Is the Living Computer Museum dead?
pcjs.org
pcjs.org
However, our little museum run with volunteers and pocket change managed to be more stable long term than the well-healed and well-funded Living Computer Museum. Why? Because having a single benefactor for a non-profit is almost a death sentence. It's super risky, and as we've seen here, when that single donor goes away, it's all over.
It's super sad the LCM is in the state it is in, but for non-profits this is a cautionary tale: you cannot build a long term non-profit on the support of a single person. The world is too chaotic for that. Even a non-profit with a billionaire behind it isn't safe. It is incredibly poor planning on humanity's part to rely on the rich to preserve our shared heritage out of some obligation or moral or ethical duty. We need to preserve this stuff on the order of the Smithsonian.
> According to multiple reports Paul Allen’s will states that the Paul G. Allen Trust, which contains billions in assets, including the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, will be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects. Paul Allen died in October 2018 and the Trail Blazers have been rumored to be on the sales block for the past few years, but all’s quiet on the Seahawks front. Is Jody Allen trying to hold onto the Seahawks against her brother’s wishes?
https://theshadowleague.com/the-instructions-are-clear-the-s...
The problem is, a lot of projects didn't make it into his list of passion projects. More:
> Sealed lips aside, here’s what we know: In 2010, Allen pledged to bequeath the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. (During his lifetime, Allen gave away more than $2 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.) Tasked with this mammoth undertaking is his sister Jody Allen, trustee and executor of his estate, who is bound by her brother’s wishes as set out in the trust.
https://crosscut.com/culture/2022/11/16b-sale-paul-allens-ar...
One can accuse his sister of not following his instructions, I guess, but unless we know what those instructions are, it isn't a very easy accusation to back up.
And that's the truth of the matter; I see Paul Allen's betrayal not as not focusing on the big things, but as focusing on the big things too much that he didn't see the little things that made life worth living. The LCM is a victim of that for sure.
You can go to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, visit where he painted, slept, ate, taught, and stored his junk. You can see how he worked, where he worked, what the lighting was like in his house, what the door looked like then and now.
Atari, on the other hand, is just gone. We cannot see their offices (they've been reoccupied a lot), and we have very little in the way of assets generated from the creation process back then. It is currently easier for us to see how Rembrandt worked 500 years ago than it is to see how Atari employees worked 40 years ago. That's not a good state of affairs, considering how influential Atari was on the evolution of home gaming.
Does that really matter? Dunno.
That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting.
> Therefore, we must preserve as much as we possibly can so that those in the future have the ability to pick and choose. As it stands now, a lot of human history is just pieced together from trash and rubble.
That's a value judgement that will eventually succumb to its own contradictions. Preserving stuff, especially preserving "as much as we possibly can" is a luxury that many ages can't afford. It's all going to end up as "trash and rubble" eventually.
If you want make something to survive for the long term, make trash and rubble.
Object X may be deleted but did you make sure all references to X were deleted as well?
The future may become interested in something it suspects did exist, but no longer does.
Unlike a programming language, humanity may try to reconstruct the missing X.
> Object X may be deleted but did you make sure all references to X were deleted as well?
IMHO, something with references to it isn't utterly obliterated. But there are a lot of things with little-to-no references to them, and those are things someone can totally decide to make the future uninterested in.
You can swap "preserve our shared heritage" with many things and it still holds. It's incredibly poor planning to rely on the good-will of the rich for lots of things, yet here we are...
In the Netherlands they have recently opened a giant storage complex with all the art that the country has acquired over the last 200 years.
Not necessarily, if the benefactor endows the NPO with a long-term trust rather than simply funding it. Endowment is what makes the difference between a charity and a hobby.
Paul Allen had a lot of hobbies, but he wasn't that charitable, in the sense that many of his good works seem to have died with him. There are obvious exceptions, but the LCM was sadly not one of them.
In a way, this reminds me of when Google shut down Reader.
This is also why you should only use standards, platforms and programming languages supported by a multitude of companies and organizations, and avoid those dominated by a single company.
There comes a point when the only way to keep this stuff running is either through manufacturing replacement parts (prohibitingly expensive) or through emulation. Emulation is cheap but completely unrepresentative of the original experience. For example, you can't emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex's beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.
