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.
I will stick my oar in for the Large Scale Systems Museum just north of Pittsburgh, PA, in New Kensington (which is where the modern aluminum smelting process was invented), with their simple website at https://www.mact.io/ .
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.
LSSM is really top notch. It's grass roots, done by volunteers that want to preserve and share experience with these machines.
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.
That wasn’t my impression of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (Assuming that’s the CHM you mention.) I haven’t been in maybe 10 years, though. Have things changed?
I went to both years ago, and did enjoy LCM better. The difference is that LCM was ectremely hands-on. They had all kinds of rare machines out on the floor that you could just...play with. Imagine using an original Lisa running XENIX of all things, then firing up MazeWar on an Imlac.
CHM is very well done but more of a traditional museum with limited, curated interactivity.
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.
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 came here to say the same. The location is a bit hard to get to. But if you are in the area, also visit the town of Heidelberg, it is close by and worth the trip.
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.
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.
The Kyoto Railway Museum (https://www.kyotorailwaymuseum.jp/en/) is certainly worth a mention. Tons of well-preserved examples of Japanese rolling stock, including multiple generations of Shinkansen (including the first!). Their technical explanations of every part of the train were also incredibly well done, with lots of examples from parts of real trains. It was one of the most impressive and genuinely educational technical museums I've ever been to.
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.
The Wright Brothers memorial in North Carolina is a very special place. They've renovated it somewhat recently and it now conveys a lot more of the struggle that they went through.
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.
The InfoAge museum in New Jersey seems to not be well known, but they have lots of interesting computer and radio artifacts, including some hands-on demonstrations. The museum is on the site of an old Marconi shore station.
NSA's National Cryptologic Museum[0] is a good one in the DC area. There's also the Smithsonian Air & Space, but that gets outside of the tech focus here.
Nothing comes even close to the Computer History Museum in Moutainview, CA.
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.
I visited the Science History Institute in Philadelphia when it was still the Chemical Heritage Foundation museum. They had a fascinating collection; hopefully it’s intact. I remember seeing lots of material from the history of plastics.
- 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)
The Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts (https://www.charlesrivermuseum.org/) is a nice local technology museum if you're in the area. Not a huge place, but tells a nice little bit of the story of the industrial revolution in New England.
Transport museum in Dresden is really nice, especially for kids. Computer game museum in Berlin is kind of disappointing IMO - it's mostly non-interactive, which is a huge missed opportunity given the subject
I'd add the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, and the Air and Space Museum (both sites). They are not as up-close-and-personal as some of the ones mentioned in the article, owing to the extreme number of visitors, but have some utterly unique and historic artifacts, like Thomas Edison's lab.
The US Smithsonian National Air and Space (NASM) museums are great.
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.
The Udvar-Hazy Center is utterly amazing. It’s like someone said “hey, you like planes? Here’s all of them. And they’re just there, you can walk up close to them. I took my family for the first time this summer, when we heard they were going to lose the Space Shuttle, and we all loved it.
Seconded, the Seattle Connections museum is a hidden gem. It really is a living history museum run by volunteers who keep everything working. And so much of it is hands-on, you can make a call from a phone on one end of the building and hear the relays clicking as the call traverses exchanges from several different eras.
I think some people might be surprised to find one of these close to home. For example, I only discovered the Connections Museum by chance (they were manning a booth at another more well known museum).
Some more
- 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.
Bletchley is great! I need to go again
Second the Cambridge Centre for Computing History
I will stick my oar in for the Large Scale Systems Museum just north of Pittsburgh, PA, in New Kensington (which is where the modern aluminum smelting process was invented), with their simple website at https://www.mact.io/ .
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.
LSSM is really top notch. It's grass roots, done by volunteers that want to preserve and share experience with these machines.
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.
That wasn’t my impression of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (Assuming that’s the CHM you mention.) I haven’t been in maybe 10 years, though. Have things changed?
I went to both years ago, and did enjoy LCM better. The difference is that LCM was ectremely hands-on. They had all kinds of rare machines out on the floor that you could just...play with. Imagine using an original Lisa running XENIX of all things, then firing up MazeWar on an Imlac.
CHM is very well done but more of a traditional museum with limited, curated interactivity.
The Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago).
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.
The Chicago museum also has a u boat.
No mention of Deutsches Museum in Munich? Whaat!?
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/
A lot of amazing recommendations well worth the visit.
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 came here to say the same. The location is a bit hard to get to. But if you are in the area, also visit the town of Heidelberg, it is close by and worth the trip.
