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Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

439 points by dboreham 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
I thought it was so sad that they shut down the computer museum in Boston years ago. It makes me think of how much more geographically diverse the computer industry was in the US back in the 1980s and how Boston has just given up on its history. It used to be associated with the Boston Children's Museum which had a DEC-10 way back in the early 1980s. They were pretty lucky because DEC would usually donate PDP-8s or PDP-11s to places like that.
- caphector 2y ago
  It’s still around but it was moved to the old SGI building in the SF/Bay Area. I went to the old one growing up; my dad worked at DEC and it was great fun to see all the hardware at the CHM.
  - kragen 2y ago
    the computer museum history center existed as a separate entity before being transferred the assets of the boston computer museum; it's not simply a relocated boston computer museum
13of40 2y ago
> A highlight of the sale is a computer which Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000. What? I know lots of people who would save them the trouble and buy it now for $50K. How bad of an investment could that be? Edit: I'm picturing something large refrigerator sized like the PDP-8 at RePC down the street. If it's cheap because it's a 20-ton white elephant that's a different story.
- buildbot 2y ago
  It’s about destruction, not making sense in my opinion.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mikestew 2y ago
  There’s a picture in TFA, with a desk for scale. It would be several refrigerators, but might still fit in your garage.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  Putting an item up for sale to the highest bidder insulates a seller from future claims that the item was sold for a low-ball price in some kind of sweetheart/kickback deal.
- dboreham 2y ago
  A dec-10 is pretty big (at the LCM it is in a room that's something like 40' by 20'), needs air conditioning, and needs a beefy electrical supply. Nobody really knows the market price for such a thing because very few are left in running order and there are very few people with the resources to provide it with water and hay.
- ghaff 2y ago
  > How bad of an investment could that be? Probably pretty bad.
buildbot 2y ago
It’s so incredibly stupid to sell off each piece of the museum - 50K for a DEC-10? Does the Allen estate really need the cash? Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy. It was extremely cool and educational to visit the museum as an EE undergraduate, to visually see and use parts of the history of computing. It’s a massive loss to loose this collection. Some of the items we will never get back or see again.
- glompers 2y ago
  Could perhaps UW (for instance) EE or CS alumni arrange to bid and give the collection to the department at UW across town?
- kragen 2y ago
  as i said in another comment, that's possibly the only dec-10 in working condition in the world selling it off piece by piece probably improves the chances that the most important pieces will be preserved rather than the whole thing going to a scrap metal dealer
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    I doubt this. Not because I doubt your sincerity; I'm just pessimistic given the hostility displayed by the administrative class toward anything that doesn't have a currency symbol in front of it.
    - kragen 2y ago
      pdp-10 fans have currency symbols tho. lots of people on hackers-l are, as they say, financially independent, and a fair fraction of them are donors to the chm and fans of the pdp-10. plus you have the modern #pdp-10 freenode crowd
    - emmet 2y ago
      First time hearing "administrative class" and god that's fitting for the MBA crowd
armadsen 2y ago
I adored the Living Computers Museum. Being able to just sit down and use an Apple 1, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, and so many more in the same place was incredible. And then, a friendly museum employee being there to show you how to use it, tell you about what made it unique, etc. was even better. It was so much better than most look-but-don’t-touch museums. It’s really a travesty that Paul Allen’s sister seems bent on dismantling everything he left behind.
- sterlind 2y ago
  why is she doing this? for the money, or out of some form of spite?
  - eschaton 2y ago
    Money and an absolute disinterest in anything Paul cared about.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      This is not just disinterest. It feels like active contempt.
      - eschaton 2y ago
        I think she doesn’t care about it enough to hold it in contempt except insofar as it represents an asset of Paul’s that hasn’t been converted into money.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - longdustytrail 2y ago
    The same thing happened to another one of Paul’s wacky passion projects, the Cinerama theater. That ended up being taken over by the Seattle Film Festival after being shut down for a few years. My impression is that Paul died somewhat suddenly and simply didn’t make arrangements to keep these things going. His sister is not interested in them so she’s winding them down. It’s too bad he didn’t set up some kind of endowment before he passed. Maybe he didn’t want to or maybe he just didn’t get around to it. I wonder what will happen to MoPop/EMP. AFAIK that’s always been a financial black hole.
tivert 2y ago
Some embarrassingly rich person needs to give the Computer History Museum enough money to buy all of it. It's puzzling why all his stuff was organized in such a way that it could get wound down like this. Seems like it would have been way better to create a nonprofit then endow it with enough money to keep operating independently.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  Bill Gates seems like a prime option.
  - zimm 2y ago
    info@gatesfoundation.org Email and ask
    - dboreham 2y ago
      Presumably billg is reading this thread already.
      - tivert 2y ago
        > Presumably billg is reading this thread already. I would assume he's not wasting his time with HN. He's rich enough and well-known enough that I'd think he'd be able to get superior versions of everything HN can provide.
        fragmede 2y ago
        I mean, if you have billg money, I guess you could have a couple ex-FAAMG software developers on payroll just so you could call them up at any hour of the day and have them give you uninformed hot-takes about an article you found online and just forwarded them, and need them to tell you something based on the headline without actually reading the article, but that seems a bit weird. I don't even have Snoop Dogg money to pay someone to roll joints for me though, so what do I know about having billg-levels of money.
shrubble 2y ago
If it was donated by someone, shouldn't they give it back to the person who donated it? How does it get sold for cash?
- taw28 2y ago
  In short, because it was donated and not loaned. Once it leaves your hands, the museum can do as it wishes (within the restrictions of its bylaws).
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    “Philanthropic trust” is probably the concept you missed here. Don’t worry, it looks like Allen missed it too.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      And with fairly unusual exceptions, museums don't tend to like a lot of restrictions on what they can do with donations.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
erickhill 2y ago
They have a basement filled with hundreds if not thousands of computer donations stockpiled like the warehouse scene from Indiana Jones. Also, it's "LCM" not "LHM".
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I would demand the donations back - closing it and selling off the collection is NOT what the donors wanted.
evereverever 2y ago
I am saddened that I never was able to visit this museum. With all of that money it could have easily been fully funded for 100 years.
mrpippy 2y ago
What a damn shame, I went in 2019 and had an amazing time. Played with a NeXT cube, Sun/3, Lisa, Alto, and so many more machines.
rbanffy 2y ago
It sickens me something like this is happening to this unique museum. I knew it was a matter of time, but, still, it’s a tragedy that’s hard to comprehend.
