On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs

Unlike many other computer museums, the exhibited computers were almost all up and running, and volunteers and staff encouraged you to play around with them, even the IBM mainframes. You could even get remote access to the computers for telnet or ssh!

LCM's indefinite closure was announced not too long ago in the CoViD era, but fits with a longer pattern. Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.

However, Allen's main business Vulcan (https://www.vulcan.com ) continues and remains locally famous as a commercial real estate developer and Amazon's main landlord in Seattle.

My wife and I have many good memories playing checkmo against a beautifully maintained PDP-8 At the museum. She just yelled out a genuine “No!” when I relayed the closure.

At one point they kept a binder of photos of victorious players.

We never made that binder and I guess we never will.

I know there are still real-hardware microcomputer BBS's (the C64 scene is arguably the biggest), but is there ANY other place that puts real big iron on the internet?

As a retro computer nerd, I hope these machines aren't silent in their storage units, and will one day again roam the internet with their descendents.

[1]https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Online-S...

I had no idea it was being shut down, that place was really one of a kind. I think there are few places where you could see a running Alto. The scope of what was there and the breadth of what was running was simply incredible.

Sounds like it won't make a return which is truly heartbreaking.

Was a bit of magic that made my day since I hadn't used either platform in, of course, a very long time.

http://www.righto.com/search/label/alto

Playing Oregon Trail on some oooold machines was good.

There have to be some philantropists around who got rich in computing and have an interest in keeping it alive.

It is one of a kind, I was raving about it to everyone. I'd be happy to donate even though it's across the world from me.

This is truly sad -- VAX (at least the early ones where the CPU was implemented as cards with discrete electronic components) was the last truly transparent hardware...

Edit: Maybe some tech exec with enough money that the museum's expenses are a drop in the bucket could help?

I hope that they choose to reopen or that it can be purchased and turned into a more sustainable operation. I would gladly donate at least $1000 to such a cause if a viable proposal could be formed...

Old telecom switches, some over 100 years old, still fully operational. The guided tour was just extraordinary. https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

They have multiple phones hooked up to these old switches. After explaining the machine the tour guide picked up a handset, dialed a number and you'd hear "clickety clickety whir whir" and see these mechanical bars move around and the other phone would start ringing. You'd pick it up and have a conversation. Really magnificent. They had two 1960s video phones and you could have a conversation across the room.

There's a constant humming of belts and mechanical clicking, it's this really unique and distinct experience. Not many people were there the day I went so it was just me and a friend on what felt like a private tour. Very intimate. The guide was an old homebrew computing club member, extremely competent.

Also if this is your thing, Berlin has a computer gaming museum which is also amazing called Computerspielemuseum.

The living computer museum was just too good to be true. I hope it comes back. They had a Xerox Alto and an Apple 1 you could use. Just walk up and start typing away.

I had read a lot about the Xerox machines but I never used one. So it was just extraordinary to try all the things I've read about, it was like meeting a celebrity. The kludgy copy and paste before dragging was "invented", the VisiOn style menus, the clunky scrolling without scrollbars, all there.

They even encouraged you to program on punch cards to feed into some 1960s era machines they had running, including a CDC super computer. Or you could go use Unix on a teletype terminal and see the reams of paper pass by.

I had read Tracy Kiddals Soul of a New Machine about the Data General Eagle Computer, but I never thought I'd see one in person, just sitting there waiting for me to interact with it.

Or that I'd ever have a chance to just lounge on the couch of a Cray XMP.

The only things missing were foreign machines. No acorn or omron or any of the Soviet clones but if you set that aside, just great (unless there was a room off to the side dedicated to them that I missed... Quite possible)

As long as I'm plugging museums here's my short list: Imperial War Museum and the British Library, London, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City.

Every 5 feet of all of those is just shocking in what famous and wonderful artifacts they have. Philadelphia's is world class, better than the MET, better than the Smithsonian, don't pass on it if you get the opportunity