Ask HN: Why did no one save the Living Computers museum in Seattle? | Hacker News Reader

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

Last I heard it closed and everything was auctioned off.

I'm not from Seattle but I'm surprised given the huge tech presence there that no one took over and tried to re-open it, even by crowd funding.

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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.

> The Living Computer Museum, it turns out, cost millions, over ten million a year

I don't get how it could cost 10 million / year

Real estate, specialized expertise, expensive repairs. It adds up! I also suspect monthly insurance is insane.

10 million is not even a lot - a typical McDonalds can cost over a million dollars a year to operate.

A typical McDonald’s costs over $1M — just in salaries.

Here are the 2023 numbers.

https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonal...

a typical McD generates a tad more revenue though...

Which is probably why we have more McDonald’s than computer museums.

true

And a tad more risk

The Museum of Flight is cool, but you owe it to yourself to get down to the Western Antique Aeroplane & Automobile Museum in Hood River.

Unlike the Museum of Flight, nearly everything at WAAAM is still in flyable condition and they have an amazing restoration team on site.

What an excellent acronym.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaam!

The truly sad part is that there wasn't a portion of the inheritance earmarked for an endowment to keep the museum going. I've heard from unreliable sources that Paul might have assumed this would happen via the executors of his will but the executors decided otherwise. :(

An endowment of 200M at a pittance 6% interest rate would more than cover the costs of running the museum, but they probably wouldn't have even needed that much after working on figuring out how to make it generate a bit more revenue.

I'm sad that I never got to attend, but would have easily paid close to $100 to visit.

He had plenty of opportunity and skilled legal advisors to set up trusts and endowments years before his demise and chose not to. Exactly why, nobody really knows for sure.

On the topic of making a bit more revenue, one of the interesting things about the Museum of Flight is that you can rent its grand gallery/main hall for high budget private events with catering. It's not cheap, but if you're having some kind of grand corporate party or high-budget wedding or something, it's a very unique facility. Their catering contractors can set up tables and chairs all around the empty walking space in the main hall.

https://www.museumofflight.org/visit/private-events/

My employer had a Christmas party at the Museum of Flight pre-pandemic. I didn't attend, but people who were there still rave about the great time they had.

More discussion about the closure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40789179

I would say a part of it is that we're practically buried in computers on a daily basis. The computer industry and computer-adjacent industries aren't really interested in old machines - it's all about what's newer and better.

Compared to the airplane - a properly maintained airplane can last for quite a while. We aren't buried in airplanes - if they were that common, I'm pretty sure no one would care about the history of airplanes.

Jason's write-up is good. It wasn't a museum, it was one guy's personal collection. What happens to your personal collection after you die is up to whoever you leave it to, and they're far less likely to care about it than you do. If you don't have a plan for it when you die, then it will almost certainly be scattered to the winds, as happened here. If Allen wanted to start a museum, then he should have started a museum, which includes finding employees and creating a funding model that will keep it running past the death of one particular sociopath. It's not anyone else's responsibility to "save" his collection.

As someone who lives a mile from Paul-land (SLU Seattle) we feel the loss and mismanagement of his various cool nerd monuments painfully.

And we came to the same conclusion. There is an impulse to accuse him of negligence for not setting up these trusts. But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. How many people really bother setting up permanent legacy estate systems while young?

He wasn't _that_ young, and it's something literally every person with extreme wealth does as part of their normal financial management process. You frequently interact with lawyers and CPAs who advise you on these things as part of their duties. He would have had a conversation about it at some level. He either wanted to take LCM with him, or someone was grossly negligent.

> But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to.

He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 1983, got non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2009, and died in 2018. That's 35 years of reminders—more than half his life!—to plan his legacy.

Something useful I learned recently. It's a lot more satisfying to share your favorite things while you're alive. You're alive to experience the rewards.

Someone close to me wants me to pick out my favorite things from their collection, so they can have the pleasure of giving them to me. Took me a while to understand.

Not everyone is worried about a legacy or where there stuff goes after they're gone. It's the least of my worries, personally.

He was diagnosed with cancer more than 30 years before his death, which also recurred almost a decade before his death. That kind of thing usually gives one a kick in the pants to get your affairs in order. To have those health incidents, that kind of wealth, and still leave so many loose ends, definitely warrants accusations of negligence.