- djmips 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    Charitably, you can blame HN's (intentionally?) poor UI design, placing tiny up and down arrows right next to each other so that it's easy to hit the wrong one.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Deleted all the social accounts and website offline too? Harsh :-(
- smsm42 2y ago
  We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at least not to somebody you'd want to sell) or donate it. There's no organizations dedicated to preserving such properties, as far as I know. So, what do you do? You shut them down, you have not other alternative.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Exactly. Unless you've setup a sufficient endowment and a legal entity of some sort, it's not reasonable to expect a relative to keep your passion project going. And even if they do for sentimental reasons for a while, that's just kicking the can a bit down the road.
  - qludes 2y ago
    If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs. If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actual data somewhere, not the actual website.
    - lobsterthief 2y ago
      And unfortunately archive.org is woefully underfunded. We take it for granted and it could be gone someday. Please support it if you have the means to do so.
    - 2y ago
leotravis10 2y ago
A HUGE cultural loss and I'm grateful that I got to visit it a few years ago.
da-bacon 2y ago
There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You could plop yourself down at a Xerox Alto and hack away to your heart's content. Being able to share this experience with my son is something I will always remember about this museum. A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.
thriftwy 2y ago
One thing I didn't notice when travelling to Bay Area is thriving small museum ecosystem. Apparently in the US they prefer to run museums like commercial venues, so either it's a large theme park of a museum, or not at all. I see the news where houses of very notable people like Ray Bradbury[1] sold and scrapped - elsewhere they'd be made a local prodigy of a "house-museum". 1. https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-ray-bradbury-house-postmortem-20150122-story.html https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-ray-bradbu...
- linguae 2y ago
  (Disclaimer: I am a member of the Computer History Museum.) We have the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (https://computerhistory.org/ https://computerhistory.org/). While unfortunately visitors are not allowed to touch the equipment unlike the Living Computers Museum in Seattle, this is still a wonderful place for people to learn about the history of computing. In addition, the Computer History Museum has many events, often free, where pioneers of computing are invited to give talks about their work. I’ve been to events that celebrated the Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, the Apple Lisa, and the original Apple Macintosh. I’ve met Dan Ingalls (Smalltalk), Charles Simonyi (Bravo and Microsoft Word), Marshall Kirk McKusick (BSD), and Donald Knuth at the Computer History Museum, and I’ve seen Adele Goldberg (Smalltalk), Jean Louis Gassee (Apple, Be), and even Steve Wozniak in attendance. It’s an amazing privilege being able to have casual conversations with people who have profoundly shaped society. It’s truly a blessing that we have this important resource in Silicon Valley and that there is a stream of donors who help keep this museum alive. I wish the Living Computers Museum in Seattle had the same type of leadership the Computer History Museum has, but barring any last-minute interventions it may be too late to save that museum.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    Exactly the one I meant under the theme park comment - another one is Monterey Bay Aquarium. Don't get me wrong, both are awesome museums. One thing that caught my attention in CHM is that as you approach the end of century, it becomes an exposition of bright boxes of computer software - quite a change from mechanical marvels of early last century or metal and plastic boxes of mid-century. But overall it's pretty great and totally worth a visit.
spaceguillotine 2y ago
Paul Allen sure didn't have great foresight for post death. First Cinerama and now the computer museum. The current sentiment with seattle lifers is that he used Seattle as a playground and didn't actually care about the longevity. EMP now MoPop just keeps hanging on by a thread as well and has gone through lots of turmoil.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  I think that's too harsh. A lot of people have a blind spot to their own mortality. He died at 65, far before most people have their affairs in order.
  - xhkkffbf 2y ago
    But he was given a diagnosis of cancer. It's not like he was hit by a bus. He had several months.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Even for someone like Allen a few minutes with Quicken Willmaker would have been able to setup a trust to keep any of these things going in perpetuity. He likely didn't like thinking about it.
    - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
      He had cancer decades ago and it came back a few times, didn't he? He probably convinced himself into thinking he wasn't going to die until it was too late, and things like this probably drop down to fairly low priority at that point. Not trying to excuse him though; if he actually cared he should've been thinking about it when he was opening the museum.
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      He was lucky enough to have several decades. (His original diagnosis with Hodgkin's Lymphoma was in 1983 according to Wikipedia. Most of the these projects in his life through 2018 were under the specter of that cancer. Even the complication of the additional non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2009 still gave him possibly luckily a few years to have handled some things.) Not that it makes it that much easier to deal with if you live that much time after a frightening diagnosis, especially because you likely can't know how much time you will actually have. But then again, none of us really know how much time we have. (How's your estate plan? Mine could use work.)
romwell 2y ago
Oh no! What a crying shame. This was one of my favorite museums in the world, probably with no analogues. When I interned in Microsoft in 2014, I got to experience Seattle — and the Living Computer Museum was one of the highlights of that experience. Simply being able to walk in and close-up something simple (say, Fibonacci sequence) on a typewriter terminal of the PDP-10 — and then see the typewriter type the output back to you on the same piece of paper was absolute magic (and a part of computing I wish we still had).
- kragen 2y ago
  you know, you can plug a dot-matrix printer into a parallel port on a linux box and redirect stdout and stderr to that port. last time i did this was 27 years ago (my monitor had been broken in shipping, but i had an inkjet printer that printed text line by line), but it probably still works. i recall i had to telnet to localhost to get it to not be line-buffered, and you might have to hack that a different way nowadays around here office supply stores still sell fanfold paper and printer ribbons of course your linux box isn't a pdp-10, but that doesn't seem to be what you're missing
craniumslows 2y ago
If you liked the Living Computer Museum then you may be interested in the https://icm.museum/ https://icm.museum/ Interim Computer Museum.
- sva_ 2y ago
  If you're ever close to Bonn, Germany, check Out the Artihmeum[0]. It starts at the top floor with the oldest "computers" and gets more modern as you walk down. They even have an original Enigma encryption machine. You can interact with some of them, but not all. 0. https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/ https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/
  - endgame 2y ago
    You're underselling it. The bottom floor has vintage hand-cranked calculators that you're allowed to compute with!
esafak 2y ago
Why is it shutting down? I scanned the article but failed to find the reason.
- cdchn 2y ago
  Estate liquidation.
  - esafak 2y ago
    I can't imagine they ran out of money, so I speculate that the executors simply did not want to maintain it.
    - astrodust 2y ago
      It's not their job to maintain it unless that was specified somehow in advance.
      - kragen 2y ago
        usually when someone's estate includes a business with employees, shutting it down and selling off its assets is not what the executors do. usually they keep the company running so they can get a reasonable sale price for the whole company
