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Computer Science Locations

Abstract

A collection of places where computing history happened, and the museums that preserve it. Historic sites (garages, labs, single rooms) and public museums, grouped by country. Each entry gives a short description, an address where one exists, and coordinates linking to OpenStreetMap. Coordinates were verified against OpenStreetMap or primary sources; a leading ≈ marks an approximate pin.

How to read the coordinates

Each coordinate is a clickable OpenStreetMap link. Some famous “garage” addresses are private homes: the people who live there did not sign up to be a landmark. View from the street, do not knock.

Argentina

Historic Sites

Clementina, Pabellón I, Ciudad Universitaria. Intendente Güiraldes 2160, Núñez, Buenos Aires C1428EGA. A Ferranti Mercury bought for about US$300,000 after Manuel Sadosky pushed the purchase through in 1959; it arrived on 24 November 1960 and ran from January 1961 in eighteen metres of cabinets at the Instituto de Cálculo of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Cecilia Berdichevsky was among its first programmers, and Wilfred Durán with four students wrote COMIC, the first Argentine programming language, for it. On 29 July 1966 the police cleared the faculty in the raid known as the Noche de los Bastones Largos; Sadosky and much of the group went into exile, and the machine was dismantled in mid-1971. See Latin America’s Tech Industry and SADIO Argentina. Status: active university building, not a museum. Coordinates: ≈-34.5455, -58.4394.

Australia

Historic Sites

Madsen Building (Radiophysics Laboratory), University of Sydney. Fisher Road, Camperdown, New South Wales 2006. Built between 1939 and 1944 for the National Standards Laboratory and wartime radar work, the building housed CSIRO’s Division of Radiophysics, where Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard assembled CSIRAC. It ran its first test program in November 1949 and was demonstrated publicly in 1951, which makes it Australia’s first digital computer and, in 1950 or 1951, the first machine anywhere to play music (see Fun Fact: The First Computer Music). The machine went to the University of Melbourne in 1955 and was shut down in 1964. The division moved to Marsfield in the 1960s. See Australia’s Tech Industry. Status: active university building, named after J. P. V. Madsen. Coordinates: -33.8887, 151.1894.

Museums

Scienceworks. 2 Booker Street, Spotswood, Victoria 3015. The Museums Victoria science and technology site, open since 27 March 1992. CSIRAC has been here since 2018, in the Think Ahead gallery, after decades in storage and a spell on show at the Caulfield Institute from 1980 to 1992. It is the oldest surviving first-generation electronic computer; the Z4 is older but electromechanical. Coordinates: -37.8314, 144.8939. Web: museumsvictoria.com.au/scienceworks.

Australian Computer Museum Society. 9 West Street, Croydon, New South Wales. A volunteer-run not-for-profit founded in 1994, holding one of Australia’s larger collections of historic hardware and running exhibitions and oral-history projects. See ACS: Australian Computer Society. Coordinates: ≈-33.8743, 151.1258. Web: acms.org.au.

Austria

Museums

Technisches Museum Wien. Mariahilfer Straße 212, 1140 Vienna. The cornerstone was laid in 1909, the building finished in 1913, and the museum opened in 1918 after the war delayed it. It holds the Mailüfterl, which Heinz Zemanek and his team built at the Technische Hochschule Wien from 1955 and presented in May 1958: about 3,000 transistors and 5,000 diodes, one of the first fully transistorised computers in Europe. Zemanek named it after the light Viennese May breeze, with the argument that a machine which cannot match the American models called Whirlwind and Typhoon will do as a Mailüfterl. It was decommissioned in 1966, went to the museum on loan from IBM in 1973, and was given outright in 2024. See IFIP: The International Federation. Coordinates: 48.1909, 16.3180. Web: technischesmuseum.at.

Belgium

Museums

Computer Museum NAM-IP. Rue Henri Blès 192A, 5000 Namur. Belgium’s first museum of computing, opened on 27 October 2016 in a former 1,200 m² sports hall of the Institut Saint-Aubain in Salzinnes. Four private collections were pooled in 2012 and became a fund of the King Baudouin Foundation in 2013, which is what the museum shows: about a thousand objects, among them one of the surviving examples of Hollerith’s 1888 tabulating machine, punch-card installations that ran Belgian pensions for fifty years, and the country’s first Bancontact cash machine. Status: open Tuesday to Saturday from April to October, weekdays from November to March; paid admission. Coordinates: 50.4628, 4.8355. Web: nam-ip.be.

Brazil

Historic Sites

Patinho Feio, Escola Politécnica, Universidade de São Paulo. Avenida Professor Luciano Gualberto, travessa 3, 380, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo 05508-010. The Digital Systems Laboratory of USP’s engineering school built the Patinho Feio (“Ugly Duckling”) between 1971 and 1972: eight-bit, 8 KB of memory, a two-microsecond instruction cycle, assembled by a class of eighteen graduate students after Glen Langdon Jr., an American professor who had worked at IBM Brazil, proposed the project. It was presented on 24 July 1972 in front of the state governor and the university rector, and never ran during the ceremony, because a photographer had pulled its plug. The design led to the G-10 for the Brazilian Navy and from there to the MC 500, the first commercial Brazilian computer, sold by the state company Cobra from 1974. See SBC Brazil and Latin America’s Tech Industry. Status: the machine is kept at the Escola Politécnica; there are no published visiting hours. Coordinates: ≈-23.5586, -46.7309.