Negligence of what? Sounds like this guy was doing something as a favor, I don’t see what obliged him to ensure it was kept available after he died.

> negligence, noun - failure to take proper care in doing something.

Negligence does not mean that he was obligated to show more care than he did. Pick whatever word you want, my point is just that he had ample warning and opportunity to get affairs in order if he cared about the longevity of those projects.

That is a good point, but my reading of “accusations of negligence” (and I think a common interpretation in this context) would be that there was a responsibility for the accused party to do something and they didn’t.

Yeah, I blame his sister. I don't know what happened behind closed doors (if anything) but I'm also disappointed neither gates nor balmer seemed to pick up the pieces either, or even Bezos given his presence in SLU

I would have thought his sister would have wanted to keep operating as a kind of memorial to brother.

She likely doesn’t have Paul’s passion for computers…not her fault.

Paul Allen could have set up an endowment if he wanted the collection to last. But he didn’t for some reason, despite having founded other formally endowed organizations like the Allen Institute.

I'm surprised Jodi Allen hasn't sold his sports teams yet...things she was reportedly not all that interested in at the time of his death.

Arainach nails this below

Just having to go through close not-at-all-rich relatives' ordinary household crap and various beloved (by them) keepsakes and deal with the pain and hassle of that in the wake of their deaths is bad enough. I can't imagine having a whole friggin' museum of electronic doo-dads dumped on me. I expect I'd take one turn through it with the best of intentions, and walk out the exit already dialing up an auction house to take care of it for me.

This is exactly what we did to my grandmother's Barbie collection. Some museum in Thailand bought them all.

Most folks' lives are just already full, is the thing. We can barely find room for a couple family heirlooms, let alone an inherited hobby, including and maybe especially a collecting hobby.

It's a little different when we're talking about someone so rich that they could pay (to them) peanuts to have someone else take care of it for them, but I still get the impulse to just be done with it, permanently.

No one else's responsibility, but if people care (and there's obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist.

Having volunteered for a small not-for profit for nearly a decade now, there's definitely a whole lot of people that just want something with no desire to give back to that community. You really do get what you put in though.

> but if people care (and there's obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist

Allen's decision was to require those people who care to pony up millions of their own dollars to acquire his personal collection, and keep it running. I'm glad you volunteer your time, but that's a whole other magnitude than purchasing and running a multi-million-dollar business. It's not reasonable to expect volunteers to spring up from nowhere and perform that kind of labor.

Well in this case it's not just "one guys collection", many many people donated priceless items to the museum; those items were then unceremoniously auctioned off for money by the billionaire descendants of Paul Allen. Which makes the whole thing much more disgusting in my opinion.

That is kind of crazy to donate something to a museum and they just sell it off

You would think there would be a provision that if they ever close you have the option to take it back.

I wonder why someone like Bill Gates didn't step in.

the cert for ascii.textfiles.com expired oct 27...

annoying.

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

Damn cute photo. "HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT ALL THE BLINKENLIGHTS!"

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/

I've been there, and it's definitely worth it -- if anyone is in the Seattle area, go check it out asap!

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.

Yeah me too. I wrote a post about why it hurt so much to lose this place along similar lines https://dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/08/16/requiem-for-the-livin...

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.

That is inaccurate. The executors tried, but they didn’t have the legal ability to do anything but sell the collection. Nobody stepped up to buy it.

His sister. Who apparently hates fun and loves money.

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...

I'm no fan of Jody, but "greed on the part of the estate" misallocates the blame.

It would have been trivial for Paul to, at any point in his life, set up trusts for his various projects - the LCM, Cinerama, the SciFi museum, MoPop, etc.

Paul was surrounded with a fleet of lawyers. These kind of trusts are not esoteric knowledge - they're something any upper middle class or upper class family is likely using to keep assets intact without going through probate.

Paul could have set up 5 foundations, given each of them an absurd initial donation of $200M each, and not noticed at all. The fact that he did not do even the minimum legal paperwork to keep them intact rather than part of his estate means that Paul never cared about these things as public benefits or experiences and instead just wanted tax dodges for his toys.

This is not a hypothetical. Without doxxing myself too much, I know some people who were involved in running Paul's household and projects. They tried to convince Paul to set up such trusts prior to his death and were not successful.

