Das größte Museum der Welt

22 October 2021

Did you think it would be possible to spend and entire day in a single museum? Where you can see entire planes, U1 submarines, the cave of Altamira, Enigma encoders and computers from the year 0? Well, you can in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. With a collection of more than a million pieces, they are the largest museum in the world.

Of course, it is hard to write something about all exhibitions. But a funny one is the computational section. Where we are all used to have millions and millions of transistors of a chip, the first computers didn’t even have transistors and used vacuum tubes instead. One of these very primitive computers, the Univac 1 (and some of the earliest IBM computers) are on exhibition in this museum and they use punchcards, vacuum tubes and lots and lots and really, lots of wires. Instead of sitting behind this computer (or in front, whatever you prefer), here you can open the computer and literally sit inside the computer.

Luckily for me, I live in an age where I can type this digitally instead of punching holes in a punchcard…

Of course, after a long day walking (read: slenteren) through a single building, you get hungry. And that’s where the other nice thing of Germans comes in very handy: they like good food and good beers. And so, after this long day, a well deserved meal and some drinks in the city is a welcome treat. And so we did.

We also learned that the German standards for a portion of meat are a bit off, relative to the Dutch. Germans really, really like meat… So, a tip if you ever visit Munich: don’t order a starter and half a pork knuckle. One of the two is more than enough.

Foto disclaimer: some German food and drinks and a nice shot of the museum.

—Thomas