The idea of creating a computer museum at the University of Stuttgart arose early on. As far back as 1966, the Computer Science Faculty Council decided to establish a computer museum to make the fascinating 350-year history of computer development accessible to the wider public.
The ideal location turned out to be a room on the ground floor of a building in Breitwiesenstraße, with a total area of about 30 m². The University of Stuttgart's Computer Museum opened eight months later, on February 11, 1997. In 2003, the museum moved to the new computer science building on the Vaihingen campus. The museum now has an area of 97 m² to present its unusual collection.
Both its concept and its collection make the Computer Museum at the University of Stuttgart unique, and it is not just enjoyed by computer fans.
The museum is particularly proud of its LPG-30, probably the oldest magnetic drum computer still in operation in Germany. And the museum has many more unusual exhibits in its collection: in addition to mechanical and electronic desktop computers, early minicomputers, old input and output devices, and a variety of data carriers that are barely even remembered today, it also has an IBM 1130 system with punch cards and even some old television sets.
The Computer Museum team comprises the museum's founder Klemens Krause; Christian Corti, who discovered the museum as a student in 1999 due to a flea market find and subsequently assisted with both the website and restorations; and Ralph Braun, who spontaneously joined the team in 2018 after taking a tour of the museum.
In addition to the expansion of the collection, documentation and archiving of software and data carriers, as well as program systems or hardware extensions, the museum team views its main task as communicating computer history. "We have a whole range of equipment that can be used to show the evolution of technology, explains Klemens Krause. Visitors are invited to embark upon a multimedia journey through time into a long-gone era of information technology, starting with Wilhelm Schickardt's calculating machine and ending with the microprocessors that ushered in a revolution in the mid-1970s and marked the beginning of modern digitalization.
A special feature of the exhibition is that all the exhibits of the collection can be shown in operation. This allows visitors to directly experience what and how calculating machines and computers were used many years ago. This is made possible by the knowledge of the system administrators, who are versed in several programming languages that are no longer in use and who also have an extensive stock of spare parts.
But this all came temporarily to an end in 2020, when the Computer Museum was closed due to the Corona pandemic.
But then the idea arose in 2020 to offer a virtual tour of the museum in the form of a livestream on International Museum Day and on Digital Day. About 280 participants accepted the invitation on the first evening, and the chat function was used to ask questions during the live stream.
Following this success, the virtual event series "Evenings at the Computer Museum" was launched together with an extensive video production. So far, the team has broadcast 16 events and made them available as video recordings on the homepage and their YouTube channel. These events are held each month and suggestions for topics are welcome.
The Computer Museum is a member of the collection network of the University of Stuttgart and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Hochschulsammlungen Baden-Württemberg. The museum also regularly participates in Science Day, showing that computers are more than windows and icons on screens and moving a mouse around.
