ZCOM Hoyerswerda

Imagine stepping into a time machine, but instead of landing in ancient Rome or the age of dinosaurs, you find yourself in the former East Germany, surrounded by clunky computers and gadgets that look like they were designed by someone who thought “minimalism” meant “as few buttons as possible, and maybe none of them actually work.” Welcome to ZCOM Hoyerswerda, where the digital future of the past is alive and well—and occasionally needs a reboot.

This museum is like a nerdy treasure trove of vintage tech, with rooms filled with computers that once cost more than your car but now have less processing power than your smartwatch. Here, you can marvel at the GDR’s finest attempts at computing, where every device seems to whisper, “I could run a whole government… slowly, very slowly.” It’s a place where floppy disks still reign supreme, and the word “gigabyte” would have been considered science fiction.

But ZCOM isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s a celebration of the quirky charm of East German engineering. You can explore exhibits that explain how these machines were used to keep the socialist state running, from planning the economy to (probably) playing very slow games of Tetris. It’s a place that reminds you that while the West had Silicon Valley, the East had… well, something that at least vaguely resembled a valley, filled with silicon if you squinted hard enough.