QWERTZ Everywhere
I cannot say in words how perfect the venue for our Hackaday Munich party was. Not only was there a gigantic collection of vintage video games just around the corner, there was also a freaking warehouse full of mainframes, tubes, transistors, and some of the old retrocomputers you may have used in the 80s and 90s.
It’s called the Computeum, and without a doubt it is one of the most complete computer museums in Germany. There are fantastic computer museums in the states, but these don’t hold a candle to the pure amount of big iron and silicon found at the Computeum.
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The Computeum isn’t so much a museum as it is a warehouse loaded to the gills with crates filled with old computers. Open one crate, and you’ll find some Timex Sinclairs, all peripherals included. Open another crate and you’ll see a VT-220 and an ADM terminal. It’s crazy, and the only person who knows what’s in all these boxes is the tour guide, [Hans Franke].
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Being from Germany, [Hans] is of course a little more interested in the German and other European manufacturers. You won’t find an IBM System/360 here – that’s a kilometer away at the Deutsches Museum. You will find a few German IBM System/370 and /390 compatible systems from Germany, Czech, and countries even further east.
Gallery of a few interesting pieces below, along with a video of the unofficial tour [Hans] gave during the party.
Oh, the Computeum is looking for a space to put all this gear on display. Yes, a warehouse filled with about 200 pallets and a bunch of mainframes on the floor is now the extent of the museum. If you know of anyway to help, drop [Hans] an email or leave a note in the comments. If there’s ever a crowdfunding campaign, we’ll put sure to put a post up.
I shot a short tour of the warehouse with [Hans] before the gigantic group tour, but my microphone crapped out. [Thomas Barth] took the group tour with a few dozen other Hackaday fans. Here’s that video. Some of it is in English:
Wasn’t in Munich they had a bunch of Crays and Cybers running inside a warehouse in a military camp?
You could login and play around with the systems… Maybe it would be an interesting place to put the collection?
http://www.cray-cyber.org/general/start.php
News sectional non functional… Someone cleared the mysql credentials…
Its actually a very sad story :/
Do they have any Robotron or other commie stuff on display?
Very impressive collection. I could spend a lot of time poking through it. A LOT of time…
Wouldn’t peeking get better results? ;)
In the “Deutsches Museum” in Munich they have a fully functional Zuse z3, which they even start up sometimes for guided tours. Must see!
A really big computer museum (biggest in the world, in fact) is located in Paderborn: http://www.hnf.de/en/home.html. I don’t know how Computeum compares to that, probably much more geeky than HNF, but I was told that HNF is worth seeing. Sadly, I neved had time to visit it on my business trips to Paderborn.