I knew we were going on holiday, I knew when we were going and I knew where we were flying from. I didn’t know where we were going until I saw the luggage tags being put on at check-in. So what did we get up to on holiday? Why looking at computers in museums, of course!
The National Museum is so huge we got lost several times and had to go back a second day. It’s got an enormous permanent exhibition charting the history of Denmark from about 1000 to 2000, and featuring a lovely old IBM with nasty green-on-black burn in towards the end. It also had a temporary exhibition entitled The World Of Tycho Brahe. The man was the ubergeek of his day – he designed and constructed many of his measuring and calculating devices, proved that the planets orbit the sun, and took the observations that enabled his assistant, Johann Kepler, to prove that Earth was just another one of those planets.
Another Danish ubergeek of his time was Jens Olsen, designer of the World Clock that is house in Copenhagen’s City Hall. It is a truely beautiful piece of precision engineering, with delicately engraved facings and such fine gearing that it is reckoned to loose 0.4 seconds in 300 years. It goes far beyond “clock” and well into the realms of analogue computing.
Another day, we took the train to Sweden (a concept I still find a bit odd), and spent our time playing with scientific toys and crawling through the U3 submarine at the Science and Maritime museum. We also spotted some graffiti that made us smile:
