5 ms·

Details of what happened here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672 via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

Details of what happened here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672 via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41288051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41288051 There were several more HN threads - just search for 'Living Computer Museum' The answer to your question is, the people who made fortunes in this industry -- some of them in Seattle -- are not interested in the history of their industry, even when they made some of it. It's a telling contrast to the wonderful Museum of Flight, also in Seattle.

coldpie 2y ago
Jason's write-up is good. It wasn't a museum, it was one guy's personal collection. What happens to your personal collection after you die is up to whoever you leave it to, and they're far less likely to care about it than you do. If you don't have a plan for it when you die, then it will almost certainly be scattered to the winds, as happened here. If Allen wanted to start a museum, then he should have started a museum, which includes finding employees and creating a funding model that will keep it running past the death of one particular sociopath. It's not anyone else's responsibility to "save" his collection.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  As someone who lives a mile from Paul-land (SLU Seattle) we feel the loss and mismanagement of his various cool nerd monuments painfully. And we came to the same conclusion. There is an impulse to accuse him of negligence for not setting up these trusts. But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. How many people really bother setting up permanent legacy estate systems while young?
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    Yeah, I blame his sister. I don't know what happened behind closed doors (if anything) but I'm also disappointed neither gates nor balmer seemed to pick up the pieces either, or even Bezos given his presence in SLU
    - asdefghyk 2y ago
      I would have thought his sister would have wanted to keep operating as a kind of memorial to brother.
      - blackhawkC17 2y ago
        She likely doesn’t have Paul’s passion for computers…not her fault. Paul Allen could have set up an endowment if he wanted the collection to last. But he didn’t for some reason, despite having founded other formally endowed organizations like the Allen Institute.
      - themadturk 2y ago
        I'm surprised Jodi Allen hasn't sold his sports teams yet...things she was reportedly not all that interested in at the time of his death.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    He wasn't _that_ young, and it's something literally every person with extreme wealth does as part of their normal financial management process. You frequently interact with lawyers and CPAs who advise you on these things as part of their duties. He would have had a conversation about it at some level. He either wanted to take LCM with him, or someone was grossly negligent.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    Arainach nails this below
  - delecti 2y ago
    He was diagnosed with cancer more than 30 years before his death, which also recurred almost a decade before his death. That kind of thing usually gives one a kick in the pants to get your affairs in order. To have those health incidents, that kind of wealth, and still leave so many loose ends, definitely warrants accusations of negligence.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Negligence of what? Sounds like this guy was doing something as a favor, I don’t see what obliged him to ensure it was kept available after he died.
      - delecti 2y ago
        > negligence, noun - failure to take proper care in doing something. Negligence does not mean that he was obligated to show more care than he did. Pick whatever word you want, my point is just that he had ample warning and opportunity to get affairs in order if he cared about the longevity of those projects.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        That is a good point, but my reading of “accusations of negligence” (and I think a common interpretation in this context) would be that there was a responsibility for the accused party to do something and they didn’t.
  - munificent 2y ago
    > But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 1983, got non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2009, and died in 2018. That's 35 years of reminders—more than half his life!—to plan his legacy.
    - daniel_reetz 2y ago
      Something useful I learned recently. It's a lot more satisfying to share your favorite things while you're alive. You're alive to experience the rewards. Someone close to me wants me to pick out my favorite things from their collection, so they can have the pleasure of giving them to me. Took me a while to understand. Not everyone is worried about a legacy or where there stuff goes after they're gone. It's the least of my worries, personally.
- soperj 2y ago
  No one else's responsibility, but if people care (and there's obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist. Having volunteered for a small not-for profit for nearly a decade now, there's definitely a whole lot of people that just want something with no desire to give back to that community. You really do get what you put in though.
  - coldpie 2y ago
