Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for-good-as-paul-allen-estate-will-auction-vintage-items/

by dboreham • 2 years ago

439 254 2 years ago

geekwire.com

PaulHoule• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

kragen16• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

buildbot2• 2 years ago

It’s about destruction, not making sense in my opinion.

mikestew• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

dboreham4• 2 years 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.

ghaff11• 2 years ago

How bad of an investment could that be?

Probably pretty bad.

buildbot2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Could perhaps UW (for instance) EE or CS alumni arrange to bid and give the collection to the department at UW across town?

kragen16• 2 years 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

anigbrowl3• 2 years 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.

vanchor3• 2 years 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?

Supposedly the proceeds are going to "charitable causes", though the article doesn't go into any more detail.

bdowling• 2 years ago

Does the Allen estate really need the cash?

The article doesn't clearly distinguish between the museum auctioning off the item it owns and the Allen estate auctioning the items that it had loaned to the museum, but there's a difference.

jojobas2• 2 years ago

How much would you pay to get to see the DEC-10 again?

Is there that much non-sentimental value about a working specimen as compared to docs and pictures?

mulmen2• 2 years ago

Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy.

Jody Allen is respecting her brother’s wishes. Paul Allen wanted his estate liquidated and the proceeds donated to charity. That’s exactly what’s happening.

armadsen• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

why is she doing this? for the money, or out of some form of spite?

eschaton2• 2 years ago

Money and an absolute disinterest in anything Paul cared about.

longdustytrail• 2 years 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.

indrora• 2 years ago

It's assassination at one fundamental level.

Spite is one way to put it. She has no love for anything computers, technology, or otherwise.

TMWNN• 2 years ago

I doubt she hates her late brother, any more than any widow who sells off or throws away her late husband's computer collection after his death (which occurs so, so often that it is probably the normal outcome after the collector's death, as opposed to an exception) hates him. It's disinterest.

themadturk• 2 years ago

The official story, at least, is that his will dictates his former holdings be sold off and the proceeds donated to charity. So it sounds like she's doing her duty as executor of his estate. Similar questions have lingered for years over what will become of the Seahawks and the Trailblazers.

magnawave• 2 years ago

The best I can tell from talking with insiders at a couple of his properties, is that he did a beyond bad job at “succession planning”. The light exception being MoPOP of course but that’s a different beast. So without setting up foundations/entities to fund/run your projects and getting people aligned before you pass, odds are your estate won’t.

So want to blame the family. But really Paul Allen’s fault here.

It’s a shame, was such a great museum.

imperfect_light5• 2 years ago

The dude was sick on and off for years, could have had an army of lawyers setting up these places to continue after him, and didn't bother. Don't blame his sister who was left this mess.

tivert2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Bill Gates seems like a prime option.

zimm2• 2 years ago

info@gatesfoundation.org

Email and ask

shrubble2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_• 2 years ago

“Philanthropic trust” is probably the concept you missed here. Don’t worry, it looks like Allen missed it too.

erickhill• 2 years 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".

rbanffy3• 2 years ago

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

evereverever• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

rbanffy3• 2 years 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.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

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

smsm422• 2 years 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.

ghaff11• 2 years 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.

qludes2• 2 years 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.

leotravis10• 2 years ago

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

da-bacon• 2 years 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.

thriftwy3• 2 years 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-bradbu...

linguae• 2 years ago

(Disclaimer: I am a member of the Computer History Museum.)

We have the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (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.

thriftwy3• 2 years 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.

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

It's definitely too late for LCM -- the heirs don't care about the societal value and are parting it out. It's gone.

It'd be super cool if CHM added a living computers wing. They've done a few nice restorations of some large machines, but it's not really the same as something like making a few terminals connected to a PDP-10 directly available to the public. Or some of the early, weird PCs, Unix boxes, Lisp machines.