So, I still collect this stuff and enjoy it. But I have given up my ambition for hardware preservation. It will take an organization much better funded than me to keep this stuff alive in the long term. And even then, I suspect a lot of it is going to be lost to time in the coming decades.
Some are more than others. PALs and ASICs can be reimplemented in CPLDs and FPGAs. At come point it becomes Theseus' computer, but, if the goal is to preserve the boat, that works. If you want to preserve the wood planks, then you need to keep it powered down in a controlled environment for future generations to apply atomic-resolution sensing eventually.
> For example, you can't emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex's beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.
Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able to do that very well with HDR displays. I already can't see pixels or jaggies on my LCDs. With proper computation, one could simulate the analog aspects of CRT tubes - its a lot for GPUs to do now, but, in a decade or so, I assume a mobile GPU would be able to do that without breaking a sweat.
Not long ago I was thinking about a CRT+deflection replacement that would take the analog signals used in CRTs (from an adapter on the neck, where the pins have a lot of variation, and the inputs to the coils), and, maybe, an extra power supply input to power the electronics, and spit out an HDMI signal on the other end.
This should be possible with modern flat panels to a point the image is hard to distinguish for all but the most extreme (think X-Y displays and Tektronix DVSTs) cases.
Curvature is an issue, but flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial.
Beyond just the aesthetics, there are practical reasons why this is important, whether it be lighgun idiosyncrasies or how the game "feels," which can affect timing and such for competitive players. There's a lot more to preserving the look, feel, and compatibility of displays for old computer systems than most realize and the rabbit hole can go quite deep on this one.
there are practical reasons why [how tthe electron gun works is]
important, whether it be lighgun idiosyncrasies or how the
game "feels,"
The way a game "feels" in this context is essentially a function of input latency. The old-style "chasing the beam" hardware, plus a CRT display, equals something very close to a true zero lag environment.
Here's a breakdown of the input lag in a modern environment, for contrast. These are all latencies that don't exist in something like, say, a Sega Genesis/Megadrive hooked up to a CRT: http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...
In an ideal emulation situation, you could theoretically recreate something close to a zero-lag analog environment (in terms of latency) without necessarily simulating the path of the electron beam itself.
Although, as the linked article implies, there are a lot of bits in the emulation stack that would need to be optimized for low latency. High refresh rate displays get you part of the way there "for free."
You could then have the controller artifically drive it line by line instead refreshing whole screen
The larger issue w.r.t. this specific quirk of CRTs is that we're running out of human beings that are familiar with what this is "supposed" to look like, and actually care.
I care a lot, but I'm old.
What sorts of things are advanced filters like CRT-Royale are missing? https://www.google.com/search?q=crt-royale
Each individual phosphor dot on a CRT is not terribly tricky to emulate.
The brightness at any given moment is a fairly simple decay function based on how long it's been since you lit it up with the electron gun. On top of that, you would typically want to apply some level of bloom to simulate the way light is diffused by the glass. Sure, you've got a few million dots to simulate, but this is also anembarrassingly parallel problem.
Now of course, admittedly, you're only simulating that phosphor glow decay at the refresh rate of your monitor -- 60hz, 144hz, 240hz, whatever -- instead of an effectively infinite level of steps as would be the case in real life. However, I don't think that is a practical issue.
You're clearly thinking of factors I'm not and I'm genuinely interested. To my mind, the visual aspects of CRTs are pretty easy to simulate, but not the near-zero lag.
I did said OLED not LCD precisely because of that
And some phosphors have a much longer decay than others, but you could easily emulate those long-term effects on a normal screen.
And yes, that device cost about the same as my house back then (2002).
https://hackaday.com/2019/01/17/sharpest-color-crt-display-i...
The experience on the original terminal was way different than emulation. The way the screen worked and the tactile feel of the keyboard was the core of the experience of it. Sitting at an actual terminal really changed my understanding the system because it gave me a physical context that software emulation could not provide. You'd be hard pressed to emulate the eye melting nature of the original plasma display or the stiffness of the keyboard.
I'd care much more about my money going into
making a product that got the visible details
of the canvas right than spoofed the proper
results if I carbon-dated it or something
Does fooling a carbon dating test matter? This is purely subjective, but for most people surely not.
