UWM's One-of-a-Kind Retro Computer Lab Faces an Uncertain Future
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Retrolab, one of only four retro computer labs in the US and the only one in a history department, may not survive its founder's retirement.
In a history department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a lab filled with machines from the late 1970s through early 2000s is quietly doing something no other history department in the United States is doing. The UWM Retrolab, run by history professor Thomas Haigh, is one of only four retro computer labs in the country and the only one operated within a history department.
The lab gives students in HIST 399 a chance to experience computing history rather than just reading about it. The department’s own description notes around 20 fully functional computer systems, but the collection has grown since that description was written. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which the UWM History Department itself noted spotlighted the lab on July 20, 2026, Haigh started the lab during COVID-19 with six machines and now has about 50 working machines from the late 1970s through early 2000s.
Haigh is approaching retirement, and he told the Journal Sentinel that the lab will be open for at least one more year but he does not plan to find a successor to run it. That timeline leaves the lab’s future an open question.
The significance is real. Retro computing labs are rare; this is one of only four in the U.S., and the only one within a history department. Its loss would mean a unique pedagogical resource disappears — not a museum behind glass, but a working collection where students can handle the actual hardware that defined an era of personal computing, from booting a 1980s machine off a floppy disk to navigating a command-line interface on a monochrome monitor.
The lab started as a pandemic project, a professor’s side interest that grew into a teaching tool. The machines are not just artifacts; they’re a way to understand the material constraints and design decisions that shaped the software and interfaces people use today. Without Haigh there to maintain and advocate for it, the collection could scatter.
The department’s acknowledgment of the spotlight doesn’t mention a plan for continuity, and the Journal Sentinel piece ends on the note that Haigh is not looking for a successor. So the lab, as a functioning educational space, may have a finite lifespan tied to one person’s career. It’s a quiet, almost inevitable story: not a funding freeze or a dramatic closure, just the retirement of the person who built it all — and the question of whether anyone else will think it’s worth saving.
Sources
- Clunky computers? Vintage video games? Tech goes retro in quirky UWM lab — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
- RetroLab in the News — University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee History Department
- Inside UWM’s Retrocomputing Lab: Where Students Experience the Digital Past Firsthand — University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee History Department