        daotoad 2y ago
        The cinerama and the museum were shut down for Covid and just never came back. They found someone to take on the Cinerama. But the living computer museum was a taller order. Which is tragic because it was an unbelievably cool place. Being able to use a Xerox Alto and an orginal Microsoft Surface (the one built into a table) was a gift. It's sad that this won't be available for others in the future.
    - jojobas 2y ago
      I wonder why no trust fund has been set up to keep it going.
algebra-pretext 2y ago
Around two months ago I stopped by the building and saw through a window that the interior seemed mostly untouched. So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in until a very loud intercom told me to get off the property. Probably not the reason for this announcement but I can’t help but feel partially responsible. The RE-PC vintage computing warehouse nearby also has a small museum with equipment going back to the 60s, you can’t touch anything but other sections of the warehouse have plenty of 90s and 2000s desktops set up that you can play with. It’s a good place to look for ancient cables, obscure controllers (I saw two SideWinders there last time), and older displays, I’m planning to go back to pick up the Apple Studio CRT https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/apple_studio_display_17_cl.html https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...
- lilyball 2y ago
  > So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in How does concern for the items inside lead you to looking for a way to break in?
  - kragen 2y ago
    if the building is unguarded and full of valuable items, someone will loot it. if you're the one that loots it, you get to decide what happens to them. if you don't, someone else will
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - squigz 2y ago
      I love HN morality takes.
    - lobsterthief 2y ago
      I’m sorry but that’s a terrible take > Someone else might loot it, and they could do who knows what with it, so I’ll loot it instead
spullara 2y ago
How about donating them to the Computer History Museum in SV?
- ertian 2y ago
  They probably can't, for the same reason it's not going to stay open: it wasn't specified in the will what to do with the LCM, and it does specifically say that the default is to liquidate.
dang 2y ago
Related: http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-living-computers-museum-finally-isnt.html http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-living-computers-muse... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802686 but we merged those comments hither)
devwastaken 2y ago
I've wanted to get my hands on an IBM or other with an orange plasma display for a while. Or really any old terminal. It's funny because buying them is very expensive, but places showcasing them are few now.
- shrubble 2y ago
  The Toshiba luggables T3100 / T5x00 with gas plasma display are still around; as are the Compaq luggables as well.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  You could have had them for free (or nearly) when computing centers were getting rid of them in the 1990s.
TobinCavanaugh 2y ago
Bummer, this place was a bunch of fun
araes 2y ago
Surprising. Visited right before Covid, and it seemed rather popular. Children wandering around playing with exhibits. Would have not expected a place like that to go under. Think every floor had maybe 10? folks while I was there. Really one of the better hands-on museums with the "lab" component. Had lots of neat digital wall displays to play with, and programmable science toys. Only downside was location. Tried walking cause I had no idea where it really was, and super-quick realized it was way past the coliseum and almost down to the badlands warehouse district by the freight harbor. Right between the railyards. Bad mental model of Seattle distances. Signage was also really difficult to spot. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SPCCJhT7B9aBfANNA https://maps.app.goo.gl/SPCCJhT7B9aBfANNA Can you even tell there's a museum there? Weird part from my own perspective, is Gate's runs a non-profit in his spare time as a hobby(?). Even if they weren't best-bros afterward, it would still take something like finger wagging to a functionary to not have this be a PR dumpster fire.
BobAliceInATree 2y ago
The sad reality is that you can spend a lifetime collecting something, the but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it, is pretty close to zero. That's true of multi-million dollar vintage computers, or your childhood stamp collection that's mostly worthless. Paul's mistake was not properly establishing a foundation & endowment to maintain this musuem, which almost certainly leaks lots of money. I personally have a decent art collection that I've amassed over the past couple decades. I have a few pieces earmarked in my will to specific friends & family that have really liked certain pieces (they don't know), but the reality is that my estate executor is going to sell the vast majority of it, and at 50¢ on the dollar of what I paid.
- bombcar 2y ago
  You're not going to get 50 cents if I know anything about it. Maybe if you started selling today you could get that, an estate auction will get a few pennies.
  - BobAliceInATree 2y ago
    A few of my pieces are quite desirable and valuable, most of them not. I looked at the numbers, and all together 40-50% of what I paid is the ballpark of today's value, not including any consignment fees.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      I've said this before, and for you I'm assuming there's no rush, but the best person to sell the "valuable" part of the collection is you. Now granted, most collections are not art - so I'm assuming you gave fewer distinct pieces than say stamps. My dad had a serious stamp collection. Had he died with it complete, we would have sold it for a few $ to a dealer. The cost of (him or us) going through it to find "the good stuff would be too high. Take your art. Unless you've cataloged it, had it appraised, and keep that updated every few years, your heirs will likely just sell it as a job-lot to a dealer. Given his costs, and risks, he'll pick a small number (like $50 per). Your Rembrant is his to find. What my dad did was sell off the expensive stuff himself before he died (and told us). He knew what he had, and where to find it. (He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread). At least we knew that what was left was basically worthless and we could donate it with a clear conscience.
themaninthedark 2y ago
There is a computer museum in Roswell, GA. Just north of Atlanta that is pretty neat. https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org/ https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org/
- dpb001 2y ago
  I think CMoA acquired the contents of David Larsen’s museum in Floyd, VA. Larsen was one of the authors of the Bugbook series and the museum was kind of a snapshot of the mid to late 70’s micro scene. I’m glad the Apple I didn’t end up in a Goodwill bin somewhere.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kragen 2y ago
this is pretty unfortunate. iirc they had the only digital pdp-10 in the world that's currently in working order — the line of computers on which emacs, microsoft basic, simtel-20, and compuserve all originated. most of the arpanet was pdp-10s at one time. nasa's gsfc spacelink ftp site, where you could download space photos, was the only one i ever encountered running hopefully that machine will find a good home in the auction and not be destroyed in the process the fact that it's shut down is, as bobaliceinatree said, a terrible indictment of paul allen's estate planning. unless he just didn't care about the people who survived him
- anthk 2y ago
  At least you can run ITS under simh, there a github repo to set everything up almost automagically.
  - kragen 2y ago
    yes, and maybe xkl still makes pdp-10s, and kv10 may be ready soon. not sure what happened to conroy's pdp-10/x hdl. but there is value in artifacts too
- Suzuran 2y ago
  Very far from the only working one. I have a working one, for now, but we don't know how much longer I will be here because I am currently dying from a government paperwork error that nobody in government has the authority to fix.
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Holy cow. What happened?