But interestingly you've linked to an ultra high resolution image viewer that lets the viewer drill down into a nearly microscopic view of the painting. If a person doesn't know much about art, they might think that if you could take something like this and hang it on your wall, it would be a pretty damn good replica of the real thing. It would certainly be cool, I have to admit. Hell, I'd love it on my wall.
And yet, it's utterly different than the real thing. Paintings in real life are three dimensional. Van Gogh in particular is one who used thick gobs of paint. Each fraction of a micron of the painting has height and its own reflective properties which interact with the light in the room as you walk around and observe it.
if I get everything I'd notice while using the
computer correct at a fraction of the price.
If you don't care about how oil paintings actually look in real life, or what video games actually looked and felt like, and you choose to brand all of the things you don't understand or don't care about as "comical", then... well, more power to you. That's your choice.
But some people choose to care.
Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able
to do that very well with HDR displays [...]
flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial.
However, there's an entire additional dimension missing from this discussion so far - latency. When paired with original game hardware up until the 16-bit era or so, CRTs offer close to a true zero latency experience.
It's not possible to recreate this with modern tech. When we add up everything in the stack (display, input drivers, everything) we're looking at over 100ms of lag.
http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...
We're not totally without hope. As the (ancient!) article notes, higher refresh rate displays reduce many of these latencies proportionally. And for non-action games, latency doesn't matter too much in the first place.
At come point it becomes Theseus' computer,
but, if the goal is to preserve the boat,
[CPLDs and FPGAs] work
It's hard to even match the input latency and general responsiveness of an NES hooked to a CRT TV with a composite cable with modern hardware, let alone something more-integrated.
My usual test is "is it very, very hard to get past Piston Honda on Punch Out?" Often, with an initial, naive set-up, it's nearly impossible. Get it dialed in a little and he becomes easy (if you spent like a billion hours playing that game as a kid, anyway). But with many display + computer + controller combos it's just impossible to get it close enough to right, no matter how you tune it.
That's my test because it's really easy to tell if the latency is bad, but if it is I'll find myself falling off things constantly in Mario, too, it's just harder to tell if I'm playing poorly or if the system's the problem. The NES is hard enough, add just a little latency and it's hellish.
This means classic light gun games such as Duck Hunt for the NES are impossible to play without a CRT.
Edit: Apparently there is a 15kHz filter inside the light gun. So it's not really about beam accuracy or brightness, it's about pulsing at the right frequency.
Yeah, I know. But you don't need the LCD to pulse, you need the backlight to pulse.
An LCD might still have issues switching fast enough, but an HDR OLED tuned to 15kHz PWM might be able to handle it. If it was designed with minimum latency in mind of course. Most screens buffer a full frame and that won't work. But playing duck hunt doesn't require timing the actual beam as it sweeps across the screen. You just need to be displaying rows with a buffer that's no more than a few rows high, and have the rows flicker. Also many third party controllers don't care that much about the flicker.
The really sad thing is that some day all of the CRTs will be dead and all of the expertise to build them too. The tooling and factories are already gone, so it's unlikely new CRTs will ever be built, unless some Ben Krasnow-esque super-hobbyist gets really passionate about it.
You could but it wouldn't have the same brightness as it sweeps so I don't know if that's good enough to trick a light gun by itself.
But I still think you shouldn't discount LCD. If you can get an LCD to switch a good fraction of the way in half a millisecond, and use the right backlight, you could make duck hunt work.
> The issue is, who is going to build that? I don't think Duck Hunt is too high on the priority list for OLED panel makers.
To trick the frequency filter might be too much effort, but the latency of having each row come along instantly might get some effort into it. Marketing loves low latency.
The other issue is all of the other causes of latency along pipeline. The NES emits an composite video signal directly from its video chip, the PPU. This composite signal travels along a coax cable into the back of the TV where it’s split by the analogue circuitry into signals driving the luminance and colour, synchronized to the horizontal and vertical retrace. The whole process happens in less time than it takes to convert that signal into digital before it could even be sent to an LCD.
That is, before our LCD display even receives a frame it’s already on the screen of the CRT. The NES is explicitly designed around the NTSC timing structure, with the rendering in the PPU happening “just in time” to be sent to the CRT. There is no place in the NES to buffer a frame.
While that's true, doing the conversion doesn't need to add more than a microsecond of latency.
