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.
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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)
https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/
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 :)
[0]: https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation
And the people who bring those machines are always quite eager to answer all questions you might have. It's a lovely event really.
[0] https://vcfb.de/
https://flippermuzeum.hu/en/main-page/
[0] https://www.flipperhalle.de/
https://www.tnmoc.org/
https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/https://www.themicromuseum.org/
https://www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/
I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to visit it, but if you find yourself in Swindon for some reason, then it's worth a peep.
https://www.tnmoc.org/
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.
(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)
https://www.nwcomputermuseum.org.uk/ - with quite a nice looking but frustrating website...
https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org
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.
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.