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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

Who is buying these things? Private collectors?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is Large Scale Systems Museum in Western PA.

https://www.mact.io/

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

Don't sleep on the Rhode Island Computer Museum

That sounds ominous.

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.

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.

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