> That is, before our LCD display even receives a frame it’s already on the screen of the CRT. The NES is explicitly designed around the NTSC timing structure, with the rendering in the PPU happening “just in time” to be sent to the CRT. There is no place in the NES to buffer a frame.
An LCD doesn't have to buffer a frame either. I believe there are models that don't. It can display as it receives, limited by the crystal speed which is still an order of magnitude improvement.
Contrast that with a CRT which uses a 25kV acceleration voltage to drive an electron beam up to 30% the speed of light (takes about 3.3 nanoseconds to travel 1 foot from the back of the CRT to the screen), which then strikes a phosphor that glows due to its valence electrons falling from excited states (which takes a few nanoseconds).
Mold and water damage can be mitigated with environmental controls but even then you're going to have decay issues because so many components just break down overtime. Many plastics just become brittle and disintegrate over time with or without exposure to UV. 10 year old devices have their softtouch rubber turning to a gooey sticky melting mess. Electrolytic capacitors and batteries leaking are commonly known but lesser known issues occur. The MFM Drive testing that Adrian's Digital Basement did recently comes to mind, 5 of 5 drives he tested were dead. One was a drive he'd validated a year prior and stored correctly.
The warm glow of those smooth beams has no modern equivalent in consumer hardware. Despite technically being old technology, and some machines being over 4 decades old, it can still blow young minds seeing a way of rendering so different from what we accept as the norm today and how it’s in many aspects even more advanced than modern screens.
Knowing it’s something that’s gradually being lost with time is pretty sad. Previous human technology advancements would often be lost in a hole and still be recognizable for what they were centuries later when they were dug up. It’s kind of strange that the tech we make since the computer revolution basically dies along with their creators and maintainers and basically just turn into future door stoppers.
If anything I expect computers from 1985 to be much better “preserved” than physical history from, say, 885, no?
Granted you have to resist the urge to use them as door stoppers and keep them in a controlled environment. But an archive is a lot cheaper/more stable than a living museum.
Same with any old blacksmithing tools and so on. They’ll look old, but generally retain their functionality and a novice can repair them.
Old electronics require expert knowledge and specifically manufactured parts to fix. Knowledge of old electronics dies each year and the parts go away. A person who’s never heard of a Vectrex or see one in action would have no idea what it does. Even if they recognize that it has a screen, they wouldn’t be aware that it renders vectors and not pixels like nearly every other screen. Another 1000 years removed from the computing standards of today, people might not even be able to imagine what a typical desktop computer does when they look at it. But they’ll see tools from 885 and generally be able to guess what they’re for.
High tech things are very abstracted tools that are just going to look like useless boxes to future people. Most won’t know or care what they did. It’s weird to think about. Advances will also be lost with time without us realizing it. Vector screens are truly impressive, but people don’t know they exist. Will we someday get monochrome retinal implants and they’re convenient enough that people give up on traditional computer screens, and someday humanity forgets we all used to have full color displays with sound in our pockets? Who knows.
we mostly don’t use archeological artifacts do we?
Something like a car engine or a video game machine, that's a collection of moving parts. No single part of them is interesting. It's how they work together. Problem is, each time you use them they get a little bit closer to death and they also get closer to death just sitting there in a climate-controlled environment.
But, it's a narrower gap than with a more complex machine.
Recently I stumbled on some Tektronix videos on YouTube. Those vector displays are even more mind blowing than Atari’s arcade games. I hope I can get to see one in person someday.
I also realize I'll get 95% of the enjoyment by just hitting the emulators at archive.org.
I gifted myself an Amiga Mini500 for xmas and once you play the games, and mess with Amiga Forever for an afternoon, and Amibian for ANOTHER afternoon...that scratch is pretty well itched.
At what point are we where "Either put it in the cloud or lose it" is the law of tech?
I have some archival grade CDs and DVDs that claim they will last longer. However I'm not sure if readers will exist as long as the media.
What format should I invest in (developing/purchasing/etc) that would A) be easy-ish to read from B) be dense enough to exceed the point I might as well just be using paper/glass slides/microfiche/and so on, and could be ramped back up from pretty crude tech.
Combine "end of civilization", "time-travelling with tech", and other thought-experiment scenarios for fun.
Don't worry about advanced stuff. How to make a transistor will be lost long before we develop a new civilization capable of needing transistors. So don't waste paper on it.
