The Computer Museum of America reclamation project | Hacker News Reader

The Computer Museum of America reclamation project

computer-museum.org

115 pointsrbanffy43 comments

It amazes me how difficult it is to keep computer museums alive.

Like Boston used to have a great computer museum in the 1980s back when Boston had a computer industry. I guess though it is hard to keep a PDP-10 alive today and it's not impressive to kids today to play LUNAR LANDER on a VT-102.

Not all computer museums fail - there are a few that have endured. The one in Mountain View, for instance, is a direct continuation of the one from Boston.

A lot of very nice computer collections are parts of bigger ones in larger, less specialised, museums.

It’s rare for museums to keep artefacts operational. The ones that still work are usually treated as the big attraction because they demand attention and maintenance.

I was recently in Bletchley Park, where I saw a partially working Bombe (they only run it partially because of the wear), and their smaller computer museum (there are a lot of machines that are available for visitors to play with) and the one in Cambridge, which has classrooms with BBC micros, as well as many other interesting machines - Suns, SGIs, Amigas, Ataris, Spectrums, and even a Lisa, which had a boot issue.

I have to say the kids in the last two seemed thrilled to play Lemmings on Amigas and Archimedes machines. Not a PDP-1, but still cool.

> It’s rare for museums to keep artefacts operational.

The Living Computer Museum tried until the money ran out. Here's the auction list from when the Living Computer Museum was liquidated.[1]

[1] https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-...

Paul Allen did not structure the financials for it to succeed, which is unfortunate. I got to go there once and it was amazing.

I also went there, shortly before it shut down during the pandemic. A friend talked me into visiting when we’re were in town for a scientific meeting. I am so glad I went.

The museum on the afternoon we visited was nearly empty. As a result, the museum docents were happy to let us monopolize their time. I mentioned offhandedly that I had always wished I could try programming SmallTalk on an Alto, and the docent said with a grin “sure!” He reloaded their Alto with a programming environment and gave me a short tutorial. I quickly crashed the machine, but I had a lot of fun along the way.

I got to try many other machines that night. I often think with sadness about how my students will no longer be able to easily have this experience.

His sister (at his behest??) decided to lean into a smaller number of projects for his money. It does seem like a miss that they couldn't keep it going. There's enough money in Seattle that it should have been doable with the right charismatic leader and fundraising.

> His sister (at his behest??) decided to lean into a smaller number of projects for his money.

And didn't do any of the obvious things one might have done if they wanted to preserve the museum's existence, like finding a buyer or starting a foundation. She did the easy thing and scrapped it for parts.

(IIRC she was the executor of his will, trustee of his estate, and the CEO of the company he left most everything to, so she had all the agency she needed to do something responsible with the museum)

I'm bitter about the outcome too, but doesn't it seem like Paul could have _easily_ made a plan for the museum's continued existence or the donation of the computers into worthy hands? I can't see any scenario where the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft wouldn't have had those plans had he wanted them..so I can only conclude he _didn't_ care materially about the importance of the computers separate from himself.

I agree that it would have been trivially easy for him to give the museum a long-term future. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about what he cared about.

The Living Computer Museum wasn't structurally a museum, it was Paul Allen's collection. Part of running a museum includes having a plan in place that the museum will continue running past the death of one particular billionaire. Allen never did this, so when he died the LCM died with him. It would have been trivial for someone of Allen's wealth and status to get one of his lawyers to set up a legal structure with an endowment that would have allowed the museum to continue to operate indefinitely rather than become a part of his estate. For whatever reason, he chose not to do this.

Wow I’m surprised by how high the realized prices are

Who is buying these things? Private collectors?

I think the prices are still really modest if you look at them in perspective. One of the small, irreplaceable stock of surviving PDP-10s could be had for less than the cost of a mediocre used Ferrari.

Antiquities and heirlooms can be a good stable investment, the same reason people trade art or watches or guns or cars. Some of these are fun to use without reducing value.

A lot of people had a strong nostalgic attachment to DEC PDPs because they were their first experience of hands-on computing.

So SV always had a community of very wealthy nerds who could afford a used PDP-10 and its insane running and maintenance costs.

But... the community was always very small.

And today, the number of people with that kind of money and a similar nostalgic attachment to increasingly remote history is even smaller.

> Antiquities and heirlooms can be a good stable investment, the same reason people trade art or watches or guns or cars.

It is only an investment if it (likely) gains yield. Otherwise it is just a means of preservation of value.

Most of these things have large categories that are inherently disinflationary. You can't make a new authentic vintage Ferrari. Whether they are fungible is the main problem and case by case. But you generally don't do it to build wealth, it's an expression of it that happens to have yields if taken seriously.

The mystery of how a computer works is what drove me. I was interested in the mass produced microprocessor based systems. Once I found per integrated circuit system it became a combination of logic and hand crafted boards.

This is is the area I focused on. I'm now at point where I would rather shed objects than collect them. I will probably hold on to the rarest handmade objects. The mass produced from the late 70's to the early 2000's I would like to get rid of.

I am prompted here to ask "Why that name?" Trolling? Lapsed trademark squatting? I recommend a less confusing moniker if this is a genuinely serious attempt at a museum and not just baiting a collector(s) with deep pockets.

There is Large Scale Systems Museum in Western PA.

https://www.mact.io/

Rhode Island Computer Museum https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home

Another shout-out for Rhode Island Computer Museum. They're very "hands-on", and just about any time you drop in you may be recruited to help chase down a problem with a PDP-9 or be compelled to play a game of O.G. Spacewar.

Their "computer crypt" is something to behold, too.

Don't sleep on the Rhode Island Computer Museum

That sounds ominous.