    - Suzuran 2y ago
      Long story short, my Medicare records got screwed up. Some database entry isn't in the correct state that allows their processes to proceed. None of the humans I can get in contact with has the authority (or knows anyone with the authority) to manually correct the record, because that would be outside of their processes. Since the record isn't in a valid state, my access to medications I need to stay alive is being cut off. The retail cost of the just one of the medications is more than 100% of my income.
AlbertCory 2y ago
I took the photos for the cover of my first book on an Alto that was rescued from the museum. This was when it was "closed for the pandemic." Anyhow, this guy had two working Altos in his basement in Bothell.
picometer 2y ago
The museum was also a generous community space; I remember attending a Seattle Indies game jam and other events before the pandemic. It was very special to be surrounded by reminders of early-computing exploratory spirit.
kelsey98765431 2y ago
rest in peace, thank you for giving me the memory of what root on an '11 felt like for dms, and a little of that all asm love for the single cve. Someday i will write it a sister and publish in TLCHM memory. farewell friend and thank you for the fish
alchemist1e9 2y ago
When is the auction? Anyone have the details available?
- kens 2y ago
  The items are being auctioned by Christie's, closing Sept 12. The webpage gives very little information at this time: https://www.christies.com/stories/gen-one-paul-allen-history-of-technology-ef080682a70e4a97a53864b475333b12 https://www.christies.com/stories/gen-one-paul-allen-history...
notlisted 2y ago
I haven't had the pleasure to visit this specific museum, but I did manage to visit https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/ https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/ in my native country of The Netherlands on my last trip to Europe, and it's a real gem, also allowing hands-on interaction. I also "adopted" my first PC. (for those familiar with The Netherlands, it's located in Helmond)
mepian 2y ago
Après moi, le déluge?
peatmoss 2y ago
Damn, this is a gut punch. I used to love this place. Just hanging out with the old systems was a flood of nostalgia and good memories.
anigbrowl 2y ago
Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement that the market has never seen such a diverse collection “that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity — much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing.” These honeyed words ring deeply hypocritical when you consider Christie's sees the collection purely as an asset capable of yielding a significant commission once sold. The closure came as the estate began to deal with a number of properties that no longer had a billionaire benefactor to help keep the doors open, and in line with what the estate says was Allen’s desire to sell his assets after his passing. I wonder about this. If someone has made a vast fortune in technology, retired from that field to take up philanthropy, built a museum to share the benefits of their experience and insight with the next generation, it seems rather unlikely to me that their greatest posthumous aspiration is to have it dismantled and dispersed. I find the auction of assets like fine art (also mentioned in the article) easier to understand as art collections are semi-ephemeral and the trading and circulation of fine art among the wealthy has been going on for many centuries. But it also strikes me that having raised $1.6 billion by selling off the art, the estate is not exactly short of funds to keep the museum functioning.
rtpg 2y ago
I was lucky enough to go to this in 2019 (thanks Gary for organizing Deconstruct right at the moment in my life where I could make the trip!), and honestly it was _so motivating_. There's obviously some nostalgia, but seeing a bunch of machines with self-contained tooling and in working order, that you could goof around in with people around you was so satisfying. I get the complications of running all of that stack, but a part of me would be hopeful for some systemic reproductions of some environments. Something like a "mini Windows 98" with 10 games or so and that copy of QBASIC and some VB.
aamargulies 2y ago
Perhaps this is a case of the opposite of love being indifference not hate.
jmward01 2y ago
The best living computer museum I ever went to was The Weirdstuff Warehouse. Between it and Fry's I had everything I needed. It is too bad this is closing down, but then again it is hard to keep everything from the past and still move forward.
jmpman 2y ago
So, what is the estate going to do with that money? Surely the family has billions they will never be able to spend, but they must liquidate everything that Paul built and loved?
- sidvit 2y ago
  Well, everything except the professional football team and the basketball team oh and also the giant real estate company. All of the stuff that generates lots and lots of money, which seems like you would want to sell for your trusts big philanthropic mission to have the greatest impact.
brianjking 2y ago
This is so sad, Living Computer Museum was one of the best places I've ever been.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
This is so sad for me on so many levels. Not the least of which that I came very very close to giving them my PDP-5 because they would keep it running and the curator at the time gave the impression that Paul was setting up a trust to keep the Museum operating (which he could have, but did not). Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy.
- mulmen 2y ago
  > Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy. I think it is unfair to blame his heir when based on all the information we have his wish was to liquidate the estate and donate the proceeds to charity. His heir doesn’t personally benefit financially from this auction. He could have set up an endowment to keep the museum going. He didn’t. That’s not the executor’s fault.
atlgator 2y ago
Send the inventory to the Computer Museum of America (Roswell, GA)
musicale 2y ago
It's a shame that there isn't a computing company near Seattle that could fund it or revive it.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
I wish another area group formed to reopen the museum and acquire lots. I assume they tried and those who made so much from the computers success had so little interest in keeping that history living. I don’t blame the sister as many do, I realize it’s his wish actually. And in some ways it’s the way it should be. The people who love the computer should keep the museum around. It’s just a shame so many wealthy tech people don’t have that love.
vinc 2y ago
It's a very sad news. I'm from Europe and I've never been to the States, but I loved the remote access to the Living Computers Museum. I'd often do `ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org` to see what was up. I'm glad to see that this will now be `ssh menu@tty.sdf.org`. Will it only be emulators or will there be some real computers?
ColinWright 2y ago
David Singmaster, author of the first book on how to solve the Rubik Cube, had a vast collection of mathematical books, papers, ephemera, and a huge collection of twisty puzzles, and other puzzles. His wish was that it remain in the UK, and he really, really wanted it to stay as a collection. But it's effectively impossible. Collections, even significant collections[0], are hard to keep together. I wish I had the money necessary to acquire and make accessible collections like this. [0] I'm not saying David's collection is significant, but it is substantial, and contains many things potentially of interest.
wakeneddreamer 2y ago
Alliance Bernstein published a white paper about transferring ones collection and preserving value http://bernstein.com/our-insights/insights/2024/whitepaper/collections-rare-finds-can-become-slippery-slopes-for-wealth-transfer.html?series=bernstein_insights&utm_source=pa http://bernstein.com/our-insights/insights/2024/whitepaper/c...
RGamma 2y ago
That said, some collector's items only gain value much later. Think 200+ yo stuff. Kinda need several generations to hold on to it though.
banish-m4 2y ago
Whaaa? Maybe they should donate to, I don't know, the Computer History Museum rather than allow speculative collectors to pick the bones of historical artifacts.
Moldoteck 2y ago
I hope german HNF museum will get it's hands on at least some of this stuff
cchi_co 2y ago
[dead]