Canada

Historic Sites

Sandford Fleming Building, University of Toronto. 10 King’s College Road, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G4. The building went up in 1907 as the university’s physics laboratory and took its present name in 1967, when physics moved to the McLennan Physical Laboratories. The university’s Computation Centre built UTEC here, a Williams-tube prototype that its team, including Beatrice Worsley, Josef Kates, Perham Stanley and Alf Ratz, declared fully operational on 1 October 1951. When money for a full-scale successor appeared, the university bought a surplus Ferranti Mark I instead: it arrived on 30 April 1952, was installed in the then new Burton Wing, and Worsley named it Ferut. It was semi-operational by September 1952 and did the civil-engineering calculations for the Saint Lawrence Seaway. An IBM 650 replaced it in 1958 and Ferut went to the National Research Council in Ottawa. See CIPS Canada. Status: active university building; no marker commemorates either machine. Coordinates: 43.6602, -79.3952.

Museums

Canada Science and Technology Museum. 1867 St. Laurent Boulevard, Ottawa, Ontario K1G 5A3. Opened on 16 November 1967 and reopened on 17 November 2017 after a three-year rebuild. Its computing holdings include the DRTE Computer, a transistorised machine built by the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment and given to the museum in 1968. Coordinates: 45.4035, -75.6189. Web: ingeniumcanada.org.

Personal Computer Museum (closed). 13 Alma Street, Brantford, Ontario, N3R 2G1. It opened in September 2005 in a former city building, with more than forty-five interactive machines from Apple, Atari, Commodore and IBM that visitors could switch on and use. It closed after the death of its founder and curator Syd Bolton on 11 June 2018; the collection went to the University of Toronto Mississauga Library in October 2020 as the Syd Bolton Collection. Coordinates: 43.1578, -80.2652.

Chile

Historic Sites

Cybersyn Opsroom, CORFO headquarters. Moneda 921, Santiago. Between 1971 and 1973 Stafford Beer and a Chilean team built Project Cybersyn for Salvador Allende’s government, and its hexagonal control room, the Opsroom, designed by a team under Gui Bonsiepe with seven swivel chairs, wall screens and control buttons in the armrests, occupied a room on the eighth floor of the building of CORFO, the state development agency. The system was used during the lorry drivers’ strike of October 1972 to route the vehicles that were still running. In early September 1973 the order came to move the Opsroom into the presidential palace and a room there was measured on 10 September; the palace was bombed the next morning. Soldiers destroyed the room after the coup. A working reconstruction was built for the exhibition How to Design a Revolution at the Centro Cultural La Moneda (-33.4435, -70.6536), a few hundred metres from the palace. See Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Cybernetic Dream. Status: active government office building, nothing marks the room. Coordinates: -33.4417, -70.6495.

China

Historic Sites

Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhongguancun South Third Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100190 (postal address 6 Kexueyuan South Road). The State Council approved the preparatory committee on 25 August 1956, making this China’s first institute dedicated to computer research; it moved to Zhongguancun in February 1958. The Model 103, China’s first general-purpose electronic digital computer, was first debugged here in August 1958. The Model 119 followed in 1964 and was used in the work leading to China’s first nuclear test; the Model 111 of 1972 was the first Chinese computer built entirely from domestically produced integrated circuits. Lenovo, Dawning, Loongson and Cambricon all began as spin-offs. See China’s Tech Industry. Status: active research institute, not a museum. Coordinates: 39.9806, 116.3205.

Denmark

Historic Sites

Regnecentralen and DASK. Bjerregårdsvej 5, Valby, Copenhagen. Regnecentralen was founded on 12 October 1955 as an institute under the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences, paid for with 900,000 kroner of Marshall Plan money. In 1956 it moved into a villa rented from Carlsberg on this street, and DASK, Denmark’s first computer, was built in the dining room: 3.5 tonnes of machine, running officially from January 1958. Niels Ivar Bech ran the group; Peter Naur worked on its ALGOL compilers, and Per Brinch Hansen later wrote the RC 4000 operating system there. The transistorised GIER followed in 1961, about fifty of them. Status: private address; nothing on the site marks the machine. Parts of DASK survive at Datamuseum.dk and at the Danish Museum of Science and Technology in Helsingør. Coordinates: ≈55.6663, 12.5274.

Museums

Datamuseum.dk (Dansk Datahistorisk Forening). Charlottegårdsvej 1, 2640 Hedehusene. A volunteer association that collects Danish computing hardware, documents and software, with an emphasis on keeping the machines running rather than displaying them behind glass. The collection covers Regnecentralen, Christian Rovsing and Dansk Data Elektronik, including DASK parts, GIER and the RC series. See Nordic Tech Industry. Status: open on selected Sundays and by arrangement for groups. Coordinates: 55.6472, 12.2163. Web: datamuseum.dk.

