OUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- AT the new headquarters of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, the ghosts of technologies past still roam the grounds.

One unoccupied room still contains dozens of worker cubicles left behind by the building's former occupant, Silicon Graphics, a computer workstation maker hit hard by the technology downturn. The empty purple cubicles mark out a kind of museum-within-a-museum, a place where the recent past suddenly turned into history. Out in the parking lot, the paint that once marked reserved spaces has all but faded, and neighboring office buildings sport a sign of the hard times: "Sublease Available."

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Surrounded by the lessons of history, the Computer History Museum is moving forward at a considerably slower pace than Internet speed. Beginning this month, the museum is offering the first chance for the public to view some of the 5,000 computer artifacts in its new home. Over the next several years, the museum will expand in three phases, gradually assuming its mission to "preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age."

The slow rollout is mainly a result of the moribund state of the technology sector, which has slowed donations to a trickle. To date the nonprofit museum has raised about $54 million in pledges ($25 million of which have been collected), with little movement over the last year toward its goal of $100 million. "The fund-raising is harder than ever," said John Toole, the museum's executive director and chief executive. "But it really helps having a building, something real to show people."

The museum traces its roots to the Computer Museum in Boston, which was founded in 1979 by Gordon Bell, a longtime engineer and executive at the Digital Equipment Corporation, and his wife, Gwen. A spinoff history center in Silicon Valley was established in 1996; four years later, half of the Boston collection moved west. Since 2000, the artifacts have been stored at Moffett Field, also the home of the NASA Ames Research Center, about a mile from the museum's new headquarters.

The Computer History Museum is still a work in progress. Of the museum's 10,000 images and 4,000 linear feet of computer documentation, most have yet to be digitized for online access, a conspicuous delay for a museum honoring the digital age. Recent visitors to the museum's Web site (www.computerhistory.org) often encountered pages filled with nothing but computer code, a glitch that certainly says something about computer history, but probably not what museum officials hope to convey.

The technology slump, however, has cut both ways for the museum. Depressed commercial real estate prices enabled it to buy its new headquarters at a discount. The building, which measures 119,000 square feet and was built expressly for its former tenant, is only nine years old. (The museum scrapped a plan to build its own space at Moffett Field when it bought the building.)

"Silicon Graphics was building a museum in 1994 - they just didn't know it at the time," Mr. Toole said, smiling.

The slack economy has also enabled the museum to tap some technology luminaries who are no longer quite so busy. A member of the museum's board, Donna Dubinsky, co-founder and chief executive of the hand-held-device maker Handspring, says she plans to devote more time to fund-raising for the museum once Handspring's recently announced sale to Palm is completed.

"This is an opportunity to collect and archive computer artifacts for future generations," Ms. Dubinsky said. "This stuff is lost if we don't get it now."

The museum's Visible Storage exhibit showcases about 500 of the collection's most notable artifacts. Among them is an imposing nine-foot-tall metal rack crammed with vacuum tubes and colored wires, a small portion of a 1945 Eniac, the world's first electronic digital computer. The complete Eniac filled an entire room, weighed 30 tons and could store about 200 bytes (compared with 16 million bytes on today's typical PC).

Sitting inconspicuously on a shelf is an Apple-1, the 1976 machine that helped set off the personal computing revolution. The Apple-1 was a few mouse clicks shy of being user-friendly: for $666.66, buyers received a circuit board, a bag of parts and an assembly manual, and had to supply their own case, keyboard and monitor.

Most of the collection has been assembled through donations; the museum gets about 10 calls a week from people seeking to unload old hardware. More often than not, it has to decline computers that are too common or already in the collection. (Please, no more I.B.M. PC Jr.'s or Commodore 64's.)

Other computers have slipped into history so quickly that the museum has had difficulty acquiring them before they became expensive collector's items. Lately museum officials have taken to calling computer makers and asking them to donate their current models, before they become obsolete. Mr. Toole said that some hardware makers are unnerved by the idea that their latest device is a museum-piece-in-waiting.

"Some of them say, 'My God, we're not history yet!' " Mr. Toole said.