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.
I recommend La Cité de la dentelle, in Calais, North of France (good train stop between Paris and London).
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...
One of the many reasons to visit Pembrokeshire, Wales:
https://www.internalfire.com/
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.
The Kyoto Railway Museum (https://www.kyotorailwaymuseum.jp/en/) is certainly worth a mention. Tons of well-preserved examples of Japanese rolling stock, including multiple generations of Shinkansen (including the first!). Their technical explanations of every part of the train were also incredibly well done, with lots of examples from parts of real trains. It was one of the most impressive and genuinely educational technical museums I've ever been to.
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.
The Wright Brothers memorial in North Carolina is a very special place. They've renovated it somewhat recently and it now conveys a lot more of the struggle that they went through.
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.
https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/index.htm
The InfoAge museum in New Jersey seems to not be well known, but they have lots of interesting computer and radio artifacts, including some hands-on demonstrations. The museum is on the site of an old Marconi shore station.
https://www.infoage.org/exhibits/
Which reminds me, another shore station is KPH in Point Reyes which is worth a visit for sure.
https://www.nps.gov/pore/planyourvisit/kph_treetunnel.htm
Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA
Deutsches Museum in Munich
Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix
NSA's National Cryptologic Museum[0] is a good one in the DC area. There's also the Smithsonian Air & Space, but that gets outside of the tech focus here.
[0]: https://www.nsa.gov/museum/
GAMM in Rome is quite fun (Italy):
https://www.gammuseum.com/en/
Shout-out to the museum of Ancient Greek technology, with their wine automaton (Athens, Greece): https://kotsanas.com/
Nothing comes even close to the Computer History Museum in Moutainview, CA.
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.
Deutsches Museum in Munich
I visited the Science History Institute in Philadelphia when it was still the Chemical Heritage Foundation museum. They had a fascinating collection; hopefully it’s intact. I remember seeing lots of material from the history of plastics.
If you're in the north of England the Derby Computer Museum is nicely maintained and presented. Exhibits are pre-2000.
https://www.derbycomputermuseum.co.uk
I’d add the following:
- 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)
The Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts (https://www.charlesrivermuseum.org/) is a nice local technology museum if you're in the area. Not a huge place, but tells a nice little bit of the story of the industrial revolution in New England.
Amazing collection of locks at the Mossman Lock Museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Mossman_Lock_Museum
Transport museum in Dresden is really nice, especially for kids. Computer game museum in Berlin is kind of disappointing IMO - it's mostly non-interactive, which is a huge missed opportunity given the subject
The System Source museum in Hunt Valley, Maryland is also worth a mention. I attended a demonstration of a revived Bendix G-15 there.
Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, OH - https://cosi.org/
Not a tech museum, per se, but I think it will appeal to the tech museum crowd.
Also, National Museum of the US Air Force: https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/
When I saw aresluna I hoped this website (also due to Marcin Wichary) finally got updated
https://guidebookgallery.org/
It's been 20 years...
Parasite Museum in Tokyo: https://www.kiseichu.org/e-top
Technorama in Winterthur
Museum of Play in Rochester NY
I do love it there (my family have been members for years), but it’s more for kids than adults.
I’d also tack on National Videogame Museum in Frisco, TX to your lists.
Explora Science Center and Children's Museum of Albuquerque
I'd add the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, and the Air and Space Museum (both sites). They are not as up-close-and-personal as some of the ones mentioned in the article, owing to the extreme number of visitors, but have some utterly unique and historic artifacts, like Thomas Edison's lab.
The US Smithsonian National Air and Space (NASM) museums are great.
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.
The Udvar-Hazy Center is utterly amazing. It’s like someone said “hey, you like planes? Here’s all of them. And they’re just there, you can walk up close to them. I took my family for the first time this summer, when we heard they were going to lose the Space Shuttle, and we all loved it.
Can confirm that the Connections museum is lovely :)
Seconded, the Seattle Connections museum is a hidden gem. It really is a living history museum run by volunteers who keep everything working. And so much of it is hands-on, you can make a call from a phone on one end of the building and hear the relays clicking as the call traverses exchanges from several different eras.
They also have an excellent YouTube channel.
https://m.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum/videos
One more list for the privileged who can travel around the world
I think some people might be surprised to find one of these close to home. For example, I only discovered the Connections Museum by chance (they were manning a booth at another more well known museum).
I’m not sure it’s the author’s fault that there are world class museums all over the world.