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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.
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]
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.
"SAMENGEST TEKEN" is most likely an abbreviation for "SAMENGESTELD TEKEN". I guess it's a translation of "COMPOSE KEY" and they ran out of rub-on letters somewhere.
I'd be careful with that. A museum selling its surplus usually means deaccessioning, and old hardware gets sold off cheap before anyone's checked whether it's actually redundant. Do you know if they document what goes out the door?
Apart from entrance fees and relying on volunteers, the Home Computer Museum will repair your old home computer for money. If they have a lot of the same type of computer, they also sell them, as well as old monitors and other devices.
Does repair work actually cover the costs, though? Fixing a 40-year-old machine means hunting down dead custom chips and capacitors, and that's slow volunteer time. I'd guess sales of duplicates quietly subsidize most of it.
Arcade cabinets in a museum means somebody's keeping CRTs and dying capacitors alive. I'd love to see their repair backlog. Those joysticks and buttons die fast once thousands of visitors start mashing them.
Hope one of them has a Philips P2000 running. Spent a summer in '84 fighting its mini-cassette drive. Though MSX was what actually took off in Dutch homes and schools, not Philips' own stuff.
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.