Paul's public image was fairly positive during his life but I've soured on him quite a bit as it has become more obvious that it was a facade. Perhaps his plan to turn South Lake Union into a massive park was legitimate, but the other projects were not.

As others were wondering why Bill Gates didn’t step up I figured I should point out, like you did, that wealthy people often have their reputation managed and are often not the people they are widely thought to be.

My impression is that you're attributing a lot of malice to someone who's lack of actions seemed more ambivalent than anything. It's a bit reductionist perhaps, but isn't it all just buildings and stuff? Would it not be weird to keep all of your collections running in perpetuity after your death, even if people seem to love it? Releasing the items into the world to be part of someone else's collection seems pretty reasonable. After all, if you're going to toss $1bn at something, there are plenty of wildly more impactful things you could do with it, not that he'd have been in a position of needing to pick one thing to spend money on.

Projecting a public image of giving back to the community while actually being apathetic and not taking any safeguards is malicious.

Calling something a "museum", as Paul did multiple times, implies a consistency of existence and a theme that is more than just "my collection". The LCM, in particular, was unique. The Computer History Museum is great but is primarily a bunch of powered-off piles of metal and silicon. The few things that are running are demos, not interactive.

The LCM let you go up and play with nearly all of the machines. You could write a program on a PDP or an Apple. You could punch cards. You could stand in next to a powered on Cray and a Mainframe and witness how loud they were. More than the exhibits, they had a staff of people who knew the machines - who repaired them, who had worked with them, who could answer your questions about them. That kind of expertise assembled in one place doesn't exist anywhere now.

Nah, I think you're you're overstepping with that characterization. All of those good qualities existed, the fact that they don't anymore doesn't take away from that, and now you have fond memories of experiencing it while it did exist. I get that you feel some sense of betrayal, and you don't need to have any particular impression of him permanently, but you also don't need to retroactively erase his face from your photos (metaphorically). You got to enjoy it for a time, and now you can't, but places come and they go, it's just the nature of things.

I was sad to see that most of your downtown had been replaced with Amazon campuses and seemingly sanitized, and that your council is butchering the already awful waterfront with a new highway, but at least they mounted the pink elephant sign next to some fake grass out front, and have ample parking.

In that context, I can see how a few more sentimental cultural spaces going away would hit a bit harder. Take the Showbox away and that would be another hit. But when it does, it doesn't mean the owner hates the Seattle population, it means time marches on, people value what they value, and you adapt.

> Projecting a public image of giving back to the community while actually being apathetic and not taking any safeguards is malicious.

What you describe is hypocrisy, not malice.

So at most that suggests he didn’t care too much about the legal details, liked to make exaggerated claims on the record, and didn’t care too much about what the general public thought of him when he was no longer around.

Which of course doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of his character or personality.

But that’s not much different from most other people, including most HN users.

Paul Allen was Seattle's rich, crazy uncle. He threw money on so many projects (RIP Cinerama, which was my favorite theater).

Jody Allen is a complete black box that answers to no one. She doesn't care about the sports teams either, so it's a mystery why the entire org doesn't just cash out at this point.

Thankfully, SIFF was able to save Cinerama (thanks to another ex-Microsoftie) and it's back in operation. I agree that it's a true treasure.

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?

Bletchley Park in the UK is home to the National Museum of Computing - they're both FANTASTIC to visit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Museum_of_Computi... has a working rebuild of a Colossus Mark 2.

Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum

Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, GA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Museum_of_America

Not a computer museum but I have a soft spot for the Connections Museum in Seattle, WA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_Museum

CHM has been my favorite to visit every time I'm in the area. I do wish they would have more modern stuff though. Especially the period between 90s to 2010s. There are some parts (first iPhone, Palm Pilot), but I wish they would continue because the internet age has been incredibly important.

A secret amazing museum: System Source just north of Baltimore: https://museum.syssrc.com/. Much more amazing than the website makes it seem!

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.

Maybe I’m the exception but I went maybe 30 or 40 times. There was so much joy in sharing my childhood with my child. Also the small gift shop had someone who knew their obscure technology history book, I must have bought 10 books from that shop.

A museum does not need a business model, per-se. If it goes in the national interest it should be preserved by the country.

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.

Ellis island could easily be converted into luxury condos. You could serve finance bros in NYC and New Jersey!

Maybe this is something DOGE can look into.

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...

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