439 points by dboreham 2y ago

I thought it was so sad that they shut down the computer museum in Boston years ago. It makes me think of how much more geographically diverse the computer industry was in the US back in the 1980s and how Boston has just given up on its history. It used to be associated with the Boston Children's Museum which had a DEC-10 way back in the early 1980s. They were pretty lucky because DEC would usually donate PDP-8s or PDP-11s to places like that.

caphector 2y ago
It’s still around but it was moved to the old SGI building in the SF/Bay Area. I went to the old one growing up; my dad worked at DEC and it was great fun to see all the hardware at the CHM.
- kragen 2y ago
  the computer museum history center existed as a separate entity before being transferred the assets of the boston computer museum; it's not simply a relocated boston computer museum

13of40 2y ago

> A highlight of the sale is a computer which Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000. What? I know lots of people who would save them the trouble and buy it now for $50K. How bad of an investment could that be? Edit: I'm picturing something large refrigerator sized like the PDP-8 at RePC down the street. If it's cheap because it's a 20-ton white elephant that's a different story.

buildbot 2y ago
It’s about destruction, not making sense in my opinion.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mikestew 2y ago
There’s a picture in TFA, with a desk for scale. It would be several refrigerators, but might still fit in your garage.
Turing_Machine 2y ago
Putting an item up for sale to the highest bidder insulates a seller from future claims that the item was sold for a low-ball price in some kind of sweetheart/kickback deal.
dboreham 2y ago
A dec-10 is pretty big (at the LCM it is in a room that's something like 40' by 20'), needs air conditioning, and needs a beefy electrical supply. Nobody really knows the market price for such a thing because very few are left in running order and there are very few people with the resources to provide it with water and hay.
ghaff 2y ago
> How bad of an investment could that be? Probably pretty bad.

buildbot 2y ago

It’s so incredibly stupid to sell off each piece of the museum - 50K for a DEC-10? Does the Allen estate really need the cash? Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy. It was extremely cool and educational to visit the museum as an EE undergraduate, to visually see and use parts of the history of computing. It’s a massive loss to loose this collection. Some of the items we will never get back or see again.

glompers 2y ago
Could perhaps UW (for instance) EE or CS alumni arrange to bid and give the collection to the department at UW across town?
kragen 2y ago
as i said in another comment, that's possibly the only dec-10 in working condition in the world selling it off piece by piece probably improves the chances that the most important pieces will be preserved rather than the whole thing going to a scrap metal dealer
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  I doubt this. Not because I doubt your sincerity; I'm just pessimistic given the hostility displayed by the administrative class toward anything that doesn't have a currency symbol in front of it.
  - kragen 2y ago
    pdp-10 fans have currency symbols tho. lots of people on hackers-l are, as they say, financially independent, and a fair fraction of them are donors to the chm and fans of the pdp-10. plus you have the modern #pdp-10 freenode crowd
  - emmet 2y ago
    First time hearing "administrative class" and god that's fitting for the MBA crowd

armadsen 2y ago

I adored the Living Computers Museum. Being able to just sit down and use an Apple 1, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, and so many more in the same place was incredible. And then, a friendly museum employee being there to show you how to use it, tell you about what made it unique, etc. was even better. It was so much better than most look-but-don’t-touch museums. It’s really a travesty that Paul Allen’s sister seems bent on dismantling everything he left behind.

sterlind 2y ago
why is she doing this? for the money, or out of some form of spite?
- eschaton 2y ago
  Money and an absolute disinterest in anything Paul cared about.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    This is not just disinterest. It feels like active contempt.
    - eschaton 2y ago
      I think she doesn’t care about it enough to hold it in contempt except insofar as it represents an asset of Paul’s that hasn’t been converted into money.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- longdustytrail 2y ago
  The same thing happened to another one of Paul’s wacky passion projects, the Cinerama theater. That ended up being taken over by the Seattle Film Festival after being shut down for a few years. My impression is that Paul died somewhat suddenly and simply didn’t make arrangements to keep these things going. His sister is not interested in them so she’s winding them down. It’s too bad he didn’t set up some kind of endowment before he passed. Maybe he didn’t want to or maybe he just didn’t get around to it. I wonder what will happen to MoPop/EMP. AFAIK that’s always been a financial black hole.

tivert 2y ago

Some embarrassingly rich person needs to give the Computer History Museum enough money to buy all of it. It's puzzling why all his stuff was organized in such a way that it could get wound down like this. Seems like it would have been way better to create a nonprofit then endow it with enough money to keep operating independently.

mostlysimilar 2y ago
Bill Gates seems like a prime option.
- zimm 2y ago
  info@gatesfoundation.org Email and ask
  - dboreham 2y ago
    Presumably billg is reading this thread already.
    - tivert 2y ago
      > Presumably billg is reading this thread already. I would assume he's not wasting his time with HN. He's rich enough and well-known enough that I'd think he'd be able to get superior versions of everything HN can provide.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        I mean, if you have billg money, I guess you could have a couple ex-FAAMG software developers on payroll just so you could call them up at any hour of the day and have them give you uninformed hot-takes about an article you found online and just forwarded them, and need them to tell you something based on the headline without actually reading the article, but that seems a bit weird. I don't even have Snoop Dogg money to pay someone to roll joints for me though, so what do I know about having billg-levels of money.

shrubble 2y ago

If it was donated by someone, shouldn't they give it back to the person who donated it? How does it get sold for cash?

taw28 2y ago
In short, because it was donated and not loaned. Once it leaves your hands, the museum can do as it wishes (within the restrictions of its bylaws).
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  “Philanthropic trust” is probably the concept you missed here. Don’t worry, it looks like Allen missed it too.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And with fairly unusual exceptions, museums don't tend to like a lot of restrictions on what they can do with donations.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

erickhill 2y ago

They have a basement filled with hundreds if not thousands of computer donations stockpiled like the warehouse scene from Indiana Jones. Also, it's "LCM" not "LHM".

rbanffy 2y ago
I would demand the donations back - closing it and selling off the collection is NOT what the donors wanted.

evereverever 2y ago

I am saddened that I never was able to visit this museum. With all of that money it could have easily been fully funded for 100 years.

mrpippy 2y ago

What a damn shame, I went in 2019 and had an amazing time. Played with a NeXT cube, Sun/3, Lisa, Alto, and so many more machines.

rbanffy 2y ago

It sickens me something like this is happening to this unique museum. I knew it was a matter of time, but, still, it’s a tragedy that’s hard to comprehend.

