Qualla: Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A., CC BY 2.0. In 1977 Nixdorf Computer AG turned twenty-five, and the people who did business with it did what people do at a company anniversary: they gave the boss presents. A lot of them were antique office machines - mechanical calculators, typewriters, the obsolete brass-and-lever ancestors of the equipment the company actually sold. It was a joke with a compliment folded inside it, and Heinz Nixdorf took it seriously. Instead of putting the machines in a corridor he started thinking about a museum. That thought, arriving as a pile of gifts nobody had planned for, became the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn - which describes itself, with reasonable confidence, as the biggest computer museum in the world.

Image: Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A. | CC BY 2.0

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum: The Collector

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Nixdorf had started with almost nothing. Born in 1925, he set up the Labor fur Impulstechnik in Essen in 1952 - a laboratory for pulse technology, which in the early fifties meant building electronic calculating equipment for companies that had never owned any. He took over the o...

Image: Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum: Died at the Trade Fair

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ziko van Dijk, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 17 March 1986 Nixdorf was at CeBIT in Hanover, the enormous computing fair that his industry had built and that he had helped make matter, when he suffered a heart attack. He was sixty. The museum existed at that point as a collection, a concept document and no address. What h...

Image: Ziko van Dijk | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum: Five Thousand Years, Two Floors

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, Calif., CC BY 2.0. The permanent exhibition does not begin with computers. It begins in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC, with the invention of writing - the first technology for getting information out of a human head and into storage - and works forward from there through counting devices, mechanical c...

Image: Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, Calif. | CC BY 2.0

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum: A Fifteen-Minute Walk

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. There is something quietly pleasing about where this ended up. Paderborn's other defining building sits about a kilometre and a half southeast: a cathedral whose predecessors burned down in 1000, 1058 and 1133, holding relics carried up from Le Mans in 836 and a crypt from around...

Image: A.Savin | FAL