Finland

Historic Sites

Helsinki University of Technology, Otaniemi. Otakaari 1, 02150 Espoo. Finland’s contribution to computing history is a piece of software with no address: Linus Torvalds wrote the first Linux kernel in 1991 on a home PC in Helsinki, in a flat whose location is not publicly documented. The one pinnable place is the campus of the Helsinki University of Technology, where the FUNET FTP server that carried the first release was run. Torvalds wanted to call the system Freax; Ari Lemmke, one of the server’s volunteer administrators, disliked the name and created the directory linux in September 1991 without asking (see Fun Fact: Linux Was Almost Called Freax). Status: since 2010 the campus belongs to Aalto University. Coordinates: ≈60.1863, 24.8300.

Museums

Suomen Tietokonemuseo (Finland Computer Museum). Varikkotie 89, 40800 Vaajakoski, Jyväskylä. Run by a volunteer association since 1985, with about 600 machines, peripherals and service tools and some 250 books, and five machines from the earliest Finnish models that exist nowhere else in the country. See Nordic Tech Industry. Status: open on Thursday evenings and by arrangement. Coordinates: 62.2314, 25.9120. Web: suomentietokonemuseo.fi.

France

Historic Sites

IRIA, Domaine de Voluceau, Rocquencourt. 78150 Le Chesnay-Rocquencourt, west of Paris. IRIA was set up in 1967 under de Gaulle’s Plan Calcul on a site NATO had vacated. From 1971 Louis Pouzin’s team built CYCLADES here: planning in 1971, design and hiring in 1972, a first demonstration with three hosts and one packet switch in November 1973, and twenty nodes by 1976, with links to London and Rome. Its CIGALE layer carried unreliable datagrams and pushed reliability out to the hosts; Gérard Le Lann took that argument to Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and it survives in TCP/IP. The French PTT preferred virtual circuits and starved the project, which shut down in 1981. See France’s Tech Industry and Early Networking Failures. Status: the research centre moved to Paris in 2016 and only Inria’s headquarters remains on the site, with a departure planned between 2028 and 2030. Coordinates: ≈48.8378, 2.1031.

Museums

Musée des Arts et Métiers. 60 rue Réaumur, 75003 Paris. Founded in 1794 as a repository for scientific instruments, it holds one of Blaise Pascal’s surviving Pascalines, an arithmometer of about 1850 and a Cray-2 of 1985, which puts three and a half centuries of calculating machinery in one building. Coordinates: 48.8661, 2.3554. Web: arts-et-metiers.net.

ACONIT. 12 rue Joseph Rey, 38000 Grenoble. The Association pour un conservatoire de l’informatique et de la télématique was founded on 24 January 1985 and holds more than 2,500 machines, some 10,000 technical documents and 2,600 pieces of software. Status: guided visits by appointment, plus European Heritage Days. Coordinates: 45.1861, 5.7171. Web: aconit.org.

Germany

Historic Sites

Zuse’s Z1 workshop. Methfesselstraße 10, Kreuzberg, Berlin. Between 1936 and 1938 Konrad Zuse built the Z1, a fully mechanical programmable binary computer, in the living room of his parents’ apartment here. The machine and its blueprints were destroyed in a bombing raid on Berlin in December 1943; the house itself was lost in the raids of 1944. Status: the original building is gone; a Berlin memorial plaque, unveiled on 28 August 1998, marks the site. Coordinates: 52.4889, 13.3851.

Museums

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum. Fürstenallee 7, 33102 Paderborn. Opened on 24 October 1996, it bills itself as the world’s largest computer museum, with 6,000 square metres tracing information technology from cuneiform to robotics. Coordinates: 51.7313, 8.7356. Web: hnf.de.

Computerspielemuseum. Karl-Marx-Allee 93a, 10243 Berlin. Founded in 1997 and reopened as a permanent exhibition in 2011, it documents the history of video games with arcade cabinets, home consoles and playable installations. Coordinates: 52.5176, 13.4420. Web: computerspielemuseum.de.

Deutsches Museum. Museumsinsel 1, 80538 München. Founded on 28 June 1903. Its Informatik exhibition runs to 1,400 square metres with about 700 objects and 40 hands-on stations, built around a replica of Konrad Zuse’s Z3 and the original Z4, plus mathematical instruments, analogue computers and a cabinet of cipher machines. Status: the exhibition has been closed since 29 June 2022 while the second half of the building is modernised; the work is scheduled to finish in 2028, the museum’s 125th anniversary. The rest of the museum stays open during the rebuild. Coordinates: 48.1300, 11.5829. Web: deutsches-museum.de.

India

Historic Sites

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Homi Bhabha Road, Navy Nagar, Colaba, Mumbai 400005. TIFR was founded on 1 June 1945 by Homi J. Bhabha with money from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. A pilot machine ran here in 1956, and the full computer, built under Rangaswamy Narasimhan, was commissioned in 1960 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who gave it the name TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator). It stayed in service until 1965. The Colaba campus itself was inaugurated by Nehru on 15 January 1962. See India’s IT Industry. Status: active research institute; visits require prior arrangement. Coordinates: 18.9071, 72.8050.