I guess this is the first time I've faced the fact that unless it is printed out at archival quality in some manner that humans can read, it basically won't exist 200 years from now. The data will perhaps be around in some kind of conglomerated and bowdlerized format, but the "you" part of the data will be lost in obscurity, and that's assuming that some version of the cloud stays intact that long.
Odd.
And plan to copy to new media every 8-10 years.
Personally, I think that the only answer to the "preserve the family stuph for a 100 years" is to migrate it all to the most reliable media available every 5-10 years (it used to be every 3-5 years). Even if there was an archival media that was 100% reliable 100 years from now, will there be something that can read it?
Never enough, but THANK GOODNESS for emulation!
My favorite old skool computer is the IBM 704 that LISP originally ran on. This machine didn't have a visual display or anything fancy. It was the sort of thing where you'd hand in your punch cards and an operator would run your job, then give you back the program results in your mailbox or something.
When I was doing research for writing my blog posts about LISP about a year ago, it was so helpful that a turnkey SIMH environment for this machine existed, that let me run the original software and then get definite concrete answers about its behavior. There were things I was curious about, particularly its handling of the T atom (and whether that remaps to TRUE which is the true truth) that I wouldn't have been able to talk about, had the emulator not been available.
Asteroids is probably the most famous example. Look at the "ultra bright" bullets and the glowy trail they leave.
And, in all honesty, while a working PDP-11/70 would be kind of neat, by today's standards it's dreadfully underpowered in speed even as it sucks down the kWh, and requires a lot of space, while SIMH on a modern SBC would run circles around it. A museum is a better place for it than a living room.
For example, even a child could manufacture this with $10 worth of tools and parts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10#/media/File:KA10_mod_en...
Keeping machines from the 00s running is going to be a hell of a lot harder than keeping machines from the 70s running
Of course you will end up in a ship-of-Theseus like situation, how many replacement parts does it take before it is no longer the original. But that's because these are working systems, unlike you average museum where you just get to look at stuff and the cases might as well be empty.
My surviving stuff consists of a Vectrex, an Interact with many tapes (including Microsoft Basic), and an I Robot. I always thought the Interact belongs in a museum but they all seem to have one already or don't care.
Maybe the solution to hardware failure is to keep the hardware, working or not, AND have emulation. But as you say vectors don't emulate well.
Only now with our fanless machines are we approaching the true idea that these machines just turn on and work. I’d bet an Apple TV has a better chance of working in 400 years than a Commodore 64.
Solid state devices fail with age too, via electromigration, temperature cycling fatigue, hot carrier injection, NBTI/PBTI and a host of other causes. And it gets worse the smaller the geometries we are working with. It's huge topic of concern in the industry.
We won't be around to know, but I'd be confident enough to bet you a beer that Apple TV will be dead as a doornail in years or decades, not centuries.
Something like run it in a well cooled and humidity controlled, nobel gas filled enclosure.
If anyone nearby is reading this, please consider coming by sometime :)
(You need a reservation. Not everything works. In fact most machines don't work probably. It's not super fancy like the Living Computer Museum was. There's a lot of stuff on the floor. It'll probably move to a bigger place soon so that'll get better probably. It's not particularly cheap; there's a yearly fee (no auto-renewals) and a per-visit fee. There's probably almost nothing to do if you aren't fluent in Japanese.)
So far I fixed: ZX81, VIC-20, PET 2001, various MSX machines. (See my blog for details :p)
Nice place, I like it. A favourite of mine is the wall sized CPU, The Megaprocessor. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43063/The-Megaproces...
They will have a Made in Japan season this spring! : ) http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/70465/Made-in-Japan-S...
I looked up the address, and just want to clarify for anyone who may want to visit: the museum is in Oume City, about 1.5 hours away by train from Tokyo Station. While technically part of Tokyo Metro area, I think for most foreign tourists "Tokyo" only refers the 23 special wards[0]. So just beware it's not just a short hop away after you're done sight-seeing in e.g. Asakusa.
So tourists are accustomed to this sort of thing, whereas - as pointed out above - they're not exactly accustomed to going that far out of the city while sightseeing "in the city".
I'm planning my next trip to Tokyo and got real excited reading about a Japanese computer museum (I'd love to get to play with some vintage Japanese micros, seeing how different they were from Western machines) but I don't know if I'd be willing to take three hours out of my vacation to go out to the suburbs and back...
