Heinz Nixdorf would have been 100 years old on 9 April 2025. The Paderborn computer entrepreneur is paradigmatic for Germany's digital history. The Institute of History at Paderborn University, together with the Computer Science and Computer History Section of the German Informatics Society and the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, is taking this anniversary as an opportunity to host a conference on 7 and 8 November on recent research into digital history and computer archaeology in Germany.

The conference is being organised as part of the Paderborn "Questions of History" of the Paderborn University' s Department of History. At the centre of the 31st annual conference are lectures that look at the second half of the 20th century with a focus on computers in or from Germany. The use of computers in East Germany and the former GDR will also be explicitly examined.

The annual conference brings together experts on current topics and aims to establish an exchange with regional players in Westphalia and beyond. In addition to the interested public and academics, employees of museums, memory institutions, archives and libraries as well as places of remembrance, monument conservators and history associations as important supporters of regional and local history research and the culture of remembrance are therefore explicitly invited. Computers have become indispensable in all these fields - digital history and computer archaeology can benefit from the broad knowledge available locally and in the regions.

The conference will be held in German and is free of charge. Please register by e-mail to computertagung@uni-paderborn.de is requested.

Further information and the full programme can be found here.

This text was translated automatically.