Studieverzameling TUDelft
June 2026
After Youjung visited this museum she shared some pictures of a core memory
on the fediverse.
We saw it and my friend Kim and I decided to visit the museum as well. The museum is inside the
Electrical
Engineering building, kind of hidden.
We arrived around 15:00 and planned to leave around 17:00 when it closes. We first walked around
on our own for
a bit but the collection seemed redundant and a bit repetetive, it was only radios and tvs in a
big room along
with some smaller equipment.
We went inside another room connected to the main exhibition space and met someone putting away
library books.
He said he can give us a tour. We emailed Eric (the contact person for the museum) but he was
unavailable.
Our
guide was a very precise old man with not a lot of knowledge of the devices he was not
interested at... But he
showed us every single device which was very helpful. This museum is massive and it spans across
3 large halls
one of them full of archival books/a library.
One of the most interesting things I found
about this museum
was the
amount of small parts they had on display. Also the only museum with medical electronic devices
on display. It
was interesting to see historic power plugs and light bulbs. It is also interesting because even
telephones from
just 50 years ago have different plugs that connect to telephone lines, which was a big deal
because it made
them easier to hack :)
Another part I really enjoyed was a library catalogue sorting machine
he showed us
because it was not very old but it was definitely discarded as a cataloguing device. This device
was really big
an heavy, with a lot of 'drive's inside it. These cassettes held each 4 TB of data inside and
they became
obsolete after a mere year. That really infuriated me... But this infrastructure is already
shelved so what was
the point of all that? I know this is literally what my project is about but still.
Another
interesting thing
was the giant tram sculpture they had inside one of the rooms where you can ring the tram bell
inside and get
your picture taken in the tram:))) We did that and our tour guide was really happy to show
us.
We later tried
all the keyboards at the computer room. That was really fun as well. We didn't have a specific
reason just to
have fun :) But our tour guide told us something really interesting about an old IBM computer.
He told us that
this computer was in every office because of the sound and feel of its keyboard. The other
computers, namely
Macs, didn't have a good feedback feel as in sound of push-back and were not efficient
enough.
Kim asked our
guide if a lot of people come to visit and he said YES :) Which was crazy because there was no
one else other
than us inside. I also told him that I know about this rado magazine called Radio Bulletin(it
used to be very
famous when PTT was a thing and at that point I've had seen a loooot of them), he asked me where
I saw it. I
told him Radio Museum Rotterdam and he was surprised they were still going...
Even before
visiting the
Studieverzameling
I was thinking, this is the most important part of this project; to visit tech museums where
things are
interesting and diverse and a political global history is showcased as tactile devices.