Seriously though, I love that the wider Japanese internet has remained so simple (and thus usable!) after so many years.
Actually TBH I don't know if the owner can speak English :c Normally, first-time visitors are given a quick tour so they can decide whether to become a supporting member or not. I'm not sure how the owner would do that. (Maybe he would ask me to translate? I'd probably do it :p)
And then in 2019 Vulcan fired everyone responsible for making it great. No more after hour parties/events. Just as things were starting to take off they ruined it, and then the pandemic hit and it was done for good.
It's a real shame and I hope someone who appreciates the museum can take control of it and rescue it from Vulcan.
I visited the LCM in 2016 as part of a computer arch course, it was really quite special to see working systems from the over 50 years ago and get to use them.
She probably has her own priorities, and is shifting things to match them.
IIRC, this phenomenon somewhat well known in philanthropy: if you setup a long-lived foundation, it will it will end up reflecting the priorities of the future staff even if those bear little resemblance (or are even opposed) to those of the founder. Everyone wants to do what they want, not what some dead guy wanted, even if all the money was actually his.
I believe this has caused some people to give up on the perpetual foundation idea, and structure their fortunes to get spent on their goals by a certain deadline.
It probably would have been better for the LCM if Paul Allen had set it up as some autonomous endowed thing controlled by a board of hard-core retro-computing enthusiasts.
> Former members of the security detail... have said in sworn depositions that Vulcan CEO Jody Allen sexually harassed bodyguards while also directing them to smuggle animal bones out of Africa and Antarctica. At least two former employees said they heard Jody Allen had smuggled ivory out of Africa in violation of U.S. and international law...
https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/Seahawks-owner...
Isn't that to be expected? It was offered as an example of the phenomenon.
> ...but with a positive outcome?
There are people who think shuttering the Living Computer Museum is a positive outcome. I'd wager the vast majority of Americans would chose to spend that money on something besides keeping obsolete computers running.
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.
Of course the fact that Paul didn’t explicitly set something in stone for like 50 years despite the billions… really sucks, cuz that place was awesome
“Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects,” a source said. “None of this is up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”
https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-no-wiggle-room-nfls-se...
They need to be financially self-sufficient to even have a chance, IMHO. Even then it isn't a given. Just like people sometimes clean their houses even when they still have tons of space.
That CEO could also pay themselves $250k without blowback either.
Unfortunately it wasn't set up like that when Paul was alive (more like a personal collection). And after his death, the chance it became like that is even slimmer.
If money is simply set aside to fund something, somebody still has to hire somebody to manage the thing, and oversee their performance, and fire the manager if they underperform, and find a new manager, and sign off on big decisions like a change of space, and so forth. But if that trustee just... doesn't care to do that... then what exactly are you going to do? Somebody would have to sue to enforce that overseeing, but frequently nobody cares to sue or has standing.
Try: ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org
For people wringing their hands about profitability, I'm sure it could have been made self sustaining, or hell if they had even attempted to raise some money outside of the foundation, there's a lot of people that loved that place. It really seemed like that the powers that be just didn't care.
It’s hard to believe this was the estate plan he intended. A lot of local people are pointing the finger at his sister who appears intent on erasing his legacy outside pro sports.
I think the only Allen project besides sports that’s going to survive is MOPOP and that’s very tourist-friendly in an excellent location.
Unfortunately it appears to be the case that this is what Allen wanted. A connected sports journalist in Portland wrote about this last year (see below link).
> “Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects,” a source said. “None of this is up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”
https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-no-wiggle-room-nfls-se...
It's sad because the LCM and Cinerama had such an impact on Seattle culture.
Business Insider says brain research was one of them. I imagine if I was a competent financial reporter I could dig into where the money’s going and maybe learn something but I don’t have those skills.
https://www.businessinsider.com/blazers-seahawks-fate-paul-a...
I also remember messing with the shell on an even older Unix machine that had an actual teletype printer terminal. And directly poking the VGA buffer on a C64 to do goofy things...
I only went once a while ago, when my family took a trip to Seattle, but that is one of my most treasured memories. It's a travesty that future generations of nerdy kids won't get that experience (and I'm sad that I likely won't get it again either).
ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org
I have been thinking recently, how could you design governance for a high-end nursing home so that the facility perpetually serve the rotation and interests of its residents. Without governance, such a facility would quickly trend towards entropy. The first step of entropy is pillage by the executive.
When I look around, adversarial systems (courts, parliaments) seem to be a device for building bedrock for better civilisation. I don’t think charity is, due to the governance obstacles.
Getting the right people is a really hard task, one really has to wade through several thousand people to find that needle in a haystack.
Defining what is 'right', is like defining what a Unicorn is i.e almost surreal.
>how could you design governance for a high-end nursing home so that the facility perpetually serve the rotation
I have been thinking of this problem for decades I think, and unfortunately the solution seems to be what I have alluded above.
Maybe a sufficiently advanced AI serving as the "right person" in a governance role is the long-term sustainable solution to this, once that is a capability. Sounds crazy now, but probably less so in 10-20 years.
And AI can also has objective drift. A project will always be a few paperclips away from collapse. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
I'm also interested in old cars. Many old cars are worth millions and people like Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno use their wealth to preserve them.
Unfortunately that scenario doesn't seem to exist for historic computers yet, although there is a collector scene at the low end (try to buy a KIM-1 now for less than $1000, for example).
I'd be willing to pay something in support of reopening the museum -- I already spend some money on picking up what I see as historic artifacts from auction sites and the LCM would actually be a more efficient way for my money to be used to achieve preservation of larger working systems. For example I have a complete board set for a pdp-11/70 (key milestone in the evolution of the systems we use today), but I can't afford to buy a rack, disk drives, and provide electricity to make a running system. The LCM already has a pdp-11/70 running V7. If I could fractionally own that, I think it'd be a good deal. I could also pledge my board set as spares should they be required.
But it would take 10000 people with my limited resources to properly fund the museum, I suspect.
I tweeted a bunch of photos: https://twitter.com/ethomson/status/1109880552360951810
What a truly handsome set of machines and I hope they find their way to another venue or become accessible to the public once more.
The Computer Museum in Mountain View has a working IBM 1401, and it's kept going by old guys who worked on the 1401 in the past. Soon, they will be gone. They have conflicts with the museum staff, who just want stuff that sits there.
The Union Pacific Railroad restored the Big Boy steam locomotive to full road operating condition a few years ago. That was a huge multi-million dollar effort. They now run it long distances for tours. Union Pacific has a Steam Shop and 50-100 employees. They get a PR benefit out of it.
The Museum of Flight in Seattle used to try to maintain some of their aircraft in flyable condition, but they seem to have given up on that.
The Jaquet-Droz automata [1] in Neuchatel, Switzerland, are still maintained, since there's still a mechanical clock and watch industry in Switzerland able to maintain such things and it's a source of national pride.
Functional nostalgia is expensive.
The puzzle (write up here, https://interngame.microsoft.com/events/2013/floppy/overview... make sure to click the solution link for notes about the happenings at LCM) actually used some of the real computers (running a simple DOS program from a floppy disc) as opposed to just emulating it on newer hardware. It was an amazing experience that you would never get at another museum.
My favorite pic had nothing to do with our puzzle at all, but was just a computer control panel with a helpful label that said “knob”.
And, in another signal for computer-collectors, "The Digibarn Collection is on long term loan at the Computer Museum at System Source in Hunt Valley, Maryland." ... https://www.digibarn.com/index.html
Is there anything that we can do to help keep it alive?
[1]https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/science-and-tech-m...
While LCM volunteers may have a keen interest in preservation, I don't feel there's the same sense of ownership as systems literally brought back to life/restored by the hand of the person who purchased them expressly for the purpose of sharing those experiences.
I've seen and heard horror stories of rare machines being destroyed because the CMOS or PRAM batteries were left in place while they were stored -- no reasonably clued-up collector is going to make that mistake. But some of these museums tie themselves in "Ship of Theseus" style knots by obsessing over keeping the original, dead batteries at the cost of losing the whole machine.
The best thing that's happened for software preservation is people uploading random disk images to archive.org...!
In the UK we have a few smallish computer museums; one in Manchester University, one at a London University and then we have the National Museum of Computing at Bletchely park (not to be confused with Bletchely park museum, as there is some politics)
It is important in the case of NMoC that it is preserved, especially that they have a working Colossus machine and many other historic British computing achievements.
