Peek & Poke Computer Museum

The Peek and Poke Computer Museum is a small, enthusiastic museum in the centre of Rijeka, dedicated to the history of personal computers and to the machines that people used before smartphones and the internet. The name is a joke that anyone who learnt to program on early home computers will recognise. In the BASIC programming language, PEEK was the command used to read a value from a memory address, and POKE was the command to write one, so peeking and poking were the basic ways of looking inside a computer and changing it. The museum invites visitors to do exactly that, literally and in spirit.

It was founded in the mid-2000s by a group of local computer enthusiasts who wanted to preserve the machines they had grown up with, and it is run largely by volunteers. The collection has grown to well over a thousand items and fills a modest space a short walk from the Korzo, Rijeka's main pedestrian street. It covers calculators, early game consoles, home computers, personal computers, peripherals, manuals, books and magazines, and the displays are arranged so that you can follow the development of the technology from the 1960s and 1970s through the home computer boom of the 1980s to the personal computer age.

What sets the museum apart is that many of the machines are working and visitors are encouraged to use them. You can sit down at a vintage keyboard, load a game from a cassette or cartridge, or try to write a line of code on a machine that has hardly any memory by modern standards. Famous models, such as the Apple II, the Commodore and Sinclair home computers and the first IBM personal computers, are represented, and so are machines from Yugoslavia and other countries of the region, which makes the exhibition a story of local as well as global technology. The volunteers who look after the collection are usually happy to explain how things work, and a visit is often a conversation.

The atmosphere is informal and welcoming, and the museum is popular with people who feel nostalgia for the machines of their youth as well as with children who have never seen a computer without a touch screen. It is a good rainy-day option. Opening hours are limited and may change with the season, with some days by appointment, so check ahead.

Rijeka has many other sights close by, including the Korzo, the City Clock Tower, the market, the cathedral of St. Vitus and the Maritime and History Museum, all listed in this guide. Allow about an hour for the museum. It suits technology enthusiasts, families and anyone curious about how the digital age began.