Ireland

Museums

Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, DERI Building, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway. Founded in 2010 on the University of Galway campus (English Wikipedia files it as the Computing and Communications Museum of Ireland), it keeps historic computing and communications equipment, from crystal radios and dial telephones to a DEC PDP-11 and an Apple II, most of it switched on and usable, and runs school outreach alongside the exhibition. Coordinates: 53.2900, -9.0744. Web: ccmireland.com.

Israel

Historic Sites

WEIZAC, Weizmann Institute of Science. Rehovot. Chaim Pekeris, who built the institute’s applied mathematics department, talked it into paying for the country’s first computer in 1950. Gerald Estrin came from von Neumann’s team at the Institute for Advanced Study, landed in Haifa on 26 December 1953 with a complete set of the IAS drawings, and led the construction with his wife Thelma Estrin as electrical engineer and the technician Micha Kedem. WEIZAC ran its first calculation in October 1955, worked with 40-bit words on a magnetic drum that magnetic core replaced in 1961, and was shut down on 29 December 1963. The IEEE made it a Milestone on 5 December 2006. See Israel’s Tech Industry. Status: active research campus; the Milestone plaque is in the institute lobby and a section of the machine is on display. Coordinates: 31.9078, 34.8133.

Italy

Historic Sites

Olivetti, Ivrea. Via Guglielmo Jervis, 10015 Ivrea, Piedmont. The street that runs past the Olivetti factories, canteen and housing is the spine of the industrial town Camillo and Adriano Olivetti built. Pier Giorgio Perotto’s team designed the Programma 101 here; it sold from 1965 at $3,200 and reached about 44,000 buyers, ten of them at NASA, where the machines were used in planning the Apollo 11 landing. UNESCO inscribed “Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century” on the World Heritage List on 1 July 2018. Status: the buildings are in mixed use and can be walked as an open-air museum (MAAM) along Via Jervis; the UNESCO visitor centre is at Via Jervis 11 and the Olivetti historical archive at Via delle Miniere 31. Coordinates: 45.4595, 7.8747.

Museums

Museo degli Strumenti per il Calcolo. Via Nicola Pisano 25, Area dei Vecchi Macelli, 56126 Pisa. Opened in 2000 by the University of Pisa, it holds calculating instruments from the fifteenth century onwards and the CEP, the Calcolatrice Elettronica Pisana. The CEP was built by the university’s Centro Studi Calcolatrici Elettroniche, set up in March 1955 and funded with 150 million lire from the surrounding provinces after Enrico Fermi wrote to the rector in support of the plan, and was inaugurated on 13 November 1961 by President Giovanni Gronchi. Olivetti ran its own laboratory at Barbaricina outside Pisa alongside the project, which led to the Elea line. See AICA: Italy’s Computing Society. Coordinates: 43.7176, 10.3921. Web: msc.sma.unipi.it.

Japan

Museums

IPSJ Computer Museum. A web museum operated by the Information Processing Society of Japan. It catalogues the history of Japanese computers: mainframes, supercomputers, personal machines and peripherals. It has no exhibition site of its own; the machines are held by certified satellite museums such as the KCG collection below. Web: museum.ipsj.or.jp.

KCG Computer Museum. 1 Jodoji-Banba-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8412. Kyoto Computer Gakuin, founded in 1963 as Japan’s first computer school, kept the systems it taught on, and the collection became the first certified satellite of the IPSJ Computer Museum. It holds eight mainframe systems (TOSBAC-3400, FACOM M770, UNIVAC 1100/20, IBM 360/40 and 370/158 among them), seven minicomputers and office machines, single-board microcomputers including the NEC TK-80E, and about thirty desktop machines from the Sharp MZ-80 and Oki if800 to the Apple II. Status: open to visitors by advance reservation. Coordinates: ≈35.0248, 135.7930. Web: kcg.ac.jp/museum.

Mexico

Historic Sites

IBM 650, Facultad de Ciencias, Ciudad Universitaria. UNAM, Coyoacán, Mexico City. The engineer Sergio Beltrán López had seen IBM machines at the University of California while working on the geology under Mexico City, came back convinced, and persuaded the university to buy one. The IBM 650 started work on 8 June 1958 in the basement of the Faculty of Sciences, and the Centro de Cálculo Electrónico grew around it. UNAM counts the machine as the first in Mexico and in Latin America; the second half of that claim is contested, because the city government of São Paulo had a Univac 120 billing its water utility from 1957. See Latin America’s Tech Industry. Status: active university campus, nothing marks the room. Coordinates: ≈19.3240, -99.1800.

Netherlands

Museums

HomeComputerMuseum. Noord Koninginnewal 28, Helmond. An interactive walk through the history of the home computer, with rooms styled by decade, a working repair workshop and an arcade café. Coordinates: 51.4797, 5.6581. Web: homecomputermuseum.nl.