Years ago I travelled to Paris, partly to visit another retro computing museum: the Musee de l'Informatique in the Grand Arch at La Défense. I’d heard great things so it was a huge disappointment to arrive and find it had “temporarily” closed a few days earlier due to problems with the building’s elevators.
Sadly, it never reopened.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musée_de_l%27informatique_(L...
It's a real shame if it does not re-open in some form or fashion.
That museum is awesome and has a decent visitor stream, so it's nice to see there's interest in the old games.
The IBM card punch machine wasn't working that day and I regret not getting a fun souvenir but the hands-on experience was excellent.
Here is a link to the large scale systems and computer museum near Pittsburgh, Pa. https://www.largescalesystemsmuseum.org/how_to_visit
They have SO MANY rich tech mogules (mogulettes) that it's hard to imagine it isn't getting incrediable funding -- even by the city or Palo Alto for example.
What is the real problem? If I was a rich millionaire / billionaire from SV I would donate in a heart beat....
Microsoft alone is probably responsible for creating several thousand millionaires locally.
https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/#intro
A Dutch non-profit, staffed by volunteers and people in need of practical training. Visitors to the museum get to touch and interact with most of them. I've 'adopted' a few machines there that introduced me to computers and programming as a kid (the language switch features on this site are a little glitchy, google translate is your friend). If you're in the neighborhood, it's definitely worth a visit.
Their LinkedIn page has a proper introduction in English:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/homecomputermuseum/about/
"The HomeComputerMuseum is a museum about (home)computers based in the centre of the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), in the technical region of the Netherlands, close to airports like Eindhoven and Dusseldorf and easy to reach by train and car. The museum is 500m2 and has around 400 computers in stock. From the early Commodore PET2001, Altair 8800, Tandy TRS80 and Apple II all the way up to early 2000 pc's with Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5. Since computers will break when they're not used, all computers are prepared to stay on during opening hours and ready to be touched by anyone who wants to. Even printers, modems, scanners and other additional hardware is connected and ready to use. We also have our own repair lab when something breaks. All computers are set up in a environment that's styled in the correct era. It's not a museum, it's an experience!
At least once per 3 months we do a big LAN-party where the newest computer is a Pentium 4. Meaning we do only old school gaming with games like Duke Nukem 3D, Red Alert, Wacky Wheels, Unreal Tournament and anything we fancy to do.
We are a non-profit organization that gives chances to people with autism and teaches young children how the old computers work. We strongly believe that in order to understand the future, one must know the past. That's what we're doing.
See, feel, try, play & learn!
We also love to show these old, sometimes forgotten, computers on Youtube and on social media. We need funds to keep this museum up and running and that's where you can help!
We're based in Helmond, conveniently placed between big airports (Eindhoven and Dusseldorf), easy reachable by train, enough parking places and right next to the city centre of Helmond. So make sure to visit us and consider a donation or any other form of support."
Very, very few people can leave a lasting mark and especially change the world for the better.
OP stated that everything you do will eventually die at some point after you. I disagree because we don't know if the positive impact that LCM created on someone could have then translated into a positive impact that a person who experienced LCM passes onto their friends and family. That positive impact could then traverse downwards.
I had this same exact discussion with some guy manning the Atari 800 booth at a recent Vintage Computer Festival East event. He was showing off cool demos running on the computer and we talked about how after he dies he felt that no one will care about this computer equipment anymore. The love for this platform dies with him and his generation.
It got me thinking that this item was made for a certain era which consisted of certain cultural elements that existed not only in the country where the item was designed, but also whatever thinking that was prevalent in specific components like the CPU design, computer science advancement at the time, marketing, etc. In other words, the computer was made specifically for people living at that moment in time. There probably wasn't much thought put into how different future people would perceive it because you don't know what the future holds and at the point of sale those people don't exist and don't matter.
At the same time though the memories that the computer generated will not be lost forever. They could have impacted downstream events (eg. the children of person could have been motivated to go into tech thanks to the love that the computer generated for their parent who subsequently went into tech)
That combination is deadly.
To really make your mark on entropy you have to bring things to a lower energy state that requires crossing a substantial barrier, such that it wouldn't happen on its own.
The potential disaster outcomes considered for the LHC would be good candidates, especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay