Retro Computer Museum
retrocomputermuseum.co.uk
retrocomputermuseum.co.uk
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)
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 :)
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://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.
Yes, I've been on the Magic Roundabout, nearly shat myself and I wasn't even driving.
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.
https://www.nwcomputermuseum.org.uk/ - with quite a nice looking but frustrating website...
(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)
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.
If you like a bit of retro computing, checkout the http://retro.directory/ lots of places - museums, arcades and events, etc.
> https://livingcomputers.org/
I only found out about this museum during the pandemic sadly, never visited when it was open.
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.
…you put a Commodore sign on top of an Atari monitor? You want to provoke a bar fight, don't you?
Kennett Classic in Kennett Square, PA USA https://www.kennettclassic.com
Large Scale Systems Museum in New Kensington, PA USA https://www.mact.io
System Source Computer Museum in Hunt Valley, MD USA https://museum.syssrc.com/
Vintage Computer Federation Museum at Infoage in Wall NJ USA https://vcfed.org/museum-info/
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.
https://ccmireland.com/collections/
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.
In this case 'Leicester' is pronounced 'Lester'.
cester -> ster (or 'stɜː' round my end)
Mornington Crescent!
(No pronunciation trickery on that last one, it is just the name of an absurdist parlor game)
I was here for almost 20 years before I learnt that Heighham is pronounced as just "Ham".
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.
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lay#Etymology_6
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’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.
Another in this part of the world is the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk
https://retrocomputermuseum.co.uk/systems/binatone-tv-master...
Saved up £15 pocket money and bought it myself in WH Smiths. One of my proudest moments.
Visit by reservation only.