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

I love the CHM and I wish it would invest more effort in interactivity. Visiting is a mix of excitement and frustration; it's thrilling to see Great Computers of History up close but depressing not to see any of them doing anything that would help viewers appreciate what it might have been like to use it.

bap• 2 years ago

I think you might find that the larger metropolitan areas are as you say. As one gets away from the coasts and into more rural areas you'll find smaller museums. Museums that are very bespoke and/or focused on a narrower curation target, etc.

kjellsbells2• 2 years ago

In the US, these museums can be brilliant, terrifyingly creepy, and everything in between.

I went to one in a tiny town in southern Arkansas a few years ago, dedicated to a river boat disaster shortly after the civil war. It was tiny, weird, and brilliant.

https://www.sultanadisastermuseum.com/

JohnFen• 2 years ago

Even in large metro areas, there tend to be small specialty museums. The problem is that if you don't know they're there already, you're not likely to find them.

msisk6• 2 years ago

Yes, very much so. Some of the interesting small rural museums across the western US I've been to include:

* Museum of the Fur Trade near Chadron, Nebraska * The Santa Fe Trail Center near Larned, Kansas * Ash Fork Route 66 Museum in Ash Fork, Arizona * National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum in Leadville, Colorado * American Windmill Museum in Lubbock, Texas * Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum near Ashland, Nebraska

The rural US has many local museums and most are surprisingly well done and very informative.

tomjakubowski• 2 years ago

Don't think it's city/rural thing or a big city/little city thing. Los Angeles has dozens of tiny museums, often dedicated to obscure subjects (printing, neon art, Jurassic technology), and also some huge and rather well known ones (LACMA, the Getty).

syntheticnature• 2 years ago

Some of this relates to being able to pay staff; there are some house-museums about, but they tend to collapse all too readily as it turns out it's mostly someone's passion project -- just like this, but at a smaller scale.

thriftwy3• 2 years ago

I imagine they could be donated to local Department of Culture (is it Arts Council in case of Bay Area?) and then staffed by some retiree grannies. Then they will outlive the initial passion. Bureaucratic systems have their disadvantaged but they're good at keeping things going on.

slashdave• 2 years ago

Are you calling the exploratorium a "large theme park of a museum"? Haven't been to the new venue, but it is anything besides commercial.

https://www.exploratorium.edu/

cpcallen• 2 years ago

I would. The new building is huge and tickets are $30 for kids and $40 for adults (though I suspect that many of the visitors get discounted or free admission because their employers are corporate sponsors). It's still one of the most wonderful places in the world but it's a world away from the hundreds of small local museums in the UK which might charge as little as £2 to visit a handful of rooms displaying e.g. artifacts telling the history of the local area.

VonGuard2• 2 years ago

You missed the museums you're talking about. There are a ton of small museums in the Bay Area, from themade.org to the American Bookbinders Museum in SF. Non-profits are also expected to donate all their assets to other non-profits if they fold, here in CA. It's mandated in your articles of incorporation. Themade.org, which I can speak to, has always promised its stuff to Stanford or the CHM if it went under, though thankfully, we've survived COVID and are thriving.

spaceguillotine• 2 years 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.

walterbell4• 2 years ago

Not just billionaires. Gov-funded Ontario Science Centre, which helped to motivate thousands of science museums globally since 1969, hosting 50 million visitors, is being shut down, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752904

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

I'm guessing covid lockdowns crashed their visitor numbers?

bpodgursky• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

But he was given a diagnosis of cancer. It's not like he was hit by a bus. He had several months.