djmips 2y ago
[flagged]
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Charitably, you can blame HN's (intentionally?) poor UI design, placing tiny up and down arrows right next to each other so that it's easy to hit the wrong one.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Deleted all the social accounts and website offline too? Harsh :-(

smsm42 2y ago
We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at least not to somebody you'd want to sell) or donate it. There's no organizations dedicated to preserving such properties, as far as I know. So, what do you do? You shut them down, you have not other alternative.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Exactly. Unless you've setup a sufficient endowment and a legal entity of some sort, it's not reasonable to expect a relative to keep your passion project going. And even if they do for sentimental reasons for a while, that's just kicking the can a bit down the road.
- qludes 2y ago
  If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs. If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actual data somewhere, not the actual website.
  - lobsterthief 2y ago
    And unfortunately archive.org is woefully underfunded. We take it for granted and it could be gone someday. Please support it if you have the means to do so.
  - 2y ago

leotravis10 2y ago

A HUGE cultural loss and I'm grateful that I got to visit it a few years ago.

da-bacon 2y ago

There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You could plop yourself down at a Xerox Alto and hack away to your heart's content. Being able to share this experience with my son is something I will always remember about this museum. A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.

thriftwy 2y ago

One thing I didn't notice when travelling to Bay Area is thriving small museum ecosystem. Apparently in the US they prefer to run museums like commercial venues, so either it's a large theme park of a museum, or not at all. I see the news where houses of very notable people like Ray Bradbury[1] sold and scrapped - elsewhere they'd be made a local prodigy of a "house-museum". 1. https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-ray-bradbury-house-postmortem-20150122-story.html https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-ray-bradbu...

linguae 2y ago
(Disclaimer: I am a member of the Computer History Museum.) We have the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (https://computerhistory.org/ https://computerhistory.org/). While unfortunately visitors are not allowed to touch the equipment unlike the Living Computers Museum in Seattle, this is still a wonderful place for people to learn about the history of computing. In addition, the Computer History Museum has many events, often free, where pioneers of computing are invited to give talks about their work. I’ve been to events that celebrated the Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, the Apple Lisa, and the original Apple Macintosh. I’ve met Dan Ingalls (Smalltalk), Charles Simonyi (Bravo and Microsoft Word), Marshall Kirk McKusick (BSD), and Donald Knuth at the Computer History Museum, and I’ve seen Adele Goldberg (Smalltalk), Jean Louis Gassee (Apple, Be), and even Steve Wozniak in attendance. It’s an amazing privilege being able to have casual conversations with people who have profoundly shaped society. It’s truly a blessing that we have this important resource in Silicon Valley and that there is a stream of donors who help keep this museum alive. I wish the Living Computers Museum in Seattle had the same type of leadership the Computer History Museum has, but barring any last-minute interventions it may be too late to save that museum.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  Exactly the one I meant under the theme park comment - another one is Monterey Bay Aquarium. Don't get me wrong, both are awesome museums. One thing that caught my attention in CHM is that as you approach the end of century, it becomes an exposition of bright boxes of computer software - quite a change from mechanical marvels of early last century or metal and plastic boxes of mid-century. But overall it's pretty great and totally worth a visit.

spaceguillotine 2y ago

Paul Allen sure didn't have great foresight for post death. First Cinerama and now the computer museum. The current sentiment with seattle lifers is that he used Seattle as a playground and didn't actually care about the longevity. EMP now MoPop just keeps hanging on by a thread as well and has gone through lots of turmoil.

bpodgursky 2y ago
I think that's too harsh. A lot of people have a blind spot to their own mortality. He died at 65, far before most people have their affairs in order.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  But he was given a diagnosis of cancer. It's not like he was hit by a bus. He had several months.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Even for someone like Allen a few minutes with Quicken Willmaker would have been able to setup a trust to keep any of these things going in perpetuity. He likely didn't like thinking about it.
  - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
    He had cancer decades ago and it came back a few times, didn't he? He probably convinced himself into thinking he wasn't going to die until it was too late, and things like this probably drop down to fairly low priority at that point. Not trying to excuse him though; if he actually cared he should've been thinking about it when he was opening the museum.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    He was lucky enough to have several decades. (His original diagnosis with Hodgkin's Lymphoma was in 1983 according to Wikipedia. Most of the these projects in his life through 2018 were under the specter of that cancer. Even the complication of the additional non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2009 still gave him possibly luckily a few years to have handled some things.) Not that it makes it that much easier to deal with if you live that much time after a frightening diagnosis, especially because you likely can't know how much time you will actually have. But then again, none of us really know how much time we have. (How's your estate plan? Mine could use work.)

romwell 2y ago

Oh no! What a crying shame. This was one of my favorite museums in the world, probably with no analogues. When I interned in Microsoft in 2014, I got to experience Seattle — and the Living Computer Museum was one of the highlights of that experience. Simply being able to walk in and close-up something simple (say, Fibonacci sequence) on a typewriter terminal of the PDP-10 — and then see the typewriter type the output back to you on the same piece of paper was absolute magic (and a part of computing I wish we still had).

kragen 2y ago
you know, you can plug a dot-matrix printer into a parallel port on a linux box and redirect stdout and stderr to that port. last time i did this was 27 years ago (my monitor had been broken in shipping, but i had an inkjet printer that printed text line by line), but it probably still works. i recall i had to telnet to localhost to get it to not be line-buffered, and you might have to hack that a different way nowadays around here office supply stores still sell fanfold paper and printer ribbons of course your linux box isn't a pdp-10, but that doesn't seem to be what you're missing

craniumslows 2y ago

If you liked the Living Computer Museum then you may be interested in the https://icm.museum/ https://icm.museum/ Interim Computer Museum.

sva_ 2y ago
If you're ever close to Bonn, Germany, check Out the Artihmeum[0]. It starts at the top floor with the oldest "computers" and gets more modern as you walk down. They even have an original Enigma encryption machine. You can interact with some of them, but not all. 0. https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/ https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/
- endgame 2y ago
  You're underselling it. The bottom floor has vintage hand-cranked calculators that you're allowed to compute with!

esafak 2y ago

Why is it shutting down? I scanned the article but failed to find the reason.

cdchn 2y ago
Estate liquidation.
- esafak 2y ago
  I can't imagine they ran out of money, so I speculate that the executors simply did not want to maintain it.
  - astrodust 2y ago
    It's not their job to maintain it unless that was specified somehow in advance.
    - kragen 2y ago
      usually when someone's estate includes a business with employees, shutting it down and selling off its assets is not what the executors do. usually they keep the company running so they can get a reasonable sale price for the whole company
      - daotoad 2y ago
        The cinerama and the museum were shut down for Covid and just never came back. They found someone to take on the Cinerama. But the living computer museum was a taller order. Which is tragic because it was an unbelievably cool place. Being able to use a Xerox Alto and an orginal Microsoft Surface (the one built into a table) was a gift. It's sad that this won't be available for others in the future.
  - jojobas 2y ago
    I wonder why no trust fund has been set up to keep it going.

