Photos from three very different computer museums in the Netherlands

100 points•npollock•about 10 hours ago•26 comments•

26 comments

teekertabout 9 hours ago
I went to the Bonami SpelComputer Museum in Zwolle, I spend > 5 hours there. Loved it, you could touch everything, oh the long lost satisfaction of putting in a real floppy floppy! I played pong, I played on an MSX (used to own one), the NES, old Sega's, Atari's. My son also loved it, I parked him at the Playstation's and Xbox's at the end, then did another round, starting from the 60's Star Trek style computers to the now. At the end we played some pinball machines, and some old arcades as well.

The whole place felt like a drab 80's office, but also felt like a lost home, it had a special charm.

Btw spelcomputer means gaming computer, but I don't know why they call it that, there are some classic gaming machines, but they mostly have regular computers, like rows of old Toshiba laptops for example.

devyabout 8 hours ago
This reminds me of two museums I've visited and left with great impressions:

- Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California (yes very close to Google's HQ - Google's a huge donor). Absolute the best collection of Computer Science history both from theories to software to hardware.[1]

- Museum of Radio and Technology in Huntington, West Virginia. A tiny museum completely organized by volunteers and donors (some were WW2 GIs and 3 letter agency retirees). Not famous at all in an old elementary school building. But collections were amazing. [2]

[1]: https://computerhistory.org/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Radio_and_Technology

NBJackabout 9 hours ago
R.I.P. Living Computer Museum (yes I am aware of its formal name). They took such good care of the systems there, and basically everything could be played with. It's technically not the only museum like it around Seattle, but it was incredibly memorable.
buildbotabout 9 hours ago
It was really something to be able to go in and interact with systems from decades ago. Huge loss that it was closed.
pkalabout 8 hours ago
Aren't they related to https://icm.museum/?
vouwfietsmanabout 9 hours ago
Only a tourist would call Helmond and Zwolle closeby, that's like half the Netherlands!
estomagordoabout 9 hours ago
Only a person from a country larger than a floppy disk would call them nearby.
brntabout 7 hours ago
Hey now, it's not about size but about how you use it.

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