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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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/

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.

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.

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).

(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.

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.

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.

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland has all-playable exhibitions of home computer and console games on original hardware. You can play something on the C64, Atari 800 or Sega Genesis, for example.

There are no heirs for LCM. Allen's will specified what do to in particular with a few of his many assets. But for all the rest, he wrote to sell it all, and donate the raised money to charities. So the will's executor (his sister) does not have the latitude to divert some assets to other outcomes.

LCM was never self-sustaining via tickets. It always needed yearly infusions of cash from Allen. Re-opening it as it was would require similar levels of cash to burn. I wish that Allen had loved the LCM enough to design an endowment to keep it going, and had specified in the will how to treat LCM specially. But he did not. What he wanted instead for his legacy, was large cash donations to various charities.

The people railing here are ignoring the fact that for whatever reason (he didn't actually care that much, he was sick and didn't have the time) didn't explicitly provide for this museum to be maintained into the foreseeable future. That may or may not be a bad outcome but it's what happens when someone passes and they haven't made an explicit provision with funding for something they owned.

By and large, museums need to cover their operating costs and apparently this one didn't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

Is there any good uk computer museum, other than the cambridge one I am planning to visit? Just hope the brits is better in maintaining its legacy. I saw at least 2 European museum mentioned here.

The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park https://www.tnmoc.org/

The Science Museum in London has some pieces, such as Babbage’s first Difference Engine and a PDP-8. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/search/categori...

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