AlbertCory2• 2 years ago

Not really. Anyone that rich has financial advisors who will certainly bug them about that.

dbish2• 2 years ago

Sounds like he was onboard with shutting things down. It wasn’t a foresight thing, more that he wasn’t interested in it going on

WorldMaker2• 2 years ago

Yeah, Foundations with Endowments need business people to run them and manage them and finding ones you trust and creating a corporate culture for them to last is hard. I can't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Paul Allen wasn't interested in establishing those sorts of legacy foundations for some of the same corporate politics reasons he was said to have struggled with Microsoft over the decades.

romwell• 2 years 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).

kragen16• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

sva_• 2 years 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/

endgame• 2 years ago

You're underselling it. The bottom floor has vintage hand-cranked calculators that you're allowed to compute with!

esafak2• 2 years ago

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

cdchn• 2 years ago

Estate liquidation.

esafak2• 2 years ago

I can't imagine they ran out of money, so I speculate that the executors simply did not want to maintain it.

mapmeld• 2 years ago

I don't think anyone has a solid public answer about why they didn't reopen with other museums after 2020. It might be too costly, people leaving the organization, etc. to the point that the board didn't think it could reopen.

lobsterthief3• 2 years ago

It required very specialized knowledge to keep those computers running so this is a very keen take

algebra-pretext• 2 years 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/appl...

lilyball• 2 years 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?

kragen16• 2 years 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

Aeolun• 2 years ago

Question to see if they’re not being neglected? It wouldn’t be the first financially failed museum that thinks just letting the building fall into disrepair is a cheap way of getting rid of their collection.

sparky_z• 2 years ago

They didn't say they intended to break in, they said they looked to see if there was a way to break in. If they could see a way, then so could anyone else, which would suggest that they aren't being protected. No actual ingress needed to come to that conclusion.

That's my maximally charitable take, at any rate.

spullara• 2 years ago

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

ertian• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802686 but we merged those comments hither)

devwastaken• 2 years 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.

shrubble2• 2 years ago

The Toshiba luggables T3100 / T5x00 with gas plasma display are still around; as are the Compaq luggables as well.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

You could have had them for free (or nearly) when computing centers were getting rid of them in the 1990s.

TobinCavanaugh• 2 years ago

Bummer, this place was a bunch of fun

araes• 2 years 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 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.

BobAliceInATree4• 2 years 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.

bombcar4• 2 years 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.

BobAliceInATree4• 2 years 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.

ikiris• 2 years ago

Few is if they're lucky. More like 1.

devilbunny2• 2 years ago

I have bought a lot of stuff at estate auctions. Yeah, a generic estate sale will not generate a lot of money, but if you have serious art (i.e., it would sell to more than a local audience), it can bring in quite a bit. I saw an Alan Bean (the astronaut) painting at one; ended up going for over $30k. And the estate gets all of that; the auction house charges a premium (in this case, 25%) paid by the buyer, but the official auction price is what the seller gets.

9659• 2 years ago

Personal collections are for enjoyment, not investment.

I liquidated some of my fathers things for effectively nothing. That he spent decades acquiring.

femto• 2 years ago

That can be a good outcome if things go to someone who values them as much as the original owner.

My Dad had a collectable car. We sold it for a fair price to an enthusiast who drives it, looks after it and keeps in in a public museum when it's not being driven. That was a good outcome. Better than someone in the family hoarding it and letting it deteriorate.

The money was immaterial, main reason for asking a fair price was to discourage someone who didn't value the car from flipping it for a tidy profit. We were also lucky, in that a member of Dad's car club was prepared to vet buyers for us.

Disbanding a closed computer museum isn't a bad thing if the items go to others who will value and display them.

dbish2• 2 years ago

In this case he didn’t have heirs and seems to have asked in his will to auction it off instead of endowing it.

shiroiushi• 2 years ago

Is there any value to a museum for that art?

ChuckMcM2• 2 years ago

My Dad collected antique cap guns. By the "collector's bible" its "worth" $40 - $50 grand. He got zero offers for it when it became clear he needed to liquidate some of his "stuff" to pay for health care. So yeah, I don't think my collection of "classic" computers will return anything to my heirs sadly.

fl73054• 2 years ago

Well, I see classic 1970s-80s computers that I'm interested in selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay etc.

Gen-Xers who grew up with them are getting nostalgic, and many of them have a lot of disposable income and plenty of space to house them.