Norway

Historic Sites

NUSSE, Blindern. University of Oslo campus, Blindern, Oslo. Thomas Hysing, Ole Amble and Tor Evjen built NUSSE (Norsk Universell Siffermaskin, Sekvensstyrt, Elektronisk) for the newly founded Sentralinstituttet for Industriell Forskning as a copy of Andrew Booth’s APEXC, with many parts shipped from England and most of the electronics rebuilt in Oslo. It ran from March 1954, starting with a version of the game NIM, and stayed in service until 1961. Odd Hassel used it for crystal chemistry and Ragnar Frisch for national-accounts work, which puts two Nobel laureates on one drum machine. The team worked first in the Astrophysical Institute at Blindern and moved into SI’s own building on the campus in 1956. See Nordic Tech Industry. Status: active university campus, no marker; the machine itself is at the Norsk Teknisk Museum. Coordinates: ≈59.9388, 10.7188.

Museums

Norsk Teknisk Museum. Kjelsåsveien 143, 0491 Oslo. Norway’s national museum of science and technology, founded in 1914 out of the Frogner jubilee exhibition. NUSSE stands here after its retirement. See Nordic Computer Societies. Coordinates: 59.9669, 10.7834. Web: tekniskmuseum.no.

Poland

Museums

Enigma Cipher Centre (Centrum Szyfrów Enigma). Święty Marcin 78, 61-809 Poznań. Opened on 25 September 2021 in a building that had housed the Poznań branch of the Polish Army’s Cipher Bureau, where Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski worked as students before they broke Enigma in the 1930s. The permanent exhibition covers ciphers from Alberti onwards and includes replicas of Rejewski’s bomba and of the Zygalski sheets. See Alan Turing and the Enigma. Coordinates: 52.4076, 16.9198. Web: csenigma.pl.

Russia

Historic Sites

Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITMiVT). Leninsky Prospekt 51, Moscow 119333. Sergei Lebedev moved here from Kyiv and built the BESM series: the BESM-1 of 1952, then the BESM-6, designed by 1965 and produced from 1968 to 1987 in 355 machines, which ran the calculations for the Venera probes and the Lunokhod rovers. The Elbrus machines followed under Vsevolod Burtsev and Boris Babayan. See Soviet and Russian Computing. Status: active institute, a joint-stock company since 3 August 2009, not open to visitors. Coordinates: 55.6989, 37.5662.

Museums

Polytechnic Museum. Novaya Ploshchad 3/4, Moscow 109012. Founded in 1872 out of the All-Russian Technical Exhibition, it holds the broadest computing collection in Russia: Bunyakovsky’s self-counting abacus, Lukyanov’s hydraulic integrator, and a Setun, the balanced-ternary machine built at Moscow State University in 1958 by Nikolai Brusentsov under Sergei Sobolev and produced in Kazan in fifty units between 1959 and 1965. Status: the historic building has been under reconstruction since 2013, with reopening announced for the second half of 2026; the museum park around it is open. Coordinates: 55.7578, 37.6295. Web: polymus.ru.

South Korea

Museums

Nexon Museum (formerly Nexon Computer Museum). 1100-ro, Jeju-si, Jeju. Opened on 27 July 2013 by the game company Nexon, it was one of the first permanent museums in Korea devoted to the history of computers and video games. Status: after a four-month rebuild it reopened on 12 May 2026 under the shorter name, recast as an experience space around visitors’ own game records; the hardware collection is in storage rather than on permanent display. Coordinates: 33.4719, 126.4850. Web: nexonmuseum.org.

Spain

Museums

Museo de Informática García Santesmases (MIGS). Facultad de Informática, Calle Profesor José García Santesmases 9, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid. Opened in November 2013 along the corridors of the computer science faculty of the Universidad Complutense, it shows machines built at the university between 1950 and 1975, commercial computers from its computing centre from 1968 on, and donated equipment, each with a panel explaining how it worked. It is named after José García Santesmases, the professor who started computing research and teaching in Spain. Status: free entry on weekdays, no booking for individual visitors. Coordinates: 40.4528, -3.7338. Web: fdi.ucm.es/migs.

Sweden

Historic Sites

BESK. Drottninggatan 95A, 113 60 Stockholm. Matematikmaskinnämnden, the state board for computing machinery set up in 1948, built BESK (Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator) in a room of the old Royal Institute of Technology premises here between 1950 and 1953. For a few weeks after it started work it was the fastest computer in the world. It ran until 1966 and its design was copied abroad, notably by Denmark’s DASK. Status: ordinary street address, no marker. Coordinates: ≈59.3399, 18.0550.

Museums

Tekniska museet. Museivägen 7, 115 27 Stockholm. Sweden’s national museum of science and technology, founded in 1924 and in its Djurgården building since 1936. BESK was donated to it in 1966; the control panel, Williams tube memory and drum memory are in the collection. Coordinates: 59.3325, 18.1188. Web: tekniskamuseet.se.

Switzerland

Historic Sites

CERN. Route de Meyrin, Meyrin, near Geneva (the site straddles the Swiss–French border). At CERN in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed the system that became the World Wide Web, writing the first browser and server on a NeXT machine here by 1990. Status: active research laboratory; parts are open to visitors. Coordinates: 46.2334, 6.0556.

