Westport Tech & Nostalgia Museum History & Today

Description:

The Westport Tech & Nostalgia Museum is a private (not open to the general public) museum in Westport, CT that displays vintage electronics, technology, and nostalgic collectible items.

 About the Curator/Creator:

Jay Babina is a college freshman who became interested in vintage technology at age 12. His family has a tech background - his great-grandfather worked at GE during WWII, his grandparents started radio station WMNR in Monroe, CT, and his father was early in on personal computer programming in the early 1980's. He plans on attending college and hopes to open the museum to the public eventually.

Jay Babina on May 17th, 2023 and May 31st, 2011.

How It Started: 

Jay's entry into technology was during his third grade science fair in 2015. He and his dad created a wood plank with a speaker and a string. The speaker moved up and down which made the string make different vibrations. Jay tied second place in the science fair to his best friend. 

On his way to Hebrew school in 2018, Jay opened the glove compartment to his family's 15 year old car, and found his Dad's 16 year old iPod. It was the first item in his collection. He found all the history of it very cool, but he especially loved the value! A couple months later, while exploring the many treasures of his basement, he found a Zip-Loc bag of his parents' old phones and PDA's, including a Motorola StarTAC, Palm IIIe Special Edition, Palm Treo, and an iPhone 3G.  

On January 11, 2020. A bored, 14 year old, Jay B. stared at his small box of ten old phones and PDAs he found in his basement. He had an idea - he would display his minimal collection on the three small shelves on his desk in his room and write hand-written informational signs on index cards to display next to it. 

Westport Tech Museum on March 25th, 2020. 

Today: 

Now, almost 5 years later, Jay's collection has grown from 10 items to over 400 different items!  He has collected his items from many different sources including eBay, flea markets, estate and tag sales, and donations from nice members of the community and friends/family. 

Rebranding: 

In September 2024, Westport Tech Museum decided to unofficially change its name to Westport Tech & Nostalgia Museum, due to a recent influx of nostalgic collectibles being displayed in the museum.

ABOUT THE WEBSITE:

This website is the third website made for Westport Tech Museum (Version 3.0).

All exhibit content and write-ups on this website were written by Jay himself.

Special exclusively-online virtual exhibits are on this website!  These are items that I don't have a physical item for.  Virtual exhibits are marked "[VIRTUAL]".

Unless otherwise noted, all videos on this site are displayed directly from YouTube (using video embedding links provided by YouTube).

The museum runs on a modified Shopify platform.  Technical assistance and modifications were made by my father (John).