    > but if people care (and there's obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist Allen's decision was to require those people who care to pony up millions of their own dollars to acquire his personal collection, and keep it running. I'm glad you volunteer your time, but that's a whole other magnitude than purchasing and running a multi-million-dollar business. It's not reasonable to expect volunteers to spring up from nowhere and perform that kind of labor.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Well in this case it's not just "one guys collection", many many people donated priceless items to the museum; those items were then unceremoniously auctioned off for money by the billionaire descendants of Paul Allen. Which makes the whole thing much more disgusting in my opinion.
  - superconduct123 2y ago
    That is kind of crazy to donate something to a museum and they just sell it off You would think there would be a provision that if they ever close you have the option to take it back.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Just having to go through close not-at-all-rich relatives' ordinary household crap and various beloved (by them) keepsakes and deal with the pain and hassle of that in the wake of their deaths is bad enough. I can't imagine having a whole friggin' museum of electronic doo-dads dumped on me. I expect I'd take one turn through it with the best of intentions, and walk out the exit already dialing up an auction house to take care of it for me.
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    This is exactly what we did to my grandmother's Barbie collection. Some museum in Thailand bought them all.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Most folks' lives are just already full, is the thing. We can barely find room for a couple family heirlooms, let alone an inherited hobby, including and maybe especially a collecting hobby. It's a little different when we're talking about someone so rich that they could pay (to them) peanuts to have someone else take care of it for them, but I still get the impulse to just be done with it, permanently.
superconduct123 2y ago
> The Living Computer Museum, it turns out, cost millions, over ten million a year I don't get how it could cost 10 million / year
- legitster 2y ago
  Real estate, specialized expertise, expensive repairs. It adds up! I also suspect monthly insurance is insane. 10 million is not even a lot - a typical McDonalds can cost over a million dollars a year to operate.
  - froh 2y ago
    a typical McD generates a tad more revenue though...
    - cpach 2y ago
      Which is probably why we have more McDonald’s than computer museums.
      - froh 2y ago
        true
  - dbg31415 2y ago
    A typical McDonald’s costs over $1M — just in salaries. Here are the 2023 numbers. https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonalds-franchise-costs-fees-average-revenues-and-or-profits-2023-review/ https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonal...
  - hm-nah 2y ago
    And a tad more risk
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
legitster 2y ago
The Museum of Flight is cool, but you owe it to yourself to get down to the Western Antique Aeroplane & Automobile Museum in Hood River. Unlike the Museum of Flight, nearly everything at WAAAM is still in flyable condition and they have an amazing restoration team on site.
- card_zero 2y ago
  What an excellent acronym. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaam!
kurisufag 2y ago
the cert for ascii.textfiles.com expired oct 27... annoying.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More discussion about the closure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789179
drivingmenuts 2y ago
I would say a part of it is that we're practically buried in computers on a daily basis. The computer industry and computer-adjacent industries aren't really interested in old machines - it's all about what's newer and better. Compared to the airplane - a properly maintained airplane can last for quite a while. We aren't buried in airplanes - if they were that common, I'm pretty sure no one would care about the history of airplanes.
caust1c 2y ago
The truly sad part is that there wasn't a portion of the inheritance earmarked for an endowment to keep the museum going. I've heard from unreliable sources that Paul might have assumed this would happen via the executors of his will but the executors decided otherwise. :( An endowment of 200M at a pittance 6% interest rate would more than cover the costs of running the museum, but they probably wouldn't have even needed that much after working on figuring out how to make it generate a bit more revenue. I'm sad that I never got to attend, but would have easily paid close to $100 to visit.
- walrus01 2y ago
  He had plenty of opportunity and skilled legal advisors to set up trusts and endowments years before his demise and chose not to. Exactly why, nobody really knows for sure. On the topic of making a bit more revenue, one of the interesting things about the Museum of Flight is that you can rent its grand gallery/main hall for high budget private events with catering. It's not cheap, but if you're having some kind of grand corporate party or high-budget wedding or something, it's a very unique facility. Their catering contractors can set up tables and chairs all around the empty walking space in the main hall. https://www.museumofflight.org/visit/private-events/ https://www.museumofflight.org/visit/private-events/
  - themadturk 2y ago
    My employer had a Christmas party at the Museum of Flight pre-pandemic. I didn't attend, but people who were there still rave about the great time they had.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Teever 2y ago
I wonder why someone like Bill Gates didn't step in.