ETH Zürich, main building. Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich. Eduard Stiefel’s Institute for Applied Mathematics rented Konrad Zuse’s Z4 and had it installed here in 1950; it was ETH’s first computer and, in 1950 and 1951, the only working digital computer in central Europe. It was in use until 1954 and went to the Franco-German Research Institute at Saint-Louis by 1955, where it ran until 1959, before going to the Deutsches Museum in 1960. Stiefel, Ambros Speiser and Heinz Rutishauser built the school’s own machine, the ERMETH, between 1950 and 1956; it ran until 1963. Niklaus Wirth held the chair for informatics here from 1968 until 1999 and wrote Pascal (1970), Modula-2 (1979) and Oberon (1988) in the same institution. Status: active university, courtyard and public areas accessible. Coordinates: ≈47.3765, 8.5482.

Museums

Musée Bolo. EPFL, Bâtiment INF, Station 14, 1015 Lausanne (fittingly, on the campus’s Chemin Alan Turing). Yves Bolognini, an EPFL engineer, turned his private collection into a museum in 2002, the first permanent exhibition of its kind in Switzerland; a foundation, Mémoires Informatiques, has run it since 2007. Coordinates: 46.5187, 6.5637. Web: museebolo.ch.

Taiwan

Museums

Science Park Exploration Museum. No. 1, Keji 5th Road, Hsinchu 300092. The exhibition hall of the Hsinchu Science Park administration, which is the closest thing Taiwan has to a museum of its own computing industry: the ground floor shows award-winning products of the park’s tenant firms, the first floor the electronics industry from the 1960s onwards with camera modules and semiconductor equipment, and the second floor the park’s own timeline with a documentary on its founding. See Taiwan’s Tech Ecosystem. Status: open weekdays 09:00 to 17:00, free, closed at weekends. Coordinates: ≈24.7835, 121.0047.

Ukraine

Historic Sites

MESM building, Feofaniya. Vulytsia Akademika Lebedieva 19, Feofaniya, Kyiv 03143. Sergei Lebedev’s laboratory of the Kyiv Institute of Electrotechnics occupied a two-storey former convent hostel here, and the team had to build the workshop and its own power supply before they could build the machine. MESM ran a test program on 6 November 1950, did its first practical calculations on 4 January 1951, and passed state acceptance on 25 December 1951, which makes it the first stored-program electronic computer to work in continental Europe. The street it stands on is now named after Lebedev. See Soviet and Russian Computing. Status: institute grounds, not a museum. Coordinates: 50.3463, 30.4887.

Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics. Prospekt Akademika Hlushkova 40, Kyiv 03187. Founded in 1962 out of the Academy’s computing centre, with Viktor Glushkov as director until 1982. Glushkov’s proposal for OGAS, a national computer network for economic planning, was drafted here and killed by the Ministry of Finance; Glushkov’s team also built the MIR machines from 1965, small computers for engineering calculations that handled fractions, polynomials and derivatives in hardware and were driven with a keyboard, a screen and a light pen. See OGAS: The Soviet Internet That Never Was. Status: active research institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Coordinates: ≈50.3638, 30.4457.

United Kingdom

Historic Sites

Bletchley Park. Sherwood Drive, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, MK3 6DS. The wartime home of British codebreaking, where Alan Turing and colleagues broke Enigma and where the Colossus machines attacked the Lorenz cipher. Status: museum and heritage site, open to the public. Coordinates: 51.9975, -0.7411.

The Manchester Baby site. Coupland Building 1, Bridgeford Street, University of Manchester, M13 9PL. On 21 June 1948 the Small-Scale Experimental Machine ran the first program held in addressable read-write electronic memory. See The Manchester Baby. Status: active university building. Two IEEE Milestone plaques and a blue plaque are mounted on the rear wall of the building, to the right of an entryway; the Baby milestone was dedicated on 21 June 2022, on the anniversary of the run. Coordinates: 53.4665, -2.2350.

A working replica is on display at the Science and Industry Museum, Liverpool Road, Manchester. Replica coordinates: 53.4773, -2.2547.

Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill. 151 Brook Road, London NW2 7DW. The Post Office moved its research work to Dollis Hill in 1921 and opened the permanent buildings in 1933. Here Tommy Flowers designed and built Colossus in 1943; the prototype went to Bletchley Park on 18 January 1944 and attacked its first message on 5 February. The station also produced ERNIE in 1957 and the Prestel viewdata service, and moved to Martlesham Heath in Suffolk in 1975. Status: the main block is Grade II listed and converted into flats as Chartwell Court, a private gated estate. English Heritage put up a blue plaque in 2023 on the side of the building visible from the back road, which is called Flowers Close. Coordinates: 51.5616, -0.2383.

Museums

The National Museum of Computing. Within the Bletchley Park estate, Milton Keynes, MK3 6DS. Opened in 2007 in Block H, the first purpose-built computer centre in the world, it holds what it calls the largest collection of working historic computers in the world, including the Colossus rebuilt by Tony Sale’s team over fourteen years from 1993 and the Harwell Dekatron (WITCH) of 1951, the oldest original working digital computer. Coordinates: ≈51.9977, -0.7430. Web: tnmoc.org.

The Centre for Computing History. Rene Court, Coldhams Road, Cambridge, CB1 3EW. Opened in its Cambridge premises in 2013, a hands-on museum of computers, video games and the social history of the technology. Coordinates: 52.2079, 0.1488. Web: computinghistory.org.uk.

