Hacker News Reader

Comment by ht_th | Hacker News Reader

I've been to a couple of these museums as well. What makes them fun to go to are:

- you may touch everything, often including things inside the computers itself

- the people working there (or, as is often the case, the one guy working there) is knowledgeable, willing to talk about it in depth, cares, and you can have a real conversation with them.

- there's a lot of surprising hardware around I had no idea existed (from failed computer companies, to specialized I/O of decades past, to special-purpose hardware)

You cannot get the same full experience with most regular museums, as then you have to follow their narrative instead of following your curiosity.

On the other hand, these museums are often not much more than an erudite collection of historical artifacts they got their hands on. To preserve is to select with a plan, not just collect everything.

View on HN

Technical/science museums in general often seem to be closer to this ideal than other museums, because while some of the artefacts may be valuable, more often they are trying to showcase how things worked rather than specific objects.

True. Although the more popular/populous museums tend to offer models you can interact with, whereas the smaller ones more often offer the real thing.

If you're ever offered to visit the archives/warehouse of a museum, accept. Showing (large) stuff is expensive in space, so most exhibitions are only the tip of the ice berg of the enormous amount of stuff the museum has collected and stored. Often an exhibition is a mix of well-known artifacts that visitors expect to be there (and are therefore included, but are not very interesting as you already know them), some artifacts that are good specimens over-all to show (but not necessarily that interesting), and some truly interesting pieces (you probably never have seen before). I found that when you visit the archive/warehouse of a museum, curators tend to show artifacts from that last category in particular.

As I child I could spend days in Deutsches Museum for that reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Museum

The Deutsches Museum in Munich is the world's largest and IMHO best museum of science and technology. Especially the mechanical engineering, cars and airplane departments are one of its kind.

Though, the computer history department is a bit too small and similar in size as the equivalent Science Museum in London. In both you find a Cray super computer, first Zuse computers and many older mainframes and terminals, etc. But everything is death, every historical computer sits just there. There is no interactivity, what a shame. They should at least re-work a Cray 1 or 2 super computer and let visitors play around on its terminal - that would be awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com