
Museu de la Tècnica - prawn
https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704
======
idlewords
I was just at a conference with Marcin in Barcelona, where we ate giant hotel
breakfasts together for three days and tried to speak with one another in
Polish about technical topics.

A lot of those conversations were about fonts and keyboards, his passion for
them, and the history of mechanical writing. And then he drives off to
sightsee and finds this place the next day.

It could not have happened to a nicer guy.

------
gpvos
It is the Museu de la Tècnica de l'Empordà in Figueres, website
[http://www.mte.cat/](http://www.mte.cat/) . According to the website, only
open by appointment, so he got lucky indeed that he could just randomly walk
into it. The tweets make it seem like the museum is far outside the town, but
it's actually just 200m outside the city centre. Figueres is easy to reach by
road and both classic and high-speed rail.

------
ameen
One of the key takeaways for me from this story is that we've lost serendipity
thanks to the information overload.

Almost all vacations, tours, travels, etc are mapped out and pre-scheduled
(even prepaid if possible) before we start on a vacation. The key exploration
aspect is lost upon our generation.

Only populist establishments enjoy decent patronage, this affects us
culturally as well. We're only exposed to a well curated section of various
cultures instead of experiencing them unadulterated.

~~~
ajdlinux
On the one hand, I think you're right to an extent - when I travel, I've
almost always booked all my accommodation, car hire and so on in advance, all
mediated through the Internet, and making my plans relatively inflexible. The
internet definitely advantages the "well curated" stuff.

On the other hand, technology has also enabled _more_ flexibility in travel.
When my grandmother went on her once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe 30 years
ago, she spent all day on bus tours, going wherever the tour company had
chosen to take her. When my father and I went to China, South Korea and Japan
two years ago, the only bus tours we went on were to visit the Great Wall and
the DMZ. Our accommodation? Bar one location, all booked through sites like
Hostelworld. Our air tickets? Booked directly by us, over the internet. We got
to choose where and when we did things. Sure, backpackers and so on have been
travelling with independence before we had the internet to help us, but
technology has brought this independence to a far wider audience with a lower
appetite for uncertainty and risk.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
> When my grandmother went on her once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe 30 years
> ago

I think it's really sad to do a "one in a lifetime trip to Europe". Every
single country has way too much to offer to do just "one trip for everything".
Hell, you can spend a month a year touring France like my parents and never
run out of interesting things to see after 25 years.

~~~
ajdlinux
I agree with you, but in defence of my grandmother...

A) Things were a bit different 30 years ago. Flying from Australia to Europe
is expensive now, it was even worse then.

B) Things are particularly different when, like my grandmother, you're a
working class person, living in a working class inner city suburb, in
government housing.

Given those circumstances, I think planning a "once in a lifetime" trip is a
perfectly reasonable thing to do.

------
elihu
Sheet music typewriter (from the linked story, if you click "show more" enough
times): [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvzBRKIXgAA-
cp_.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvzBRKIXgAA-cp_.jpg)

It makes sense that such a thing would exist, but I've never really thought
about what such a machine would look like or how it would work.

~~~
jay-anderson
I'd like to know more about them honestly. I'm not sure music typewriters
would be as practical as transfers (buy a sheet of symbols and rub them onto
the page) or stencils. From what I understand the highest quality music
typesettings engraved the music in plates. (More info:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_engraving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_engraving))

~~~
maxerickson
I bet it has push buttons for advancing the paper up and down the staff,
greatly simplifying keeping notes aligned compared to a stencil.

It also looks like overstriking the lines on notes above and below the staff
would be easier than adding them over a stencil.

I guess it would serve different purposes than engraved music.

------
constable83
This is a more readable version (like Storify) and, contrary to the other
Twitter Moment shared here, has all the original tweets intact:
[https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

------
bradleyjg
Twitter is a terrible medium for whatever message might have been hidden in
there. I'm sure it must be good for something, but whatever that might be, a
story like that is not it.

------
hueving
>Marcin Wichary, the lead typographer and designer at Medium,

Yet we had to read what should have been a blog post in a series of tweets. :)

------
binarycrusader
For those who want to learn a little more about the museum, there's an English
language page here:

[http://www.mte.cat/content/blogcategory/64/178/lang,ca/](http://www.mte.cat/content/blogcategory/64/178/lang,ca/)

------
rmathew
Wonderful. However, a blog-post on their web-site or, say, a post on Medium
would have been so much more readable than a tweet-storm you have to keep
doing "Show More..." on.

