computing History, Monash University preserves the artifacts and the experiences of fifty years of computing education and research at one of Australia's top ten universities. In this first part of a two part paper, we describe the purpose, the development and the planned future for the museum. In Part Two, we will describe the collection and current display.

This university museum has a growing collection of early computer equipment and a permanent exhibition tracing the development of computing technology within an Australian context and particularly related to computing at Monash University. The Museum has been evolving since its inception with greater definition of its collection policy, defined collection management and its role as a repository for computing history and the dissemination of its research. This paper gives an overview of the origins of the Museum, current activities and future directions.

Introduction to the Monash Museum of Computing History, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. Part I of this series described the development of the Museum. This article gives a description of the current holdings of the Museum and the permanent display.

This chapter tells of the Monash Museum of Computing History, how it was started in 2001 and its purpose to preserve the computing history of Monash University and present this history to members of the University and the general public. It also describes Monash University's: MONADS research project.

Monash University, Australia developed an in-house local area network called MONET during the 1980s to meet the needs of the university's computer users. The Monash University Computer Centre team created and installed an economical computer access network across an extensive campus with distributed computer installations and a large numbers of users. MONET was an early implementation of a Local Area Network (LAN) at a time when LAN concepts were evolving and specific hardware and software for the purpose did not yet exist. MONET became a successful large scale system that was in development and then operation to support all the University's computer services for over a decade. It was also commercialized and used by various other organizations.