(Not) Obsolete: A Living Electronics Museum on EEI #59

Not Obsolete is the point of This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, and this Elektor Engineering Insights #59 clip makes that point rather well. Mitch joins the show from Ramsgate, UK, surrounded by experimental electronics, musical machines, test gear, and enough blinking hardware to remind us that old technology is often still the best way to see how engineering actually works.

Not Obsolete: Watch the EEI #59 Clip

The clip comes from Elektor Engineering Insights #59, our session on the Elektor Formant, DIY synth culture, and hands-on electronics education. During the discussion, Mitch gave viewers a quick look inside the Ramsgate museum, where the mission is not to preserve old equipment as silent furniture, but to keep it alive, evolving, and available for people to experience.

That distinction matters. A static display can tell you when something was made and what it was used for. A working machine can show you how a circuit behaves, how controls map to sound, how an interface guides the user, and how repairable technology teaches through its faults. In other words, the machine is not just historically interesting. It is still useful.

“This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete” Fits EEI

EEI #59 focused on the Elektor Formant, the classic modular analog synthesizer that first appeared in Elektor in the late 1970s. The Formant was never only an instrument; it was also a practical electronics education in oscillators, filters, envelopes, calibration, wiring, grounding, and debugging. That makes the museum clip more than a scenic detour. It sits right in the same culture of learning by building, repairing, and listening.

This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete was launched by Sam Battle, also known as Look Mum No Computer, and is described as a home for experimental and obsolete scientific and musical technology. The name contains the joke and the philosophy at the same time: these machines may be old, awkward, rare, or ridiculous, but they are not finished. They still invite hands-on learning, and in some cases they still make sounds that suggest a fax machine has discovered jazz.

Old electronic instruments and test setups often expose the structure that modern devices hide. You can follow signal paths, hear changes immediately, watch meters respond, and understand cause and effect without a software update getting involved. This is preservation, yes, but not preservation as taxidermy. It is preservation as a working bench.

Electronics education is strongest when it is physical, audible, and a little bit unforgiving. Whether the subject is a modular synth, a museum full of rescued machines, or a half-repaired device that refuses to behave, technology does not stop teaching just because it is no longer new.