Christie’s books and manuscripts department is used to handling cryptic material. They sell works written in Latin all the time. This weekend it will get wired with “The Origins of Cyberspace,” a sale at Rockefeller Center that includes such treasures as a 1955 dittoed report on a computer-programming language and a 1966 “Brainiac Electric Brain Kit” (complete with bolts, bulbs, and wires), used to teach people concepts of digital computing.

The February 23 auction could signal the start of a new area of serious collecting. The sale attempts to market artifacts from the age of the computer. “It is in many ways a new field, and a new collecting opportunity for us is exciting,” said the Christie’s books and manuscripts expert in charge of the sale, Tom Lecky. “But there are obviously technical challenges.”

Not to mention marketing ones. The catalog is filled with scientific text that makes for laborious reading for anyone who struggled through high school science classes. For instance, lot 206 is a 1947 bulletin from the American Mathematical Society on “Numerical inverting of matrices of high order.” Huh? A bigger risk for Christie’s is whether they can find enough potential bidders blessed with sufficient technical background to appreciate – or even understand – the sale. Oh, for the days of the dot-com boom.

Mr. Lecky spoke by phone from Stanford University, where sale highlights were on view this week for professors, students, and a smattering of computer-industry folk, for whom the significance of the material was presumably obvious. A week earlier, Christie’s held a similar preview at the Burndy Library at MIT, another stomping ground for hackers and their hangers-on. Needless to say, it was the first time Christie’s has toured auction property to these venues.

Perhaps Christie’s was willing to take on “The “Origins of Cyberspace” sale because it came to Christie’s prepackaged and with ample contextualization. The 255-lot sale, subtitled “A Library on the History of Computing, Networking and Telecommunications,” was assembled by California book dealer Jeremy Norman. Mr. Norman and his colleague Diana Hook authored a 670-page bibliography called “Origins of Cyberspace,” which details the collection. Christie’s then distilled the giant tome into a slimmer auction catalog, discarding items deemed less significant or less salable.

Christie’s had dealt with Mr. Norman before, both as a consultant on sales and as a client. In 1998, a 1,383-lot, three-part auction of medical and science books belonging to Mr. Norman’s late father, collector Haskell Norman, brought $18 million at auction. Mr. Norman began buying computer related material in 1971. His specialty as a dealer in medical and science books gave him a good grounding for the technology books.

“What I did was make a collection on a topic that has not been collected in this way,” said Mr. Norman. “What mattered? It was hard to know.” To form the nucleus of the “Origins” collection, Mr. Norman bought several hundred items along with four small collections, always with a view to ultimately selling the whole kit and caboodle.

The sale begins with 17th- and 18thcentury texts relating to mechanical calculating. Thirty-four lots involve Charles Babbage, the 19th-century English mathematician credited with dreaming up a programmable machine called an “analytical engine.” An 1843 document about this invention is expected to sell for $20,000-$30,000.

The sale then leaps ahead to the mid-20th century, including documents by and relating to the work of computing pioneers Jon von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon (let’s face it: you either know why these folks are important or you don’t). Other sale highlights include a 1920 first-edition copy of a play by Karel Capek, “R.U.R Rossum’s Universal Robots” which introduced the word “Robot” (which comes from the Czech word “robota,” for drudgery or servitude. The signed copy is estimated at $15,000-$20,000.

The auction also includes a 1951 nickel-coated bronze tape used to store data on the Univac I, one of the first computers ever made. This funky, metal box, with “UNIVAC” stenciled on the side of the casing – as cool-looking as a piece of contemporary sculpture – is estimated to fetch just $200-$300 as a relic of the not-so distant past.

In a testament to how fast technology hums forward, there is no way to find out exactly what is stored on the tape. Christie’s catalog notes that the hardware used to run these tapes no longer works, just as the programs used to read the tapes no longer exist.

Another fascinating lot is a 1946 business plan for a company to manufacture electronic computers “of moderate cost.” The plan is estimated to sell at auction for $50,000-$70,000.The plan was written by two University of Pennsylvania professors, who in 1946 built ENIAC, the first electronic computer, and later BINAC and UNIVAC I. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly hoped to sell their computer to science labs and the U.S Census and weather bureaus. They rented a dance studio in Philadelphia and hung out a shingle for their start-up, the Electronic Control Company. But neither man got rich. In fact Mr. Norman picked up the Eckert archive, stored in a bunch of cardboard boxes, for a price he called “one of the bargains of a lifetime.”

Apparently it took someone like Mr. Norman to understand the significance of these relics of the digital age. The auction will show if his predictions were correct. Unfortunately, you can’t follow this cyber auction live via the Internet or bid online – though you can check out the catalog and leave an absentee bid via Christie’s Web site, www.christies.com.

“The Origins of Cyberspace” sale will take place on February 23 at 10 a.m. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, 212-636-2665).