But it is a lot of work to get that kind of money for each individual machine. And I suspect it will be a passing fad. In some decades when the Gen-Xers start to log out, the younger generations will not sustain the same kind of market.

deafpolygon• 2 years ago

This is one of the reasons why I avoid "collecting" anything. (Another is space, maintenance, etc.)

There's just not much point, unless you absolutely love something. But many people collect with the end-game of making a profit, which is a mistake.

imperfect_light5• 2 years ago

but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it

That's not the issue, he set up the parts of his empire he cared about so they'd live on (Allen Institute for example) and instructed his sister to sell the rest. She could have gone against his instructions, but the point is he clearly he didn't care whether the Cinerama or the Living Computer Museum continued on. That's on him, not his heirs.

The fact that no other Seattle-adjacent computer billionaires like Gates, Bezos, Simonyi, Ballmer has offered to continue it just shows the generally low quality of people that have gotten rich from tech.

ghaff11• 2 years ago

Or the fact that they don't see maintaining a home for a bunch of old computers for people to look at is a priority given other museums and world needs.

jl6• 2 years ago

The issue with estate sales is that they are usually estate disposals. People inheriting their parents’ stuff are usually themselves grown adults with their own busy lives, and the average estate consists of immense amounts of clutter that the inheritor has approximately zero interest in. They’re grieving, they’re seeking closure. Not looking to spend years sifting through hundreds of thousands of items of household bric-à-brac looking to extract value. They want your house cleared so they can sell it and hopefully pay off a bit of their own mortgage.

ZaoLahma• 2 years ago

This is all sadly too true, which is why I think we should do our best to declutter as we age. Ideally when our time comes, we should only have things of immediate use and value to us left, and pretty much none of "might be good to have one day".

I've seen instances where people couldn't get rid of things due to grief and decided to keep it all tucked away for several decades, leaving the decluttering to the following generation(s). Better then to be a bit proactive.

badgersnake• 2 years ago

I’m sure if somebody came along with a serious offer for the collection with the goal of exhibiting it somewhere else it would be accepted.

alsetmusic• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the guy (Ken Fritz) who built a $1M listening room that his kids sold for (essentially) parts after he died.

The total take for the million-dollar stereo system, including the speakers, the turntable, the dozens of other components from detached cones to the reel-to-reel decks? $156,800.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fr...

I don't blame them at all. It was his passion, not theirs.

Fatnino• 2 years ago

There was a private tank collection in Portola Valley. There was a way to arrange tours but it didn't have anything like regular hours. It was just a guy with lots of money spending it on buying and restoring tanks. Most of them could run under their own power. Stuff like a German Tiger parked facing an American Sherman and a Russian T34. 2 huge garage fulls of these things. And visitors were allowed to climb onto and into all the tanks. It's how I learned that British tanks are righthand drive.

Anyway, guy died, his heirs preferred money to tanks, and they all got sold off. At best they are on display somewhere on the east coast behind velvet rope where no one will touch or drive them again.

fulladder• 2 years ago

I remember that guy, but can't think of his name now. A VC told me about the tanks back in the mid-2000s. Thanks for bringing to mind a good memory from back in the day.

themaninthedark• 2 years ago

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

dpb001• 2 years 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.

kragen16• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

At least you can run ITS under simh, there a github repo to set everything up almost automagically.

kragen16• 2 years 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

Suzuran5• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Holy cow. What happened?

kragen16• 2 years ago

thank you for the correction

AlbertCory2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

When is the auction? Anyone have the details available?

kens• 2 years 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...

notlisted• 2 years ago

I haven't had the pleasure to visit this specific museum, but I did manage to visit 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• 2 years ago

Après moi, le déluge?

peatmoss• 2 years 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.

anigbrowl3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

jmward01• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

ChuckMcM2• 2 years 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.

mulmen2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

musicale• 2 years ago

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

fnordpiglet• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

wakeneddreamer2• 2 years ago

Alliance Bernstein published a white paper about transferring ones collection and preserving value

http://bernstein.com/our-insights/insights/2024/whitepaper/c...

RGamma• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

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