United States

Historic Sites

HP Garage. 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto, California. In 1938 Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began building audio oscillators in this one-car garage; they formed Hewlett-Packard in 1939 with $538 and a coin toss. Status: owned by HP as a private museum, not open to the public but viewable from the street; California Historical Landmark #976 (“Birthplace of Silicon Valley”), on the National Register of Historic Places since 20 April 2007. Coordinates: 37.4430, -122.1546.

Physics Hall, Iowa State University. 2323 Osborn Drive, Ames, Iowa. John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics, and his graduate student Clifford Berry built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer in the basement of this building between 1939 and 1942: binary arithmetic, vacuum tubes for the logic, and a rotating drum of capacitors that was refreshed continuously so the charge would not leak away. Nobody could get it out again, and it was dismantled in the late 1940s when the department wanted the storage space. Status: active university building. A campus marker, “Birthplace of the Computer”, stands south of it; the IEEE dedicated a Milestone plaque in April 1990, and the computer science building was renamed Atanasoff Hall in 1988. An Ames Laboratory team rebuilt the machine between 1994 and 1997 and ran it on 8 October 1997; that replica sat in the lobby of the Durham Center and went to the Computer History Museum in 2010. Coordinates: 42.0294, -93.6474.

Moore School of Electrical Engineering. 200 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ENIAC was built here under a contract signed on 5 June 1943 and dedicated on 15 February 1946, then shut down on 9 November 1946 and moved to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where it was running in 1947. The Moore School Lectures of summer 1946, the first course anywhere on how to build a computer, were given in the same building. Status: active university building. Four of the machine’s forty panels and a function table are on display on the ground floor, near the room where it stood; the IEEE dedicated an ENIAC Milestone plaque in September 1987. Other panels are at the Smithsonian, the Computer History Museum, Fort Sill and the University of Michigan. Coordinates: 39.9524, -75.1905.

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View, California. William Shockley set up his laboratory here in 1955 and opened for business in 1956, making the first silicon devices built in the valley that later took silicon’s name. Eight of his staff, among them Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Status: the original building is gone and a shopping and housing development, The Village at San Antonio Center, occupies the site; an IEEE Milestone plaque, “Birthplace of Silicon Valley, 1956”, is mounted on the office building facing San Antonio Road. Coordinates: 37.4048, -122.1109.

Fairchild Semiconductor. 844 East Charleston Road, Palo Alto, California. Founded on 1 October 1957 by the eight who had walked out on Shockley. Jean Hoerni’s planar process and the first integrated circuit that could be manufactured commercially came out of this building. See The Integrated Circuit Revolution. Status: in commercial use; California Historical Landmark #1000, registered on 8 May 1991 as the “Site of Invention of the First Commercially Practicable Integrated Circuit”. Coordinates: 37.4216, -122.1033.

Jobs family garage. 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos, California. The garage where the first Apple computers were assembled in 1976, though Steve Wozniak has said the garage’s role was later overstated: much of the real design work happened elsewhere. Status: private home, do not disturb the residents. Coordinates: 37.3403, -122.0689.

Homebrew Computer Club. Menlo Park and Stanford, California. The club first met on 5 March 1975 in Gordon French’s garage in Menlo Park, about thirty hobbyists around a borrowed Altair 8800. The second meeting moved to the Peninsula School in Menlo Park, later ones to an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, and from 1978 to the Stanford Medical School. Steve Wozniak handed out Apple I schematics at these meetings until Steve Jobs talked him into selling the design instead of giving it away. The club ran until December 1986. Status: French’s garage has no reliably documented street address, so only the SLAC site is pinned here; SLAC is a national laboratory with restricted access. Coordinates (SLAC): ≈37.4201, -122.2056.

Google’s first office. 232 Santa Margarita Avenue, Menlo Park, California. Susan Wojcicki bought this house in 1998 and rented the garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for $1,700 a month; Google was incorporated on 4 September 1998 while the company worked out of it. Status: private house, viewable from the street. Coordinates: 37.4580, -122.1637.

Xerox PARC. 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California. The lab where the graphical user interface, the Alto, Ethernet and the laser printer took shape in the 1970s. See The Xerox PARC Revolution. Xerox announced in April 2023 that it would donate the lab to SRI International; the handover took effect on 18 January 2024, and PARC now works as SRI’s Future Concepts division. Status: active research site, not a public museum. Coordinates: 37.4027, -122.1486.

Bell Labs, Murray Hill. 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey. The first working transistor was demonstrated here in 1947; the site also produced Unix, C and information theory. See Bell Labs: The Idea Factory. Status: active laboratory, now owned by Nokia, with a small on-site technology showcase; Nokia is moving the Bell Labs headquarters to a new building in New Brunswick, New Jersey, due for completion at the end of 2027. Coordinates: ≈40.6842, -74.4012.

Boelter Hall, Room 3420, UCLA. 580 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, California. On 29 October 1969 Charley Kline tried to send the first message over the ARPANET from this room; the system crashed after two letters, “LO”. See the first ARPANET message. Status: the room has been restored as the Kleinrock Internet History Center. Coordinates: 34.0693, -118.4433.

