If anyone nearby is reading this, please consider coming by sometime :)
(You need a reservation. Not everything works. In fact most machines don't work probably. It's not super fancy like the Living Computer Museum was. There's a lot of stuff on the floor. It'll probably move to a bigger place soon so that'll get better probably. It's not particularly cheap; there's a yearly fee (no auto-renewals) and a per-visit fee. You need a reservation and in order to get it you probably need to be fluent in Japanese. You probably also need to be fluent in Japanese to have a good time there because I'm not sure if the owner speaks English.)
So far I fixed: ZX81, VIC-20, PET 2001, various MSX machines. (See my blog for details :p)
Near my hometown in NL there’s a similar place, the Home Computer Museum and just like the one on Leicester they turn the computers on with games and BASIC and foxpro and protracker running and it’s just a delight. The collection is huge, I was pretty impressed. Went there with my kids the other day and it was just great. Worth a detour!
Oh wow, my partner and I are planning a trip to the Netherlands for later this summer and this was one of the top places we wanted to visit. I'm glad to hear it comes so highly recommended from someone local!
I mean it’s a nerdy dusty place. Definitely not a regular polished museum experience! But the part that matters, the computers & what they can do, is very well done IMO
Absolutely fantastic place that I also recommend to anybody interested.
So nice that the machines are out, powered on and ready to be tinkered with. Sit down and relive the old days by hammering out some 6502 assembly or something :)
If you're in Berlin, you can visit this one [0]. Has some rare historical gems including an original arcade cabinet for space invaders, as well as some experimental stuff like the famed PainStation. [1]
There is also the vintage computing festival [0] which is absolutely great!
You have people showing their homebrew computers (some even with completely homebrew CPUs!), old homecommputers from east and west, mainframes, workstations and game consoles of the past.
And the people who bring those machines are always quite eager to answer all questions you might have. It's a lovely event really.
On a game/arcade/Europe tangent also check out flippermuseum in Budapest if you love pinball. I chanced across it when I was there a few years ago and it is awesome
While you're there, take a stroll around Bletchley Park as well. Last time I checked, you get a discount when visiting both, and they're right next to each other.
Highly recommended. They used to have a gaming-focused satellite in the Grand Arcade. It’s gone, now, but I heard a rumour they may bring it back in the summer.
I was able to visit this place last year, it was great! I spent all day wandering around and playing. I would have stayed even longer if they weren't closing, hah.
(While they don't brand themselves as a museum and it's very much about playing the games, they have an incredible collection of arcade gaming history)
The guy behind This Museum is (Not) Obsolete has a youtube channel Look Mum No Computer where he creates massive, insane musical instruments out of furbies, hand-made syths, etc. Truly impressive and very entertaining and educational.
As a resident of Ramsgate, definitely feel lucky to be a few streets down from both TMINO + Micro Museum and very cool to see a shout out here! Well worth doing both in a day as they're next to each other.
If you're in Georgia, USA, the Computer Museum of America is an excellent museum. I had a blast visiting and would love to go back. Lots of high quality exhibits and they're always rotating.
Well I know where I'm visiting soon! I used to see movies in that complex when I lived in Roswell. I'm still relatively close. Thanks for this information, had no idea!
The Kraków Pinball Museum in Poland is a good one - pay a small fee to enter and their whole collection of pinball machines are on free play mode. Lots of arcade machines too, and beer of course.
While this looks nice, I really loved https://livingcomputers.org/ when it was alive. Sadly it's in stasis now, I was lucky enough to visit while it was still open and I ran around to all these old machines punching in code and showing my wife all the old machines I've worked on in my 40yr+ career.
Sadly "in stasis" is pretty generous. I know several people who were in that win of the Allen org and they've all said that Jody Allen viewed it as a waste of time and money and was delighted at the opportunity to close it and never reopen courtesy of the pandemic.
It's sad. The LCM was magical. It's weird Jody Allen couldn't have just shoved off the LCM onto some other staffers or something if she was bored of it.
After who knows how many people donated the hardware they’d carefully preserved for years with the expectation it would be preserved at the museum as part of Paul Allen’s legacy.
It’s so great to see the many places listed here. It compels me to mention The Museum of Arts and Digital Entertainment, based in Oakland CA, in case any Bay Area folks are interested in such places: https://www.themade.org/
I was about to post this, but I see you already did.
I've been there in person. The Google Patent Litigation group used them as a source of prior art, since many technologies were developed first for games, before "regular" users got them. No, I can't give any details.
Games & computers of the past era, Wroclaw, Poland: https://gikme.pl/en/
Many great retro consoles, computers. I am most happy with the opportunity to play on a real asteroid with a vector display.
The museum was one of Paul Allen's pet projects. The one two punch of his death and then COVID hitting is what shut the museum down.
The building is still there with everything in it (at least it looks that way from the outside), so I guess there's hope. Also, another one of Allen's projects, the Cinerama in Belltown, was also shut down around the same time and that just sold and is now re-opening soon, so I'm hoping we'll see something similar with the computer museum.
We had a friend in town who I went with and my wife had to work that day, so I told her we'd go back another time... Not sure I'll ever be able to keep that promise.
After my visit, the next time I visited my mom, I decided to finally recycle the old Gateway 2000, considering that the museum had lots of them and that they'd be good forever stewards of them. Now I'm not so sure.
