Paul Allen's Computer Museum to Be Auctioned | Hacker News Reader

Paul Allen's Computer Museum to Be Auctioned

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There was a really good post with significant background earlier this year:

> Is the Living Computer Museum Dead?

https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2023/02/16/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831880 (238 comments)

> At the time, Vulcan CEO Bill Hilf framed the closure both as an unavoidable consequence of COVID-19 and as a difficult decision that was actually in keeping with Paul Allen’s wishes – that how Paul wanted his money to be spent after he was gone was very different from when he was alive.

> Yet it’s almost impossible to square the idea that Paul Allen, after investing so much time, energy, and money in the Living Computer Museum and its people – not to mention his express hope that efforts like his would not be “lost to time” – would have also left instructions that could somehow be interpreted to justify completely shutting down LCM after his death.

Allen's will gave his entire estate over to a living trust. The trust documents are private, so nobody but the beneficiaries truly know what his wishes were. However, as far as I'm aware from reading press coverage of his estate, the instructions were basically to sell everything and give the money to certain specified charities rather than putting entities in place to continue operating his projects.

So we can expect that MoPop (Formerly The Experience Music Project) has no safety net at this point also I suppose...

It's hard for me to imagine building Museums and other cultural organizations during your lifetime with the expectation that it would be dismantled after your death.

If these really were his wishes, that's very disappointing.

My initial thought was "why don't they donate it to another vintage computing museum?"

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-muse...

> The estate previously teamed up with Christie’s for a November 2022 auction of 155 masterpieces from Allen’s extensive art collection. It was the world’s most successful single-owner fine art auction ever, raising a record $1.62 billion.

I'm sure they are expecting a huge payout here as well. Understandable but sad nonetheless.

"Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's graphics card."

Very doubtful that this would raise a relatively meaningful sum...

Indeed, some big, rare and once costly things are just too cumbersome to have a huge market.

Who has the space to store an antique mainframe?

Same thing happens in other markets, industrial grade 12 foot bed CNC lathes can be picked up for similar prices to small hobby machines. Great deal if you have a spare barn, 3 phase power and the logistics to move it. Not many do!

Even at a smaller scale, I'm sure a ton of us have somewhat historically interesting antique computers in our attics or basements and a ton of people here would pipe up to yell "You can't just toss (or recycle) an Osborne!!!" Well I can because it's not doing anyone any good in my attic and I'm not wasting a lot of effort to transfer it to someone else's attic after they play with it for a day.

I bet a few HN folks could honestly crowdsource a purchase an item or two and give it to worthy entities.

It's tough. When the Boston Computer Museum closed down a number of years back, its holdings were sold off and I don't think most of them were ever put on display. Admittedly, a lot was just random "old computers" at that point, but it costs money to display properly. No one is getting any real benefit from putting them in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse someplace.

MIT ended up with the K&E slide rule collection at one point. Apparently they've merged it with a recent donation and it may be on display at their new facility but it pretty much sat in storage for years as far as I'm aware.

As far as I know the bulk of the Boston Museum was put on a train to California where it became the start of the Computer History Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum

Some of it went to the Museum of Science in Boston--I think the Whirlwind was there (not sure if still on display). But, yes, a lot went to the Computer History Museum. Not sure there's much on display. Latterly, a fair bit of the collection was various donations from local computer companies demonstrating things like graphics and the computers themselves weren't necessarily uniquely important or interesting.

Really sad to see something so amazing get picked apart for its value.

I really wish Paul set up endowments to continue his projects. I don’t know if he knew how his sister would handle his estate but it doesn’t seem like what he wanted.

Be careful what you wish for. Endowments and foundations aren’t really accountable to anyone and just end up getting taken over by people with their own agendas.

As someone who has been on the periphery of non-profits for years, they easily become mostly employment sinecures for executive directors and others. I've actually seen foundations set up to formally wind down operations after some number of years for exactly this reason.

It's true. While we're complaining about his sister, we could easily be complaining about someone who came into power of a well-endowed foundation with an agenda we don't like. It doesn't take too much imagination to, say, imagine a climate extremist who blames all computers and cyberspace for consuming so much energy and destroying the planet.

One friend who toured Montechello recently said that there's so much emphasis on slavery that the house has been turned into a monument to the bad things that Thomas Jefferson did in his life. I'm not saying this is incorrect or bad. Only that I don't think this is how Thomas Jefferson imagined his house would be used after his death.

I have a hard time seeing how that's a worse outcome than Monticello (or the computer collection) not being preserved at all (which seems to be the implication of "be careful what you wish for"). A museum agenda you disagree with can be changed in the future by new management, but once the artifacts are gone, they are gone.

A historical site like Monticello needs to be preserved in place, but when it comes to museum collections, a lot of times it's just as well for stuff to end up in private collections. Collectors tend to care (sometimes to an obsessive degree) about whatever it is they collect; it's not just a job for them, nor do they get possessed by weird ulterior motives the way foundations can be.

This one hurts... I visited the Living Computer Museum in 2017 and it was amazing. Here's a selection of some photos I took: https://photos.app.goo.gl/VUVXQ1cG3zWAMWY3A My favorite photo here is the one of the Xerox Altos available to play multiplayer Maze War (one is a real Alto and the other two are emulated).

I wish someone like Bill Gates would step in to save the museum and its items.

I think he's busy bluescreening humans.

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789179

Not everything in the LCM collection is owned by LCM; some is on loan. Hope Christie's figures that out.

Give 1/3 to LGR, 8 bit guy and curiousmarc?

I like auctions. Cash the day of the sale.

Hopefully there is a provision for somebody to come along in advance and purchase the whole lot.

As is, where is, no warranties of any kind.

Ideally someone who has the wherewithal not to move it, can you imagine someone having that much financial ability and talent when it come to real estate too?

I always felt so disappointed when I had to pick up working surplus and move it straight to storage myself. There's so much real junk out there and it would be such a shame to let it become co-mingled.

Hopefully, bulk buyers will be able to make rescue bids after piecewise bids have been taken and totaled.

There's lots of individuals that could afford it, real billionaires and stuff, all it takes is the right stuff. The kind of guts most people just don't have, whether they are very well-heeled or not.

Regardless of how it's sold in the end, there will be some sum total dollar amount that it all amounts to.

And people will know whether Allen's work was respected well enough to be maintained as an intact collection representing a great man's life's work, or if it ended up dispersed in a way that is only fitting for things like Allen's great art collection. Art is a different kind of life's passion. Allen's long-term collection & preservation efforts are not as diminished when the less-interactive non-tech artworks are dispersed.

After the hammer comes down, people can then play armchair quarterback, to see which of their favorite billionaires can be rated as to whether or not people think they would have been able to afford keeping the museum going financially if they really wanted to.

Plus any high-rollers can be more or less compared to what percentage of their net worth some random (and not so random) youtubers are dedicating to preserving other rare milestone tech gear out of respect for other great technology pioneers.

I bet UsagiElectric or similar could probably crowd fund a purchase or two.

Would love to see some of these go to a good home. Whether that's publicly available via someone on Youtube, or another museum.

The 8-Bit Guy famously shorted an extremely rare IBM PC, with about 10 copies made, using a paperclip. Don't give him any sort of valuable keepsake, he'll destroy it.

Now is a good time to be thankful for and get involved in the still-active computer history museums: https://computerhistory.org/ https://m.facebook.com/bloopmuseum/

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