coldpie 2y ago

Jason's write-up is good. It wasn't a museum, it was one guy's personal collection. What happens to your personal collection after you die is up to whoever you leave it to, and they're far less likely to care about it than you do. If you don't have a plan for it when you die, then it will almost certainly be scattered to the winds, as happened here. If Allen wanted to start a museum, then he should have started a museum, which includes finding employees and creating a funding model that will keep it running past the death of one particular sociopath. It's not anyone else's responsibility to "save" his collection.

kridsdale1 2y ago
As someone who lives a mile from Paul-land (SLU Seattle) we feel the loss and mismanagement of his various cool nerd monuments painfully. And we came to the same conclusion. There is an impulse to accuse him of negligence for not setting up these trusts. But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. How many people really bother setting up permanent legacy estate systems while young?
- hughesjj 2y ago
  Yeah, I blame his sister. I don't know what happened behind closed doors (if anything) but I'm also disappointed neither gates nor balmer seemed to pick up the pieces either, or even Bezos given his presence in SLU
  - asdefghyk 2y ago
    I would have thought his sister would have wanted to keep operating as a kind of memorial to brother.
    - blackhawkC17 2y ago
      She likely doesn’t have Paul’s passion for computers…not her fault. Paul Allen could have set up an endowment if he wanted the collection to last. But he didn’t for some reason, despite having founded other formally endowed organizations like the Allen Institute.
    - themadturk 2y ago
      I'm surprised Jodi Allen hasn't sold his sports teams yet...things she was reportedly not all that interested in at the time of his death.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  He wasn't _that_ young, and it's something literally every person with extreme wealth does as part of their normal financial management process. You frequently interact with lawyers and CPAs who advise you on these things as part of their duties. He would have had a conversation about it at some level. He either wanted to take LCM with him, or someone was grossly negligent.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Arainach nails this below
- delecti 2y ago
  He was diagnosed with cancer more than 30 years before his death, which also recurred almost a decade before his death. That kind of thing usually gives one a kick in the pants to get your affairs in order. To have those health incidents, that kind of wealth, and still leave so many loose ends, definitely warrants accusations of negligence.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Negligence of what? Sounds like this guy was doing something as a favor, I don’t see what obliged him to ensure it was kept available after he died.
    - delecti 2y ago
      > negligence, noun - failure to take proper care in doing something. Negligence does not mean that he was obligated to show more care than he did. Pick whatever word you want, my point is just that he had ample warning and opportunity to get affairs in order if he cared about the longevity of those projects.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        That is a good point, but my reading of “accusations of negligence” (and I think a common interpretation in this context) would be that there was a responsibility for the accused party to do something and they didn’t.
- munificent 2y ago
  > But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 1983, got non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2009, and died in 2018. That's 35 years of reminders—more than half his life!—to plan his legacy.
  - daniel_reetz 2y ago
    Something useful I learned recently. It's a lot more satisfying to share your favorite things while you're alive. You're alive to experience the rewards. Someone close to me wants me to pick out my favorite things from their collection, so they can have the pleasure of giving them to me. Took me a while to understand. Not everyone is worried about a legacy or where there stuff goes after they're gone. It's the least of my worries, personally.
soperj 2y ago
No one else's responsibility, but if people care (and there's obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist. Having volunteered for a small not-for profit for nearly a decade now, there's definitely a whole lot of people that just want something with no desire to give back to that community. You really do get what you put in though.
- coldpie 2y ago
  > but if people care (and there's obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist Allen's decision was to require those people who care to pony up millions of their own dollars to acquire his personal collection, and keep it running. I'm glad you volunteer your time, but that's a whole other magnitude than purchasing and running a multi-million-dollar business. It's not reasonable to expect volunteers to spring up from nowhere and perform that kind of labor.
andrepd 2y ago
Well in this case it's not just "one guys collection", many many people donated priceless items to the museum; those items were then unceremoniously auctioned off for money by the billionaire descendants of Paul Allen. Which makes the whole thing much more disgusting in my opinion.
- superconduct123 2y ago
  That is kind of crazy to donate something to a museum and they just sell it off You would think there would be a provision that if they ever close you have the option to take it back.
vundercind 2y ago
Just having to go through close not-at-all-rich relatives' ordinary household crap and various beloved (by them) keepsakes and deal with the pain and hassle of that in the wake of their deaths is bad enough. I can't imagine having a whole friggin' museum of electronic doo-dads dumped on me. I expect I'd take one turn through it with the best of intentions, and walk out the exit already dialing up an auction house to take care of it for me.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  This is exactly what we did to my grandmother's Barbie collection. Some museum in Thailand bought them all.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Most folks' lives are just already full, is the thing. We can barely find room for a couple family heirlooms, let alone an inherited hobby, including and maybe especially a collecting hobby. It's a little different when we're talking about someone so rich that they could pay (to them) peanuts to have someone else take care of it for them, but I still get the impulse to just be done with it, permanently.

