It's a pretty monumental effort to transport, store, refurbish and show these massive computers. There aren't a lot of organizations even willing to put in the effort which is why most of this stuff gets landfilled or sent to the recycler. I would assume they asked around and no one else was interested.

Sounds like SAP donated $250k to fund it.

https://www.pressebox.de/pressemitteilung/sap-ag-walldorf/co...

I bet most of these were German government property at some point. Considering the time period they were produced, they were probably under security protocols as well. That doesn't just expire. You are right to wonder what the provenance and legal standing of this transfer was.

As a USian, I had the same thought!

Read on to the last paragraph, I think what they meant to hint at is this:

> And about those WWII bombing raids? Midway through our work, we noticed a demolition team carefully dismantling a live 500-pound Allied bomb just 350 feet from our location. According to a local office worker, this wasn’t unusual; numerous unexploded bombs had been found on-site in the years prior, prompting evacuations in 2004.

If you live in Europe, there's a reasonable chance you've had the experience of being (or living) in the proximity of an uncovered leftover WW2 bomb at some point that needed to be defused. Because those bombs didn't all disappear in the 40s.

I'm guessing in this case that could've meant somebody could've found that entire hangar and its contents and just cleaned the "junk" out entirely.

The writing seems odd because it’s from the BAI (Before AI) era.

Died in August 2010 [1], so he was still alive when this happened in August 2006.

[1] https://www.aachen-gedenkt.de/traueranzeige/profdr-ingwalter...

Kinda crazy if you think about it. In my home town of Cologne, if you dig anywhere you either find roman ruins or WW2 bombs. ~30 bombs last year. I've been evacuated so many times.