------
impossiblegame
This is the most inspiring story I have read all week. Not a typewriter geek
but this story makes a good case. I wish for everyone to stumble like this on
a treasure related to what they love.

------
corny
This reminds me of a similar museum my wife and I stumbled on in Girona this
September: Museu del Cinema. Four stories of movie-making history with a very
heavy focus on pre-motion picture equipment and devices like magic lanterns,
zoetropes, 3D viewers and shadow puppets. We were the only patrons there in
this otherwise touristy part of town. Highly recommended!

[http://www.museudelcinema.cat/eng/colleccio.php](http://www.museudelcinema.cat/eng/colleccio.php)

------
glandium
This museum would make Tom Hanks ecstatic
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208662)

------
meshko
Oh man, I don't care (as much) about typewriters but yeah, what a happy story.
It's like visiting a town for a day and learning by accident that the band
you've loved for years but never seen live is playing there this very night.

------
zeroer
This is a terrible way to tell a story.

~~~
elicash
I enjoyed it. Something about reading it tweet by tweet made it feel even more
like I was on the ride with him as he's discovering something new.

~~~
exodust
It's not a great UX for reading the story. Which is why the 'moments' version
is better:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

~~~
drivingmenuts
Still pretty intolerable, having to read it sentence-by-painful sentence (I
read in blocks), scrolling down half a page and realizing I haven't even read
a full paragraph yet.

I finally found something worse than listening to a technical procedure on
YouTube.

~~~
exodust
Sure okay. I see your point. For reading it's no good. Perhaps Twitter should
allow normal paragraphs in moments. The tweet could be just the title of the
document, but from then on it's anything goes. That would be great, but they
probably won't do that.

------
lucideer
Possibly OT, but given his offline Google Maps failed him for info/directions,
worth noting this place is findable on OSM:
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3809950661](http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3809950661)

------
devnonymous
For all those warning about clicking the 'Show more' ...come on, there aren't
that many times you'd have to do it !! ...and the story is worth it ! I mean,
yeah, I agree with all the criticism of twitter UX etc if I were to randomly
select a convenient medium that lets me put up series of photos and some text
as an ongoing narrative, I'd probably go with twitter as well ...broken as it
is from the reader's perspective.

All that said, I find that story fascinating ! Not that I know anything about
typewriters but I can relate to the enthusiasm and sheer joy of such a
serendipitous discovery. I give my thanks to all the obsessive collectors and
connoisseurs of everyday things !

------
webmaven
This is a great set of photos if you are into retro- or paleo-tech anything.
Really cool.

Also, it is special when it feels like the universe has lined everything up to
give you a unique experience. I'm glad this guy shared his.

------
colordrops
The irony of using 140 character tweets to talk about old typewriters.

------
mezod
I hope he let the guy downstairs know about his feelings somehow!

------
cooper12
Wow, this story makes me thing that we treat "hipster" pretty badly for trying
to bring back retro stuff. Museums don't last forever and what better way to
keep the past alive than to keep using it in the present. People need to keep
shooting in film, using typewriters, restoring old cars, maintaining old
technical documentation, just so we can keep having moments like this and
ensure that culture lives on.

------
err4nt
Wow, I was surprised at how much the 'Moon Alphabet' diagram reminded me of
the Graffiti handwriting recognition alphabet from PalmOS:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_\(Palm_OS\))

I wonder if this is convergent design, or if Palm's Graffiti was more directly
influenced by the Moon Alphabet.

------
downandout
Someone really needs to figure out how to make this kind of content readable
on Twitter, since I know Twitter won't.

------
presty
personally, Dali's theater museum is my favorite museum in the whole world and
definitely something to check if you are in barcelona/figueres

------
besselheim
This reminds me of the similar joy of stumbling across a pianola museum in
Amsterdam.

Always a pleasure to find such a well curated niche set of exhibits.