superconduct123 2y ago

> The Living Computer Museum, it turns out, cost millions, over ten million a year I don't get how it could cost 10 million / year

legitster 2y ago
Real estate, specialized expertise, expensive repairs. It adds up! I also suspect monthly insurance is insane. 10 million is not even a lot - a typical McDonalds can cost over a million dollars a year to operate.
- froh 2y ago
  a typical McD generates a tad more revenue though...
  - cpach 2y ago
    Which is probably why we have more McDonald’s than computer museums.
    - froh 2y ago
      true
- dbg31415 2y ago
  A typical McDonald’s costs over $1M — just in salaries. Here are the 2023 numbers. https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonalds-franchise-costs-fees-average-revenues-and-or-profits-2023-review/ https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonal...
- hm-nah 2y ago
  And a tad more risk
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

legitster 2y ago

The Museum of Flight is cool, but you owe it to yourself to get down to the Western Antique Aeroplane & Automobile Museum in Hood River. Unlike the Museum of Flight, nearly everything at WAAAM is still in flyable condition and they have an amazing restoration team on site.

card_zero 2y ago
What an excellent acronym. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaam!

kurisufag 2y ago

the cert for ascii.textfiles.com expired oct 27... annoying.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

More discussion about the closure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789179

drivingmenuts 2y ago

I would say a part of it is that we're practically buried in computers on a daily basis. The computer industry and computer-adjacent industries aren't really interested in old machines - it's all about what's newer and better. Compared to the airplane - a properly maintained airplane can last for quite a while. We aren't buried in airplanes - if they were that common, I'm pretty sure no one would care about the history of airplanes.

caust1c 2y ago

The truly sad part is that there wasn't a portion of the inheritance earmarked for an endowment to keep the museum going. I've heard from unreliable sources that Paul might have assumed this would happen via the executors of his will but the executors decided otherwise. :( An endowment of 200M at a pittance 6% interest rate would more than cover the costs of running the museum, but they probably wouldn't have even needed that much after working on figuring out how to make it generate a bit more revenue. I'm sad that I never got to attend, but would have easily paid close to $100 to visit.

walrus01 2y ago
He had plenty of opportunity and skilled legal advisors to set up trusts and endowments years before his demise and chose not to. Exactly why, nobody really knows for sure. On the topic of making a bit more revenue, one of the interesting things about the Museum of Flight is that you can rent its grand gallery/main hall for high budget private events with catering. It's not cheap, but if you're having some kind of grand corporate party or high-budget wedding or something, it's a very unique facility. Their catering contractors can set up tables and chairs all around the empty walking space in the main hall. https://www.museumofflight.org/visit/private-events/ https://www.museumofflight.org/visit/private-events/
- themadturk 2y ago
  My employer had a Christmas party at the Museum of Flight pre-pandemic. I didn't attend, but people who were there still rave about the great time they had.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Teever 2y ago

I wonder why someone like Bill Gates didn't step in.