MIT Building 26. 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Home in the late 1950s to the TX-0, on which members of the Tech Model Railroad Club (whose clubroom was in the now-demolished Building 20 nearby) gave the word “hacker” its computing sense. See The Hacker Culture. Status: active university building. Coordinates: 42.3601, -71.0901.

MITS. 6328 Linn Avenue NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico. MITS moved into this building in 1973, and here Ed Roberts and Bill Yates designed the Altair 8800 that ran on the cover of the January 1975 Popular Electronics, on newsstands from 19 December 1974. Paul Allen and Bill Gates wrote Altair BASIC for the machine and founded Microsoft in Albuquerque in 1975. Pertec bought MITS in a deal completed in May 1977 and the brand disappeared. Status: commercial building. Coordinates: 35.0777, -106.5768.

Arlington Hall. 4000 Arlington Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia. The US Army took over this women’s junior college on 10 June 1942 and made it the home of the Signal Intelligence Service, which broke Japanese systems including PURPLE and, from late 1946, read Soviet cable traffic in what became the Venona project. Much of the workforce were women recruited from colleges and teaching jobs. Army intelligence stayed until the summer of 1989, then moved to Fort Belvoir. Status: the eastern part is the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, the western part the Army National Guard’s Herbert R. Temple Jr. Readiness Center; the National Park Service found the site eligible for the National Register of Historic Places on 7 October 1988, but it has never been formally listed. Coordinates: 38.8698, -77.1036.

US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory (NCR Building 26). Patterson Boulevard at Stewart Street, Dayton, Ohio. The Navy set up the laboratory in the National Cash Register company’s Building 26 in November 1942. Under Joseph Desch, about 600 WAVES, 100 Navy officers and enlisted men and a civilian workforce built the 120 American Bombes used against the German naval Enigma; the finished machines ran at the Naval Communications Annex in Washington. See Alan Turing and the Enigma. Status: the University of Dayton demolished Building 26 in January 2008. The IEEE Milestone plaque, dedicated in October 2001, can be seen at Carillon Historical Park, 1000 Carillon Boulevard, in front of the WAVES cabin. Coordinates (plaque): 39.7289, -84.1982.

Sugar Camp. Near the corner of Far Hills and Schantz Avenues, Oakwood, Ohio. NCR built sixty four-person cabins here in 1934 as a summer training camp for its salesmen. From April 1943 the cabins housed the WAVES working a mile away in Building 26; at the peak twelve women shared a cabin and slept in shifts, because the Bombe assembly ran three shifts a day, six days a week. The camp had a dining hall, classrooms, a swimming pool and a baseball diamond, and none of the women were allowed to say what they did. Status: the camp is gone. Cabin 22, the last one, was moved to Carillon Historical Park and dedicated there on 6 June 2004, the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. Coordinates (cabin at Carillon Park): 39.7282, -84.2009.

Naval Communications Annex. 3801 Nebraska Avenue NW, Washington, DC. The Navy bought the campus of the Mount Vernon Seminary, a girls’ school that had been here since 1917, for $1.1 million on 20 July 1943 and moved its codebreaking organisation in. The Bombes built in Dayton ran here, operated around the clock by WAVES, and the site later housed the first headquarters of the National Security Agency, from 1952 to 1957. Status: the Nebraska Avenue Complex became the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and most staff left in 2019; it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 10 August 2016 and is being processed for sale or transfer. Coordinates: 38.9391, -77.0846.

Museums

Computer History Museum. 1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View, California. It claims the largest collection of computing artifacts in the world and descends from the Digital Computer Museum, opened in Massachusetts in 1979 and renamed The Computer Museum in Boston in 1982; the successor organisation moved into its Mountain View building, a former Silicon Graphics site, in 2002. Coordinates: 37.4143, -122.0774. Web: computerhistory.org.

Computer Museum of America. 5000 Commerce Parkway, Roswell, Georgia. Built on Lonnie Mimms’s private collection, it opened in July 2019 (timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing) and was renamed the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art. Coordinates: 34.0384, -84.3394. Web: mimmsmuseum.org.

National Cryptologic Museum. 8290 Colony Seven Road, Annapolis Junction, Maryland. Run by the NSA and open to the public since 16 December 1993, with free admission. Its holdings include German Enigma machines visitors may operate, a Cray Y-MP, and the one surviving US Navy Bombe of the 120 built in Dayton. See Alan Turing and the Enigma. Coordinates: 39.1149, -76.7747. Web: nsa.gov/museum.

Living Computers: Museum + Labs (closed). 2245 First Avenue South, Seattle, Washington. Paul Allen’s collection opened to the public on 25 October 2012 and held one supercomputer, seven mainframes, ten minicomputers and more than three dozen microcomputers, many of them kept running rather than shown behind glass. It closed in February 2020 and never reopened; the Allen estate announced the permanent closure in June 2024. Christie’s auctioned part of the collection between 23 August and 12 September 2024 for $3,635,982, and the rest went to the Interim Computer Museum in Tukwila, Washington, and to the Mimms Museum in Roswell, Georgia. Coordinates: 47.5825, -122.3347.

📚 Sources