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.
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.
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)
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.
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]
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
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.
Games & computers of the past era, Wroclaw, Poland: https://gikme.pl/en/
Many great retro consoles, computers. I am most happy with the opportunity to play on a real asteroid with a vector display.
Been looking for a place to donate my Interact. It was produced in Michigan and didn't go far, but I hear a slightly better version appeared in France and had a small following. Not sure the UK is the right place for this thing.
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.
Thanks for positing this - it's a wonderful place and I haven't been for a while. I live in Leicester and I've been here a number of times with the family - it's a great activity. One of my favourite things to do here is browse the old manuals in the back room and tinker with the BBC Micro or the Acorn whilst My children love playing all the old and classic games. Wonderful!
Zoetermeer, the Netherlands has the Nationaal Videogame Museum (https://www.nationaalvideogamemuseum.nl/). Hundreds of machines, consoles and arcades, free to play. You buy a two- or four-hour slot to get in.
A bit tangential, but 'Leicester' is one of those wonderful British place-names that doesn't really follow any English pronunciation rules and you just have to know the right one...
We've got a Leicester here in Massachusetts which is also pronounced 'Lester'. It is just West of Worcester, which is pronounced 'Wuster'. But they become 'Lestah' and 'Wustah' with a Boston accent.
All of the recent fuss about Welsh placenames only serves to highlight that places in England, in contrast, are usually named in languages that no-one speaks any more. At least Welsh is still spoken.
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.
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 was born in England, but we emigrated to Canada when I was 5. A few years later, we returned for a visit. My mother and I were on the Tube when I announced loudly `Ooh look, Mummy, the next stop is Lye-ces-ter Square!'. She shushed me and said she didn't want the other passengers to think we were Canadians.
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.
I went there in September of last year and really enjoyed it. If anyone wants to see some of it, I posted my pics in a blog post. Unfortunately it doesn't have many pictures of the computers that were hands on there, but more of the video game consoles. https://gglas.ninja/blog/2022/09/national-videogame-museum-t...
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.
If the Cinerama can be saved, so then can the LCM, one should hope. The LCM isn’t in the same kind of prime location the Cinerama is. I picture the terms to be different, no pre-existing 3rd party to hand things off to, and getting some of the key people back is going to be a challenge.
I love Retro from the UK. As a German, it much better reflects my childhood in the 80s with CPCs, Sinclairs, Archimedes' and Atari STs - computers that to me feel forgotten by US Retroism.
And also not forgetting Acorns, Dragons, Orics and a bunch of other almost cottage industry manufacturers that you could go into John Menzies, Debenhams or WH Smiths and buy straight from store stock. I think we had quite a rich selection of machines to choose from back then.
I grew up in Leicester and then later moved to Silicon Valley. I had several old computers in a cupboard at my parents’ home for years - Acorn Atom, Atari 800, Video Genie, Elan Enterprise - and was never able to muster enough energy to schlep them out to San Jose to the museum there. I’d only I’d known there was somewhere I could’ve donated them to so close by.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadhttps://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.
Yes, I've been on the Magic Roundabout, nearly shat myself and I wasn't even driving.
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.
https://www.tnmoc.org/events/2023/5/20/econet-lan-party
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)
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
[0] https://www.flipperhalle.de/
https://flippermuzeum.hu/en/main-page/
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://www.peekpoke.hr/
Another in this part of the world is the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk
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.
Visit by reservation only.
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.
…you put a Commodore sign on top of an Atari monitor? You want to provoke a bar fight, don't you?
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.
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.