algebra-pretext 2y ago

Around two months ago I stopped by the building and saw through a window that the interior seemed mostly untouched. So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in until a very loud intercom told me to get off the property. Probably not the reason for this announcement but I can’t help but feel partially responsible. The RE-PC vintage computing warehouse nearby also has a small museum with equipment going back to the 60s, you can’t touch anything but other sections of the warehouse have plenty of 90s and 2000s desktops set up that you can play with. It’s a good place to look for ancient cables, obscure controllers (I saw two SideWinders there last time), and older displays, I’m planning to go back to pick up the Apple Studio CRT https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/apple_studio_display_17_cl.html https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...

lilyball 2y ago
> So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in How does concern for the items inside lead you to looking for a way to break in?
- kragen 2y ago
  if the building is unguarded and full of valuable items, someone will loot it. if you're the one that loots it, you get to decide what happens to them. if you don't, someone else will
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - squigz 2y ago
    I love HN morality takes.
  - lobsterthief 2y ago
    I’m sorry but that’s a terrible take > Someone else might loot it, and they could do who knows what with it, so I’ll loot it instead

spullara 2y ago

How about donating them to the Computer History Museum in SV?

ertian 2y ago
They probably can't, for the same reason it's not going to stay open: it wasn't specified in the will what to do with the LCM, and it does specifically say that the default is to liquidate.

dang 2y ago

Related: http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-living-computers-museum-finally-isnt.html http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-living-computers-muse... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802686 but we merged those comments hither)

devwastaken 2y ago

I've wanted to get my hands on an IBM or other with an orange plasma display for a while. Or really any old terminal. It's funny because buying them is very expensive, but places showcasing them are few now.

shrubble 2y ago
The Toshiba luggables T3100 / T5x00 with gas plasma display are still around; as are the Compaq luggables as well.
SoftTalker 2y ago
You could have had them for free (or nearly) when computing centers were getting rid of them in the 1990s.

TobinCavanaugh 2y ago

Bummer, this place was a bunch of fun

araes 2y ago

Surprising. Visited right before Covid, and it seemed rather popular. Children wandering around playing with exhibits. Would have not expected a place like that to go under. Think every floor had maybe 10? folks while I was there. Really one of the better hands-on museums with the "lab" component. Had lots of neat digital wall displays to play with, and programmable science toys. Only downside was location. Tried walking cause I had no idea where it really was, and super-quick realized it was way past the coliseum and almost down to the badlands warehouse district by the freight harbor. Right between the railyards. Bad mental model of Seattle distances. Signage was also really difficult to spot. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SPCCJhT7B9aBfANNA https://maps.app.goo.gl/SPCCJhT7B9aBfANNA Can you even tell there's a museum there? Weird part from my own perspective, is Gate's runs a non-profit in his spare time as a hobby(?). Even if they weren't best-bros afterward, it would still take something like finger wagging to a functionary to not have this be a PR dumpster fire.

BobAliceInATree 2y ago

The sad reality is that you can spend a lifetime collecting something, the but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it, is pretty close to zero. That's true of multi-million dollar vintage computers, or your childhood stamp collection that's mostly worthless. Paul's mistake was not properly establishing a foundation & endowment to maintain this musuem, which almost certainly leaks lots of money. I personally have a decent art collection that I've amassed over the past couple decades. I have a few pieces earmarked in my will to specific friends & family that have really liked certain pieces (they don't know), but the reality is that my estate executor is going to sell the vast majority of it, and at 50¢ on the dollar of what I paid.

bombcar 2y ago
You're not going to get 50 cents if I know anything about it. Maybe if you started selling today you could get that, an estate auction will get a few pennies.
- BobAliceInATree 2y ago
  A few of my pieces are quite desirable and valuable, most of them not. I looked at the numbers, and all together 40-50% of what I paid is the ballpark of today's value, not including any consignment fees.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I've said this before, and for you I'm assuming there's no rush, but the best person to sell the "valuable" part of the collection is you. Now granted, most collections are not art - so I'm assuming you gave fewer distinct pieces than say stamps. My dad had a serious stamp collection. Had he died with it complete, we would have sold it for a few $ to a dealer. The cost of (him or us) going through it to find "the good stuff would be too high. Take your art. Unless you've cataloged it, had it appraised, and keep that updated every few years, your heirs will likely just sell it as a job-lot to a dealer. Given his costs, and risks, he'll pick a small number (like $50 per). Your Rembrant is his to find. What my dad did was sell off the expensive stuff himself before he died (and told us). He knew what he had, and where to find it. (He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread). At least we knew that what was left was basically worthless and we could donate it with a clear conscience.

themaninthedark 2y ago

There is a computer museum in Roswell, GA. Just north of Atlanta that is pretty neat. https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org/ https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org/

dpb001 2y ago
I think CMoA acquired the contents of David Larsen’s museum in Floyd, VA. Larsen was one of the authors of the Bugbook series and the museum was kind of a snapshot of the mid to late 70’s micro scene. I’m glad the Apple I didn’t end up in a Goodwill bin somewhere.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kragen 2y ago

this is pretty unfortunate. iirc they had the only digital pdp-10 in the world that's currently in working order — the line of computers on which emacs, microsoft basic, simtel-20, and compuserve all originated. most of the arpanet was pdp-10s at one time. nasa's gsfc spacelink ftp site, where you could download space photos, was the only one i ever encountered running hopefully that machine will find a good home in the auction and not be destroyed in the process the fact that it's shut down is, as bobaliceinatree said, a terrible indictment of paul allen's estate planning. unless he just didn't care about the people who survived him

anthk 2y ago
At least you can run ITS under simh, there a github repo to set everything up almost automagically.
- kragen 2y ago
  yes, and maybe xkl still makes pdp-10s, and kv10 may be ready soon. not sure what happened to conroy's pdp-10/x hdl. but there is value in artifacts too
Suzuran 2y ago
Very far from the only working one. I have a working one, for now, but we don't know how much longer I will be here because I am currently dying from a government paperwork error that nobody in government has the authority to fix.
- tomcam 2y ago
  Holy cow. What happened?
  - Suzuran 2y ago
    Long story short, my Medicare records got screwed up. Some database entry isn't in the correct state that allows their processes to proceed. None of the humans I can get in contact with has the authority (or knows anyone with the authority) to manually correct the record, because that would be outside of their processes. Since the record isn't in a valid state, my access to medications I need to stay alive is being cut off. The retail cost of the just one of the medications is more than 100% of my income.

