'50 Years of Apple' is a juicy exhibit at Long Island Museum

"That does not compute!" the persnickety robot in "Lost in Space" used to complain, but at the Long Island Museum, things are computing just fine.

The exhibit "50 Years of Apple Computers: The Kevin Lenane Collection," running through May 24 at the  museum, in Stony Brook, presents selections from what’s believed to be the largest collection of Apple products and memorabilia, courtesy of collector Kevin Lenane. It features 24 working computers, an early personal digital assistant, Apple cameras, watches, phones, and a rare working model of the machine that launched an empire — the Apple 1, which was just a motherboard.

Users had to buy their own keyboard, monitor and cassette recorder. Its first advertisements heralded an amazing 4 kilobytes of memory. (The base model of today’s iPhone 16 has 2,000,000 times that.) Only 200 of them were made and few still exist. It retailed for the curious price of $666.66. A working model is housed in the Victoria and Albert museum in London.

The start of his collection

The Apple 1 wasn’t the first machine Lenane acquired for his collection. That was another old model he found on eBay. "It was like $10," Lenane recalled. "I thought, ‘Oh man, I remember that. This is the computer my grandfather had in his apartment.’ ”

Because Lenane’s father worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, he was always around computers and remembers playing video games as a toddler. Even for him, it’s difficult to encapsulate how these inventions have changed communication, connectivity, business, commerce, creativity, and even the language we use. Apple. Macintosh. iPod. iPhone. Apps. Beats. AirPods. FaceTime. We don’t even think of mice the way we did 50 years ago.

"More than anything, it’s brought connectivity and creativity. Apple was really big always on the creative part," Lenane says. "Being able to see clearly and communicate, I think it’s promoted us into being a more cooperative society globally."

From a visionary startup to a megacorporation worth some $4 trillion when CEO Tim Cook recently announced he’ll pass the reins to a younger generation, Apple’s 50 years have defied odds, embodied the American dream and changed the world. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, after a couple of college dropouts (the "two Steves") engineered something revolutionary from Jobs’ parents’ garage. It’s an epic story.

Two tales to tell

Curator Nina Sangimino worked to tell two stories at once. "Basically, I’m going through the timelines of both technological innovation and also design innovation because their devices are so carefully and beautifully designed," she says. "That’s something that was really important to Steve Jobs from the very beginning, that everything was designed beautifully to fit into your life and be incredibly intuitive and user-friendly. That’s why some of these devices are included in the Museum of Modern Art."

But we all know that computers are about more than computation. The exhibit embraces the fun side as well. "There’s a 1983 Apple 2E with a color monitor, and it has a lot of vintage arcade games," Sangimino said. "We have it set up that people can come in and play."

Lenane’s favorite part of sharing his collection with the public has been watching people connect with machines that were part of their lives, which happened when he gave a tour and a demonstration of the Apple 1 on Sunday.. "I love to hear people talking about how this is the one I had in college," he said. "They’re reliving a moment in time, and that’s a neat thing."