It's been 20 years...
- Cambridge Centre for Computing History - https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
- London Museum for Science - Babbage's Difference Engine https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/charles...
- National Museum of Computing (near Bletchley Park Museum) https://www.tnmoc.org/
- Bletchley Park Museum https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
- Manchester Museum (Manchester Baby) https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/meet-ba...
I visited these all last year in a single trip to the UK and it was incredible. I can recommend it to anyone who has spent some time thinking about the history of computing.
For those that aren’t aware, one of the locations is on the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC and the other - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - is near the Dulles Airport in Dulles, VA.
The latter has the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde… and the Enola Gay.
Not a tech museum, per se, but I think it will appeal to the tech museum crowd.
They have DEC PDP11 and VAX, SGI, Sun, IBM mainframe and midrange, Data General (apparently the same terminal setup as used in Severance), a Cray J90, etc. And it all works and you can sit down and type on the systems. If you want to take the 45 minutes it takes to boot an IBM mainframe - you can do it. I know some of the people there, they are top-notch restorers and know the hardware and software very well.
Most museums, I'll pick on CHM as an example but it applies to basically any metropolitan museum: by contrast are quite sterile, you can tell they have a ton of money but it's the standard impressive architecture and displays setup that is designed to ferry large groups through relatively quickly but don't impart much wisdom on the participants.
I never got a chance to visit Living Computer Museum but I wonder if that met some kind of high funding to be able to service masses while still going deep hands on.
CHM is very well done but more of a traditional museum with limited, curated interactivity.
Deutsches Museum in Munich
Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix
The one that's missing is my favorite one though: the sister museums in Sinsheim and Speyer: https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en/
They have both Concorde and Tu-144, the full interior of a 747 and a big space exhibit, including the Buran space orbiter. Last year they added a submarine to the collection, next to a massive amount of other exhibits.
I went there as a child and loved it, in particular the UBoat you can enter. Next time I am going to Germany I plan to visit it again.
On my bucket list is a two weeks trips to spend there. For me it is the world’s only epicenter of start to finish of all technologies. So many precious pieces no matter big or small, from Japan or like the Zuse, from Germany - I cannot get enough of it, especially the people you can meet there.
Founders, builders, billionaires as everyday Joe doing maintenance or giving talks - this is so much better than any ebook there is and also time runs, if you start to find out about the mechanical IBM machines, and especially the the smell there, which was a revelation.
Nevertheless kudos to any Electronics Museum or Automobile Museums. It takes a lot of dedication and maintenance to build these museums for us.
Thanks a lot, this is my Disney World on steroids, my childhood playground.
Shout-out to the museum of Ancient Greek technology, with their wine automaton (Athens, Greece): https://kotsanas.com/
- Kyoto Railway Museum (you can ride a passenger train pulled by a real steam locomotive)
- Central Air Force Museum in Monino near Moscow (you can visit Tu-144 and Il-62 passenger cockpits, as well as check out other rather exotic aircraft)
Having been to both the National Railway Museum in Taipei and the Kyoto Railway Museum and comparing the two, I'd say that the former was particularly strong in areas around train maintenence, whereas the latter had much more content about trains themselves.
https://www.deutsches-museum.de/
Also recommended:
Arithmeum Bonn: https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/
Miniaturwunderland Hamburg: https://www.miniatur-wunderland.de/ (not really a tech museum but definitely of interest to techies)
In Switzerland:
Technorama in Winterthur: https://www.technorama.ch/
Verkehrshaus Luzern: https://www.verkehrshaus.ch/
Lots of running kit you can get close to or hands on with e.g. 4000hp jet generators, telephone exchanges, steam engines etc. plus knowledgeable and passionate staff.
Well worth a couple of hours detour to check out.
https://www.infoage.org/exhibits/
Which reminds me, another shore station is KPH in Point Reyes which is worth a visit for sure.
So much debugging of prototypes, crashes, redesigns and high stakes testing.
There's also something undeniably cool about standing right where other humans did something for the first time did something and walking the distance of their flights on the field.
Leavers machine that weight tons. Technology from 19th century that is still in production nowadays.
https://www.cite-dentelle.fr/collections-1/industrie-et-tech...
Animats•18h ago
One of the big classics. It once contained exhibits from major manufacturers. US Steel, General Electric, RCA. AT&T, IBM, Whirlpool, International Harvester, the Santa Fe Railroad... Most of the corporate sponsorship is gone, it's more "educational", and it costs $30 instead of being free.
Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago).
This was once impressive, and now it's closed with the artifacts in storage. It had much early TV studio equipment. Their nostalgia exhibit, pre-Internet, was that they had a huge library of TV shows on VHS tapes, and you could request that one be played for you.
ghtbircshotbe•6h ago