AlbertCory 2y ago

I took the photos for the cover of my first book on an Alto that was rescued from the museum. This was when it was "closed for the pandemic." Anyhow, this guy had two working Altos in his basement in Bothell.

picometer 2y ago

The museum was also a generous community space; I remember attending a Seattle Indies game jam and other events before the pandemic. It was very special to be surrounded by reminders of early-computing exploratory spirit.

kelsey98765431 2y ago

rest in peace, thank you for giving me the memory of what root on an '11 felt like for dms, and a little of that all asm love for the single cve. Someday i will write it a sister and publish in TLCHM memory. farewell friend and thank you for the fish

alchemist1e9 2y ago

When is the auction? Anyone have the details available?

kens 2y ago
The items are being auctioned by Christie's, closing Sept 12. The webpage gives very little information at this time: https://www.christies.com/stories/gen-one-paul-allen-history-of-technology-ef080682a70e4a97a53864b475333b12 https://www.christies.com/stories/gen-one-paul-allen-history...

notlisted 2y ago

I haven't had the pleasure to visit this specific museum, but I did manage to visit https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/ https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/ in my native country of The Netherlands on my last trip to Europe, and it's a real gem, also allowing hands-on interaction. I also "adopted" my first PC. (for those familiar with The Netherlands, it's located in Helmond)

mepian 2y ago

Après moi, le déluge?

peatmoss 2y ago

Damn, this is a gut punch. I used to love this place. Just hanging out with the old systems was a flood of nostalgia and good memories.

anigbrowl 2y ago

Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement that the market has never seen such a diverse collection “that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity — much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing.” These honeyed words ring deeply hypocritical when you consider Christie's sees the collection purely as an asset capable of yielding a significant commission once sold. The closure came as the estate began to deal with a number of properties that no longer had a billionaire benefactor to help keep the doors open, and in line with what the estate says was Allen’s desire to sell his assets after his passing. I wonder about this. If someone has made a vast fortune in technology, retired from that field to take up philanthropy, built a museum to share the benefits of their experience and insight with the next generation, it seems rather unlikely to me that their greatest posthumous aspiration is to have it dismantled and dispersed. I find the auction of assets like fine art (also mentioned in the article) easier to understand as art collections are semi-ephemeral and the trading and circulation of fine art among the wealthy has been going on for many centuries. But it also strikes me that having raised $1.6 billion by selling off the art, the estate is not exactly short of funds to keep the museum functioning.

rtpg 2y ago

I was lucky enough to go to this in 2019 (thanks Gary for organizing Deconstruct right at the moment in my life where I could make the trip!), and honestly it was _so motivating_. There's obviously some nostalgia, but seeing a bunch of machines with self-contained tooling and in working order, that you could goof around in with people around you was so satisfying. I get the complications of running all of that stack, but a part of me would be hopeful for some systemic reproductions of some environments. Something like a "mini Windows 98" with 10 games or so and that copy of QBASIC and some VB.

aamargulies 2y ago

Perhaps this is a case of the opposite of love being indifference not hate.

jmward01 2y ago

The best living computer museum I ever went to was The Weirdstuff Warehouse. Between it and Fry's I had everything I needed. It is too bad this is closing down, but then again it is hard to keep everything from the past and still move forward.

jmpman 2y ago

So, what is the estate going to do with that money? Surely the family has billions they will never be able to spend, but they must liquidate everything that Paul built and loved?

sidvit 2y ago
Well, everything except the professional football team and the basketball team oh and also the giant real estate company. All of the stuff that generates lots and lots of money, which seems like you would want to sell for your trusts big philanthropic mission to have the greatest impact.

brianjking 2y ago

This is so sad, Living Computer Museum was one of the best places I've ever been.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

This is so sad for me on so many levels. Not the least of which that I came very very close to giving them my PDP-5 because they would keep it running and the curator at the time gave the impression that Paul was setting up a trust to keep the Museum operating (which he could have, but did not). Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy.

mulmen 2y ago
> Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy. I think it is unfair to blame his heir when based on all the information we have his wish was to liquidate the estate and donate the proceeds to charity. His heir doesn’t personally benefit financially from this auction. He could have set up an endowment to keep the museum going. He didn’t. That’s not the executor’s fault.

atlgator 2y ago

Send the inventory to the Computer Museum of America (Roswell, GA)

musicale 2y ago

It's a shame that there isn't a computing company near Seattle that could fund it or revive it.

fnordpiglet 2y ago

I wish another area group formed to reopen the museum and acquire lots. I assume they tried and those who made so much from the computers success had so little interest in keeping that history living. I don’t blame the sister as many do, I realize it’s his wish actually. And in some ways it’s the way it should be. The people who love the computer should keep the museum around. It’s just a shame so many wealthy tech people don’t have that love.

vinc 2y ago

It's a very sad news. I'm from Europe and I've never been to the States, but I loved the remote access to the Living Computers Museum. I'd often do `ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org` to see what was up. I'm glad to see that this will now be `ssh menu@tty.sdf.org`. Will it only be emulators or will there be some real computers?

ColinWright 2y ago

David Singmaster, author of the first book on how to solve the Rubik Cube, had a vast collection of mathematical books, papers, ephemera, and a huge collection of twisty puzzles, and other puzzles. His wish was that it remain in the UK, and he really, really wanted it to stay as a collection. But it's effectively impossible. Collections, even significant collections[0], are hard to keep together. I wish I had the money necessary to acquire and make accessible collections like this. [0] I'm not saying David's collection is significant, but it is substantial, and contains many things potentially of interest.

wakeneddreamer 2y ago

Alliance Bernstein published a white paper about transferring ones collection and preserving value http://bernstein.com/our-insights/insights/2024/whitepaper/collections-rare-finds-can-become-slippery-slopes-for-wealth-transfer.html?series=bernstein_insights&utm_source=pa http://bernstein.com/our-insights/insights/2024/whitepaper/c...

RGamma 2y ago

That said, some collector's items only gain value much later. Think 200+ yo stuff. Kinda need several generations to hold on to it though.

banish-m4 2y ago

Whaaa? Maybe they should donate to, I don't know, the Computer History Museum rather than allow speculative collectors to pick the bones of historical artifacts.

Moldoteck 2y ago

I hope german HNF museum will get it's hands on at least some of this stuff

cchi_co 2y ago

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