Did you say,you’re a techie and looking for an escape? Put away that swimsuit! Why not visit a technological destination this summer vacation?! There are a handful of spots that you might like to visit… places full of history and innovation. Here at Panda Security, we’ve put together a list of the best vacation spots for the techie-in-you. Enjoy!
Bletchley Park
Just an hour outside of London in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, you can visit the place where Alan Turing and his team changed history. This code-breaking center turned museum was once the central spot for Britain’s codebreakers during World War II. After 1993, Bletchley Park became a museum and is now a popular tourist attraction, but not too long ago 10,000 cryptanalysts used the Victorian mansion to analyze encrypted messages communicated by German Troops during WWII.
Here at the National Museum of Computing, visitors can see some of the most important and innovative inventions of the time, such as Colossus, a machine that was used to decipher secret Nazi communications in 1943.
Technopolis
Out of all of the tech-friendly places in the world there is a country where anyone can become digital. The Republic of Estonia is an innovative country with its own Technopolis, which has been frequently referred to as the European Silicon Valley, and the home of Skype. If Estonia is on your list this summer, don’t forget to follow your technological curiosities to the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University, founded in 1960.
Before there was Steve Jobs in Palo Alto, before Google was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, there was HP. After meeting each other at Stanford University, William R. Hewlett and David Packard joined forces and began what we now know as HP. These two garage manufacturers turned legends built their first product, an oscillator in 1938, and a business was born.
Hewlett-Packard bought and restored the house with the famous garage in 2000. Now the house is open occasionally for visitors and is remembered at the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
CERN
CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, is the place where British scientist Tim Berners-Lee began the World Wide Web in 1989. Here you can find various particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle collider ever built. Thanks to the LHC, physicists are able test different theories of particle physics and are able to prove or disprove the existence of the theorized Higgs boson.
Here you can participate in a guided visit of the facility and learn about the fundamental laws of nature. You can even ask some of the 3,000 center workers how the LHC works. You can also visit the Globe of Science and Innovation or the ATLAS experiment visitor center.
The Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is the best place for computer science history in the world. Opened in 2002, the old Silicon Graphics building contains more than 2,000 year old IT history, starting with Chinese abaci.
You can view the mechanical computer, a pre-eminent invention that was designed by Charles Babbage in 1834; a collection of the first supercomputers (like Cray 1); Apple 1 (one of the first PCs); and the legendary Pong video game.
