Why did no one save the Living Computers museum in Seattle?

Details of what happened here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672

via HN: 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.

It's a genuine tragedy.

We were members. It was a fun and interesting place to go to with kiddos every now and then -- particularly on a rainy day. Kids could goof off or, if interested, actually learn. And it was a great resource and community for us local adult nerds.

Okay, one photo of my (then much younger) daughter, for old times' sake: https://davepeck.org/random/kiddo-lcm.jpg

It's a huge effort to keep large old hardware going. It took a major effort to restore one IBM 1401 at the Computer Museum in Mountain View.

The Connections Museum in Seattle has several working telephone central office switches.[1] They're only open for a few hours a week. I wonder how much longer that will last.

[1] https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

The Museum's thin profit margin disappeared during the pandemic, and the Allen estate decided they could extract money selling off all of Paul's vintage computers, rather than take a few years of losses to keep these treasures available to the public.

Unless you were willing to donate your cash to the Allen family so that they could throw it on top of their Scrooge McDuck wealth pile, the museum was doomed. They weren't interested the actual cultural value of the collection.

With that said, keep a close eye on MoPop's collection should they ever run into any financial difficulty.

Losing the museum was a real heartbreaker. To me it was a really special place because it captured that special feeling of getting access to hardware that isn't widely available and just fiddling with it. It's what I remember loving about computers as a kid.

Vultures did not value Paul Allen’s ideas and investments, but are happy to benefit from it while tearing down the pieces they don’t personally care about or benefit from. It’s the same story as anything else, but I agree it is strange someone like Bill Gates didn’t step in to buy out the museum.

There was no desire to save it on the part of the executors of the Paul Allen estate.

At least someone filmed a tour before it closed a few months ago

https://youtu.be/OohnXELGQ74?si=UgHyjv6AKeaTF3kK

> The museum closed in February 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[2] In June 2024, The Paul Allen Estate announced that the museum would be permanently closed and that the museum's collection, most of which was owned by the Estate and not the museum itself, would be auctioned off[3] by Christie's.[4]

I'm not going to say it was greed on the part of the estate, but they effectively just gave the middle finger to the museum.

> Vulcan LLC, a conglomerate that maintains the Allen family’s estate and many business ventures, has been under the leadership of Paul Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, since the former’s death. A controversial billionaire in her own right, Jody Allen has sustained her brother’s more prominent investments, like ownership of the Seattle Seahawks and Sounders. However, more niche projects like LCM+L and the Cinerama theater in Belltown (also closed indefinitely) seem to be of less interest to Vulcan’s new upper management.

https://seattlecollegian.com/paul-allen-living-computers-mus...

It was interesting to contrast various museums in UK that I'm aware of.

There is the retro computer museum [1] which I've been to in Leicester which I was very impressed with, when talking to the guy he mentioned that they receive no funding and it's all run by volunteers. It's entirely self supporting and very good!

There is a national museum of videogames [2] which was ok, but ran out of money on it's site in Nottingham and later reopened in Sheffield. I believe this gets a large amount of [maybe lottery] funding >1 million / year.

Then there is stuff like Bletchley park site which I need to visit at some point which I assume gets a lot of state funding, I don't know much about this though.

[1] https://retrocomputermuseum.co.uk/

[2] https://thenvm.org/

In the Netherlands there is a similar initiative, non-profit, crowd-funded. I have been there many times and it is amazing, hundreds of old computers and devices. YOU CAN USE THEM ALL!

You can buy a ticket for €10,- or "adopt" a computer for 128,- per year. They will turn on/off the device daily. Your name can be on a card next to it.

They also collect new(er) laptops to give them to families who cannot afford one.

Check the dropdown with computers which are not adopted yet, its huge!

https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/museum/bezoekinformatie...

The full collection: https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/collectie/

On this topic, does anyone know where are the best computer museums to visit?

What is the biggest one in the world?

Ya know…you go once, drag your family to it, etc. It’s not a repeat excursion for locals. Without some serious interactive exhibit$, that attract schools of children, annually… doesn’t feel like a sustainable business model. Especially with that price tag. Maybe more of an add-on room to the Museum of History and Industry.

Seattle is a lot smaller than I realized before visiting it and even smaller to the tech executives who live in a bubble within a bubble within Jeff Bezo's literal downtown bubble.

Computers are objects of Theseus: leaking capacitors, tin whiskers, degrading plastics and rubber, etc. Also nobody is making CRTs anymore, except for some certified avionics parts.

Even people like Bill Gates, would have more money than knows what to do with. Keeping museum operating would be a rounding error in their fortune ......

Societal eshitification. Statue of Liberty is expensive real estate too. Build some condos.

Probably a combination of people not having the money to do so right now and the fact that a lot of people would kill to get their hands on some of the stuff in that museum. not sure how much of it was successfully auctioned off but that's just a guess.

There was no announcement regarding the opportunity to transfer the collection to new owners. If such an announcement was made, it was done without any public disclosure.

I find the claims throughout the HN comments that the LCM board was openly taking offers disingenuous at best. My personal attempts to contact the museum in 2021 about this were met with no reply. I even reached out to former staff members and a Seattle Times reporter who covered the LCM via their social media accounts, and they were equally in the dark about what was happening internally. It was only at the Christie's auction in 2024 that the true intentions of the board became clear.

If you look at the 2023 IRS filings from the LCM, they donated $1.1 million to the "Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum" [1], another one of Paul's collections/museums. This museum was also closed under the same COVID circumstances and only reopened after Steuart Walton purchased the collection [2]. It is mind-boggling that the same thing did not occur for the LCM, considering the number of multi-millionaires and billionaires in the Seattle area whose fortunes were built on the backs of the computers the LCM aimed to preserve and share with the world.

We will look back at this decision to abandon and sell off the LCM as a shameful disruption of Seattle's own computing culture and industry, which transformed our world. For now, the small museum at RePC (non-living, unfortunately) or the homes of personal computer collectors are all that remain in our city.

RIP LCM — while you're gone for now, I will never forget the time I was able to use your Xerox Alto [3] and, to my surprise, meet one of the original engineers who crafted its software.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Heritage_%26_Combat_Arm...

[3] https://medium.com/vulcan-inc/xerox-alto-is-rebuilt-and-reco...