{"id":1719,"date":"2026-10-03T18:36:58","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T18:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/?p=1719"},"modified":"2026-10-03T18:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T18:37:07","slug":"paderborn-heinz-nixdorf-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/03\/paderborn-heinz-nixdorf-forum\/","title":{"rendered":"Paderborn: Heinz Nixdorf Forum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After a quick post Parkrun<\/a> shower, I headed off to the Heinz Nixdorf Forum museum<\/a>, which is the largest computing museum in the world. It’s situated in the former HQ of Nixdorf Computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s quite expansive in its scope; it starts off with the development of counting systems, before moving onto printing presses, adding machines, morse code transmission, etc. Essentially anything that’s to do with information processing and a precursor to the computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Player piano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Jacquard loom<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A lot of the captions were only in German, so I had to struggle through and\/or use Google Translate (which does a pretty good job with the live image tool).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was an extensive (some might say excessive) collection of historical typewriters, of which here are just two:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chinese typewriter <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They’ve also got a large (working) Stowger exchange; you can call other phones on it (assuming you’re old enough to know how to use a dial phone)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There was a section on codebreaking, and the Enigma.\u00a0 They’d actually got more enigma machines than the museum in Poznan<\/a>.  The Poles didn’t get any credit for solving it here though. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then it was onto the computers.\u00a0 The collection was arranged roughly chronologically.\u00a0 There was a large section on the history of Nixdorf’s devices; they’d done a lot more in-house than most other manufacturers.\u00a0 It sounded like the company had struggled after Nixdorf’s death; it was eventually taken over by Siemens<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Core memory<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Mock up of an electronics workshop<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Various types of storage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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There was a nice AR sculpture illustrating Moor’s law:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They’d got good displays on the cultural side of things too, with exhibits showing the 2600Hz whistle, CCC etc<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Invariably in computer museums you reach the point where the computers you’ve owned or used start to appear.\u00a0 They’d also got a large collection of calculators and mobile phones, so this happened to me more than once:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The latter part of the exhibition focuses on AI and robotics.\u00a0 I was impressed how recent some of the exhibits were.\u00a0 There was quite a large section on human-like robots.\u00a0 These were pretty creepy. You could interact with the first two; it was really unnerving how their eyes followed you around. I’m quite glad the other ones weren’t powered up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There was an industrial robot that’d been programmed to sweep plastic pellets into patterns:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The final section of the exhibition focussed on quantum computing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an excellent museum.  There’s a lot in there, and it was well presented. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a quick post Parkrun shower, I headed off to the Heinz Nixdorf Forum museum, which is the largest computing museum in the world. It’s situated in the former HQ of Nixdorf Computers. It’s quite expansive in its scope; it starts off with the development of counting systems, before moving onto printing presses, adding machines, READ MORE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe2026"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1720,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1719\/revisions\/1720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travel.mawds.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}