Karin Mimms with a clamshell iBook, which was released by Apple in 1999 and came in five candy-color huesCourtesy of Mimms Museum of Technology and Art For better or worse, some of us have reached the age when the “cutting-edge” technology we grew up with is now fit for a museum. That turquoise Game Boy you mastered Donkey Kong on? Your college BlackBerry? The colorful iBook laptop made famous by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde? You’ll find them all at the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art, a public museum dedicated to computers that opened in 2019 in the former Roswell Mall—another bygone relic of millennial youth. On April 1, after a sneak peek for members, the museum will publicly launch its latest exhibition, iNspire: Fifty Years of Innovation from Apple. It features the largest collection of the tech giant’s products ever displayed to the public. Among the 2,000 artifacts are early Apple computers and rare prototypes, as well as memorabilia from employees and fans. You’ll find a “Lisa” computer—an early and costly desktop that shared a name with Steve Jobs’s daughter and famously flopped upon its 1983 release, landing many of the units in a Utah landfill. Also on display is the original iPod, unveiled in 2001; it’s now considered a desirable collector’s item for Gen Z, who never experienced the joy of transforming a binder of CDs into a palm-sized device. “Apple has not only survived [for 50 years], it has become one of the most influential and widely recognized companies in the world,” says museum founder Lonnie Mimms. “These artifacts tell the story of a small start-up that grew into a company that reshaped modern life.” Mimms is CEO of Mimms Enterprises, the commercial real-estate company that owned Roswell Mall. When the mall closed due to economic shifts and the opening of flashy North Point Mall nearby, Mimms and his wife, Karin, decided to turn part of it into a museum showcasing their collection of technology artifacts. Mimms’s archive, which spans 40 years of technical design, began with his first personal computer: a Sol-20 from Processor Technology, produced in 1976. In 2024, Mimms acquired the collection of the Living Computers: Museum + Lab, which was launched in 2012 in Seattle by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen but closed in 2020 due to the pandemic. “[The Living Computers team’s] preference was to keep as much of the collection together as possible,” Mimms says. “It had taken decades to build, and I wanted to help ensure it stayed preserved and accessible to the public.” Throughout the museum, you’ll find one of the world’s largest collections of Cray supercomputers, an early Enigma machine used for secret wartime communications, and NASA mission equipment—a favorite of field-trip students. Guests can play restored video games such as Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog. For those more “seasoned” visitors, who mastered such games in their youth, it’s an opportunity to relive the glory days, when knees didn’t hurt and the iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye. This article appears in our April 2026 issue. The post From Game Boys to AirPods: The tech we grew up with is now at Roswell’s Mimms Museum appeared first on Atlanta Magazine. ...read more read less