Paul Allen's death, and then the COVID pandemic, effectively put the museum in stasis. At least two of Allen's former museum-ish places are getting to reopen soon - both the downtown Cinerama and the Flying Heritage and Combat Armor museum in Mukilteo have been sold by his estate and are reopening this year. Hopefully Living Computers is next.
If the Cinerama can be saved, so then can the LCM, one should hope. The LCM isn’t in the same kind of prime location the Cinerama is. I picture the terms to be different, no pre-existing 3rd party to hand things off to, and getting some of the key people back is going to be a challenge.
I went there in September of last year and really enjoyed it. If anyone wants to see some of it, I posted my pics in a blog post. Unfortunately it doesn't have many pictures of the computers that were hands on there, but more of the video game consoles. https://gglas.ninja/blog/2022/09/national-videogame-museum-t...
The city has a rich history of computer manufacturing in the 80s and 90s, with DEC and later Compaq, and APC. They have a PDP-11 (sadly not working), many DEC terminals and a whole range of home computers, among others.
Thanks for positing this - it's a wonderful place and I haven't been for a while. I live in Leicester and I've been here a number of times with the family - it's a great activity. One of my favourite things to do here is browse the old manuals in the back room and tinker with the BBC Micro or the Acorn whilst My children love playing all the old and classic games. Wonderful!
Zoetermeer, the Netherlands has the Nationaal Videogame Museum (https://www.nationaalvideogamemuseum.nl/). Hundreds of machines, consoles and arcades, free to play. You buy a two- or four-hour slot to get in.
A bit tangential, but 'Leicester' is one of those wonderful British place-names that doesn't really follow any English pronunciation rules and you just have to know the right one...
All of the recent fuss about Welsh placenames only serves to highlight that places in England, in contrast, are usually named in languages that no-one speaks any more. At least Welsh is still spoken.
Latin gives us, via Old English, the "-cester" in all of the placenames mentioned elsethread, as well as "-chester" and "-caster". Old English gives us all of the "ton"s, "hamp"s, and whatnot. The "win-" in "Winchester" is Celtic, as are the "dor-" in "Dorchester" and the "man-" in "Manchester". The "lei-" in "Leicester" means an unploughed meadow, a.k.a. a lay or lea.
When one isn't a native Latin or Old English or Celtic speaker and cannot even understand placenames in England, it does seem a little silly, and missing a huge elephant in the room, to be worrying about Welsh placenames. (-:
This is why the names don't follow Modern English pronunciation rules. They aren't actually Modern English.
I was born in England, but we emigrated to Canada when I was 5. A few years later, we returned for a visit. My mother and I were on the Tube when I announced loudly `Ooh look, Mummy, the next stop is Lye-ces-ter Square!'. She shushed me and said she didn't want the other passengers to think we were Canadians.
We've got a Leicester here in Massachusetts which is also pronounced 'Lester'. It is just West of Worcester, which is pronounced 'Wuster'. But they become 'Lestah' and 'Wustah' with a Boston accent.
My house just outside of Portland Oregon kind of resembles a vintage computing museum. I’m moving back to my rainforest off-grid electronics-destroying compound in Hawaii and can’t in good conscious bring any of my collection to rust away out there. (None of my buildings are anything like climate controlled)
I’m planning on selling what I can for my kiddos college/travel funds, but will have a bunch of stuff left over: if anyone knows of a good local place to donate some ancient hardware I’d love to hear about it.
I love Retro from the UK. As a German, it much better reflects my childhood in the 80s with CPCs, Sinclairs, Archimedes' and Atari STs - computers that to me feel forgotten by US Retroism.
And also not forgetting Acorns, Dragons, Orics and a bunch of other almost cottage industry manufacturers that you could go into John Menzies, Debenhams or WH Smiths and buy straight from store stock. I think we had quite a rich selection of machines to choose from back then.
The Rhode Island Computer Museum's "computer crypt" is like the end of the first Indiana Jones where they put the Ark of the Covenant into the huge warehouse with rows and rows of shelves filled with other artifacts of antiquity.
I grew up in Leicester and then later moved to Silicon Valley. I had several old computers in a cupboard at my parents’ home for years - Acorn Atom, Atari 800, Video Genie, Elan Enterprise - and was never able to muster enough energy to schlep them out to San Jose to the museum there. I’d only I’d known there was somewhere I could’ve donated them to so close by.
Museums like this can be a little overwhelming. There is so much to take in. I often lose focus and just skim over to see it all. But I know the most interesting bits are in the details. Do any of you have a nice strategy for getting the most out of a visit ?
Been looking for a place to donate my Interact. It was produced in Michigan and didn't go far, but I hear a slightly better version appeared in France and had a small following. Not sure the UK is the right place for this thing.
This feels like a shameless plug, sorry. I sometimes do volunteer work at a (mostly personal) computer museum in Tokyo. https://www.dream-library.org/museum/index.html
If anyone nearby is reading this, please consider coming by sometime :)
(You need a reservation. Not everything works. In fact most machines don't work probably. It's not super fancy like the Living Computer Museum was. There's a lot of stuff on the floor. It'll probably move to a bigger place soon so that'll get better probably. It's not particularly cheap; there's a yearly fee (no auto-renewals) and a per-visit fee. You need a reservation and in order to get it you probably need to be fluent in Japanese. You probably also need to be fluent in Japanese to have a good time there because I'm not sure if the owner speaks English.)
So far I fixed: ZX81, VIC-20, PET 2001, various MSX machines. (See my blog for details :p)