------
koytch
Where are the '1' and '0' on the Bar-Lock? Or did hackers of that time do
direct I/O?

~~~
raphman
The same is true of other old typewriters, e.g. the one patented by Sholes
[1]. Typists used l/O instead. This slightly reduced mechanical complexity.

[1]
[https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US207559-1...](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US207559-1.png)

~~~
koytch
This is so wrong… Did they use old-style figures, too? That's the only way I
can imagine it might have looked OK.

~~~
schoen
I've still encountered text on the Internet that substitutes I for 1 and O for
0, presumably written by people who learned in an earlier era and haven't
shaken that habit.

But it's slightly hard to search for because a lot of the search results are
OCR errors. Still, I'm sure not all of them are because I've seen this in
newly-published news articles (maybe written by journalists or edited by
editors who've been in the news business for some decades?).

------
timehastoldme
This is so freaking cool! A mini-history told by someone passionate about it.

------
chrismcb
He never found the dali museum because it was in the opposite direction

------
ForFreedom
That is amazing

------
schoen
For people who didn't want to click "Show more" a lot, it's a super-
enthusiastic story, in tweet form, about accidentally stumbling upon the
world's largest typewriter museum in a small town in Spain -- by someone who
loves typewriters. If you like typewriters or enthusiasm, you might like
reading the story.

~~~
prawn
And submitted to HN by someone who was in Spain (from Australia) just a few
days prior to this and would've loved to have visited this museum had I known
it existed!

I came across the tweet-story via William Gibson who is very prolific on
Twitter (@greatdismal).

I read it in the older OSX Twitter app and didn't have to continually click to
unveil more.

~~~
empath75
Neuromancer was written on a typewriter and William Gibson had never even used
a computer before.

------
no_protocol
This link seems to provide a more readable version of the story:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400](https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400)

It doesn't require readers to click 'more' or wade through other users'
comments.

I don't know much about Twitter, can someone explain why there are two views
like this?

~~~
webmaven
Moments are basically curated collections. The tweets in them don't have to be
from the same thread, or even the same user.

Here is a Moment with _all_ of the guy's tweets and photos from the thread:
[https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

~~~
logicallee
I urge even people who had read through our link to click the above: it
includes pictures that aren't in our current link.

Dang, or Scott, I encourage you to please change the link from the submitted
OP link to the above one! While the submission is exciting to click through
one by one (an enchanting story), in fact the missing photos (such as of the
actual rooms in question) are too much. I enjoyed both reading experience, but
the above one should have been our link.

------
michaelvoz
All this story did to me was remind why I don't read twitter. Short messages,
interspersed with some random people's comments... I'm sure whatever did
happen was downright magical, but the medium destroyed it for me. Can someone
pastebin the story?

------
sushirain
Why not use Medium instead of twitter?

"Marcin Wichary, the lead typographer and designer at Medium, is obsessed with
all things typeface, including typewriters. So when he chanced upon Museu de
la Tècnica in a small Spanish town, nothing could have prepared him for what
he found."
[https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400](https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400)

~~~
js8
While I agree that Twitter is terrible for this kind of thing (I actually
struggled to get back to reread the beginning..), to play a devil's advocate:

Maybe he wouldn't write a blog post about it. Maybe in the beginning, he just
thought, I will post this little story that surely will fit in 140 characters.
And then, as he uttered first couple tweets, he just started to, kinda
naturally, add interesting things he found in the museum. And voila, a blog
post.

On the other hand, if he thought, let me write a blog post about it, he could
also think, ah scratch it, that's gonna take an afternoon.

So I think twitter simply needs an interface to convert a series of tweets
into a blog post. (Or maybe Medium needs a "Smallium" which would work like
Twitter except it could convert a series of nanoposts into a Medium post.)

------
alblue
Mods: would make sense to retitle this as "I found a typewriter museum in
Spain and I was excited" as the title as it currently stands has limited
value.

~~~
andai
I believe it has exceptional value, in the form of not spoiling the whole
thing before you even click on it.

------
Merad
To be frank, I totally lost interest in whatever the magical moment was after
clicking the link and realizing I would have to piece it together from a dozen
or more twitter posts. If your story involves more than three sentences or so,
you can invest a few minutes to post it in a coherent format if you want
people to invest the time to read it.

~~~
exodust
Yes Twitter is painful when read this way. I made it to the end but wasn't
happy about the experience.

Then I came back here and discovered the "moments" version of his story here:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

And FWIW I wouldn't be missing the Dali museum. I appreciate old typewriters,
but Dali was the master. There are few artists that come close.

------
visarga
I think this is a parody to Twitter storytelling. The title is the end of it.
Even after opening the log, it's difficult to follow and parts of it remain
hidden under "show more" buttons.

------
oliv__
Why exactly is this on the top page of HN?

~~~
c0nducktr
Because people find it interesting?