Some might surprise you. I brought my Altair over to a friend's house and his clever 5th grade son was enthralled by it. I explained binary numbers and how to convert from binary to octal. Then I taught him some basic 8080 assembly instructions and he was entering his own programs on the front panel shortly later. I wrote out a basic program for adding two 8 bit integers and without my explanation, he figured out converting decimal <-> octal and chose some numbers you might expect from a 5th grader, like adding 6 and 7, and choosing two numbers that summed to 67 in decimal.

I've always thought "computers" was an odd discipline as it had virtually no interest in its history. Yeah, they were large, slow blobs, but without all of the old machines we'd have no hacking, and no new machines (or marketplace). Individuals might have interest in individual machines, but compared to things like history, virtually nothing at scale. Which is sad as the world's becoming "computers".

I know it's not the same as a functioning PDP-10, but the Byte Shop in Jamaica Plain has a functioning Altair 8800 connected to an ADM-3A dumb terminal, among other working computers from the 1970s and 1980s.

https://byteshop.io/

Usually these appeal mostly to people in the field. I've tried to take many people to computer museums but generally they aren't interested unless they are software engineers themselves.

I suspect this applies to almost all museums.

I just came back from the The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) in the UK at Bletchley Park. It was fantastic. They have a wide variety of working systems that you can play with, from home computers to mainframes, as well as Bombes and the Colossus (used to break the Lorenz cipher), and WITCH. Very cool. https://www.tnmoc.org/

Quasi-related: If you're into old telephone switching equipment (some of which is computer-based), the Connections Museum in Seattle is not to be missed.

I regret not having the time to stop by the Connections Museum in Seattle when I was there. They're working on a new museum in Denver.

Their YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

It is at once obvious and hard for people to internalize that there will come a time in the future when our time will be as far in the past as ancient Rome is to us. We might not be interested in old magazines and artifacts from our grandparent's childhoods, but they will be (at least one hopes). There are so many ways that we ought to be more considerate of future generations, and this is one them. These museums are our Libraries of Alexandria.

For anyone who finds themselves in the vicinity of Atlanta. I can highly recommend the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art. Which was also formerly called the Computer Museum of America, but AFAIK has no relation to the one in San Diego.

Anyway, it's clearly a labor of love. They have some very cool artifacts from the space program (e.g. a some of the Space Shuttle and Apollo main computers). And a large fraction of the floor space is devoted to a new, very comprehensive exhibit on the history of Apple, with just about every product they ever made plus some internal prototypes.

I feel like there are probably a lot of users on HN who have access to old data such as old BBS archives and stuff which would be appreciated by archive.org or Archive Team.

I know some of that found its way to http://textfiles.com/ whose owner is associated with the Archive Team -- though it's focused on text rather than executables, of course.

In the Netherlands there is a computer museum with a huge collection. The computers can be used by anyone. Really a great experience for kids these days and adults.

https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/

Conveniently located in outer Eindhoven!

"Currently (spring of 2026) graduate students in the Museum Studies and Archival Studies programs at Claremont Graduate University are working on-site at San Diego State University to create an index of what is in the former Computer Museum of America collection.

This research program is being underwritten by an anonymous donor, and will continue into the summer."

Wow... undoubtedly much stuff that's been collecting dust for decades, and they haven't even taken inventory of what's there? Or (assuming the effort described above went ahead) no result posted on the website.

Cool! The pictures remind me of my business partner Tom's basement - full of every computer and device he ever owned since the 1970's. But his are more orderly, sorted and filed and often in the original packaging. It'll be a great contribution to some museum one day.

They should make the catalog online and available so people know how they can help.

Sigh, I offered cool IMSAI gear with loads of cards to a computer museum, and they preferred "autographed" stuff, "prestige" items, negating the pioneer spirit of those of us who soldered countless thousands of parts, sockets and interconnects.

Dsigned by Ty Warner, of course) the experience will live with me as long as I live and can instill in younger people that pioneer spirit (perhaps with SBC's and real-world interfaces) and fun times growing up with these gizmos.

I don't see them as museum pieces to be hung on a wall, and guarded. What good does that do in the tech world as opposed to the art world? I recall hearing about the greatest art theft of all time, IIRC, the one at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. [0]

I previously visited that museum, at a time when passive photography was considered harmful (probably a holdover from the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and thoroughly debunked) and got a raft of shit from a curator about having evil photographic gear in my possession.

Since I never knew his name I never thought to look up whether he was one of the guards bound and gagged in the robbery.

More to the point, "treasures" ( and these are treasures) are for fools to hoard, and you can learn from mere observation, whereas the old gizmos are still "playable"

In fact, a few frayed ribbon cables still need replacement.

UNLESS WE HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO SO.

Claude refused to.

[0] https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/isabella-ste...

> they preferred "autographed" stuff, "prestige" items

That’s sad. Maybe other museums would be more enlightened. In the end, unless the museum is well funded by a government grant or something similar, it’ll need to recover costs from tickets, and prestige items are something they can advertise to the muggles.

Keeping these machines running is hard work and, for the most part, unpredictable - they will go down and need maintenance from time to time. These is a constant tension between keeping it operational and keeping it original, as tools, materials, parts, and techniques become unavailable, and replacing parts with modern equivalents is a last resort.

I was watching a video of a guy fixing up an old homemade guitar he found. A well built solid piece, only one that exists in the world. A thing somebody spent real time and effort to create, and nearly worthless. While some soulless factory built item from the same era that sold in the thousands is highly collectable with a price to match. There is a sort of tragedy with these things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngq4Hw4B9J0

Saving this for later, I really love a handmade one-off guitar.

I often wish I had the woodworking chops to build a guitar myself, I have a very specific idea of what I want from a guitar.

Very cool and good work. Thank you!

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