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.
I don't get how it could cost 10 million / year
10 million is not even a lot - a typical McDonalds can cost over a million dollars a year to operate.
Here are the 2023 numbers.
https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonal...
Unlike the Museum of Flight, nearly everything at WAAAM is still in flyable condition and they have an amazing restoration team on site.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You would think there would be a provision that if they ever close you have the option to take it back.
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.
annoying.