My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia | Hacker News Reader

My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia

ounapuu.ee

149 pointshddherman21 comments

As other people here are recommending computer museums: I can recommend two in Germany: the Heinz-Nixdorf museum in Paderborn and the computer museum in Kiel.

The one in Paderborn is quite big and has lots to see. The one in Kiel is located in an elevated bunker and my co-founder happens to be the director. If someone really wants to, I'm sure we could arrange a private tour!

The Arcade Museum in Berlin is great!

Computer museum in a bunker? Tom Scott has entered the chat.

Cool! I was in this one in Tallinn a few years ago, it's a very large private collection (family owned + volunteers iirc), you have to contact them beforehand to make sure there's someone there, they have a lot of cool stuff, Robotron machines, some transmeta machines too!

https://arvutimuuseum.ee/en/

On this topic, ff you're in Vienna, Austria, a nice new retro-computing museum with a focus on gaming has just opened up ..

https://www.gamingmuseum.at/

Some really fun things to see and do, including a working 8-bit collection, classic arcade games, etc.

Do I need to speak German to get the most out of it? Or do they have English descriptions?

English descriptions abound! Alongside German too, of course. But yes, you should do okay with English in this particular museum ..

There is also a interactive video games museum called LVLup in Estonia that is a lot of fun https://www.facebook.com/lvlupmuseum/

I absolutely have to go to this cool museum... Estonia is a great startup country: Online administrations, ect... They love startups. Tallinn, the capital city, is an european hub for small startups. And this comes by no miracle: - First let's not forget that Estonia used to be part of USSR from 1945 to 1991. This is not ideal for startup land... - The real trick is that long before communism came, society in Estonia was rich and full steam on trading with boats. Hansea ligua was a big a thing in Northen Europe. Trade, compromise, innovation was already rooted in the Estonian working culture. Vive l'Estonie

I (being an Estonian), recently started using the phrase "was occupied by USSR..." instead of "was part of USSR". We never wanted to be a part of that evil empire and never _formally_ were (when looking in from outside), so after seeing someone point it out in a forum, I also started usign the better description.

But yeah, USSR didn't manage to break our culture (and our own language is a noteworthy part of that). Although there was corruption in various government institutions after USSR collapse, systemic open corruption wasn't part of our culture.

Most (many?) people are ok to work for their own success instead of cheating others as the first choice, that helps the startup culture. And Skype is the most notheworthy company affecting Estonian startup culture. Although not founded/funded by Estonians, the tech & business was built in Estonia from scratch, by mostly Estonians. And now there are multiple generations of ex-Skypers who've successfully built startups & businesses more than once.

Culture & neighbors - that's what I usually tell other people, when they ask about our quick recovery after the USSR occupation.

Estonia and Latvia too are some of my favorite places in Europe right now. But: there is a massive shadow hanging over them with the Ukraine war as a painful reminder that Russia is still causing problems in Europe and likely won't be done for a long time to come.

I visit both at least once or twice every year and always come away being very much impressed with all the projects and companies that originate there. Access to funding is still not what it should be though, hopefully that will change in the future.

I am not Estonian, but my mother and her parents were. They emigrated in 1948. That generation has passed but I recognize in your description some of my own attitudes and how they came from their examples. Thank you for your window into the culture.

I know that Estonia was contested at certain points for Russian and German rule. My grandfather was a lawyer, may grandmother was a teacher, and, according to family lore, they were persons of interest to the people who'd invaded and taken over. Do you have recommendations for learning more about that awful phase of history? I wouldn't bring it up, but it is connected to my maternal line's emigration to the US in 1948, so there is a curiosity on my part.

This is probably a decent start, there are useful references & further reading links in the end:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Eston...

Creepy Sidenote: Estonians had to escape from Sweden too because they feared Social-Democrats will hand them over to Russians. https://eu.news-journalonline.com/story/news/local/flagler/2...

There is a Michelin star restaurant in Palermo, Sicily called MEC that has a surprising collection of Apple products and personal photos, letters, and other effects from Steve Jobs (including his shoes?). I think they also had a camera pointed at our table so that the kitchen could deliver each course in optimal time. One of the more interesting meals I have had in my life, eating creative food while sitting next to an iMac G4 opulently displayed in a glass museum case.

Really cool. I sent the blog’s author an email asking him to add the museum as an entry to Atlas Obscura. Sadly, I didn’t have enough details to make an entry myself.

I also recommend

HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond (The Netherlands) https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/ The Apple Museum (Stockholm, Sweden) Computer History Museum (Mountain View, California)

Another private collection, more mainframes and supercomputers, in the UK that I found out about recently https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/

I found a great working telephone exchange exhibit at the "Internal Fire Museum of Power" https://www.internalfire.com/. It's mostly a museum of diesel engins, but in a separate building at the back they have a telephone exhibit.

They had several old telephone exchanges connected together so you could place calls between them and also between rooms elsewhere in the museum. The oldest exchange was a manual plug board type, the newest was an Asterisk PBX running on a Raspberry Pi which had an IP desk phone connected to it. It was mostly all connected together, although I didn't get very long to play with it, so I'm not completely sure.

We used to have an absolutely fantastic museum called 'NINT' in Amsterdam, it had 10's of live exhibits like that and none of it was supervised. Then it got moved and half the collection was lost, then it was moved again and the lost the other half and now it lives on as NEMO, next to central station. It's still a nice day trip for younger kids but the hard technology angle has been almost entirely erased. Not that any kid today would understand what a rotary phone switchboard does anyway...

Reminds me of https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/ - which is more about using old technology (art rather than preservation, but also more of an emphasis on being able to see the step-by-step relays operate while you're dialing.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com