The sad reality is that you can spend a lifetime collecting something, the but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it, is pretty close to zero. That's true of multi-million dollar vintage computers, or your childhood stamp collection that's mostly worthless. Paul's mistake was not properly establishing a foundation & endowment to maintain this musuem, which almost certainly leaks lots of money.
I personally have a decent art collection that I've amassed over the past couple decades. I have a few pieces earmarked in my will to specific friends & family that have really liked certain pieces (they don't know), but the reality is that my estate executor is going to sell the vast majority of it, and at 50¢ on the dollar of what I paid.
The issue with estate sales is that they are usually estate disposals. People inheriting their parents’ stuff are usually themselves grown adults with their own busy lives, and the average estate consists of immense amounts of clutter that the inheritor has approximately zero interest in. They’re grieving, they’re seeking closure. Not looking to spend years sifting through hundreds of thousands of items of household bric-à-brac looking to extract value. They want your house cleared so they can sell it and hopefully pay off a bit of their own mortgage.
This is all sadly too true, which is why I think we should do our best to declutter as we age. Ideally when our time comes, we should only have things of immediate use and value to us left, and pretty much none of "might be good to have one day".
I've seen instances where people couldn't get rid of things due to grief and decided to keep it all tucked away for several decades, leaving the decluttering to the following generation(s). Better then to be a bit proactive.
Well, yes. But that assumes someone with the capital and interest in kicking off a probably money-losing museum. After all, another computer museum with some significant holdings also went out of business 20-30 years ago. Silicon Valley is not unique but computers and other industrial artifacts are just not what most people have in mind when they're looking for a museum to go to.
My Dad collected antique cap guns. By the "collector's bible" its "worth" $40 - $50 grand. He got zero offers for it when it became clear he needed to liquidate some of his "stuff" to pay for health care. So yeah, I don't think my collection of "classic" computers will return anything to my heirs sadly.
Well, I see classic 1970s-80s computers that I'm interested in selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay etc.
Gen-Xers who grew up with them are getting nostalgic, and many of them have a lot of disposable income and plenty of space to house them.
But it is a lot of work to get that kind of money for each individual machine. And I suspect it will be a passing fad. In some decades when the Gen-Xers start to log out, the younger generations will not sustain the same kind of market.
The problem is it’s only valuable to those who hold value to it because they grew up with it. Once those collectors get old and start dying off, the bottom falls out of the market because subsequent generations don’t have the same nostalgia. and thus those once valuable collectibles are then basically worthless.
I have first hand experience of this happening too. My dad collected a specific type of model railway. His collection used to be worth thousands but by the time I inherited it all the other collectors were also dead and neither myself nor my brother wanted to maintain the collection. So we sold it for practically nothing.
Dad would be turning in his grave if he knew but frankly, he was the only person who had sentimental value to that collection and we needed the space. It wasn’t even about the money for us, it was literally just multiple boxes of stuff we knew we wouldn’t ever use and didn’t want to keep indefinitely just to honour the memory of dad (we have far better ways to honour his memory).
This isn’t meant to sound insensitive because I loved my dad and still miss him a lot.
I have a large collection of retro gaming consoles and 8 and 16 bit computers. Plus hundreds of games on physical media. I love my collection just like my dad loved his trains. But I know my family will sell it for a pittance the moment I pass away. And I’m fine with that. I own it because it brings me pleasure. I didn’t buy it thinking my family should honour my legacy by hoarding it too.
I enjoyed stamp collecting as a kid. I inherited a stamp album from a distant relative who I think was a clipper ship captain or something along those lines. Was probably worth some money once upon a time. I should look at it one of these days. I'm sure it (and my own collection) are worth nothing today.
Yeah, I'm really nostalgic for 90s era computer & gaming stuff — turns out, that stuff is pretty expensive right now cause all of us that grew up with it have the disposable income to re-buy it. 30-40 years from now when we're all dying & downsizing? I'm sure that market will crater.
We've seen this play out before. This couple in Wisconsin stocked up on antique phones when the demand was hot in the 1980s, now they are in their 80s and they can't get rid of them:
They should advertise up here in Canada. Functional rotary phones are selling like hotcakes for $50-80 a pop. Especially original non-standard (not-black) colours.
That's like collector cars that peak in value for the generation after they were made. If it was a poster on your wall growing up, you want it when you are old and wealthy. The generation after is less interested.
Computer prices are a bathtub curve for interesting computers. Very expensive at the start, then they're worthless garbage for 10-40 years, then prices start to rise. If it's not interesting, then they just stay worthless.
Examples:
- Supercomputer parts
- SGI, HP 9000, Sun SPARC machines and parts
- More esoteric UNIX workstations
- PDPs
- VAXen (how many complete cabinet-style VAXen still exist?)
- Apples
- Terminals (since almost all of these were tossed, these are surprisingly expensive even in bad condition)
And probably need to be in pretty mint condition and find the right buyers. Nothing I have is mint and I wouldn't even try to sell it. The minicomputer boards are from a once major minicomputer maker but very few people have probably even heard of them today.
VT100 has some demand; not later less iconic terminals. (Personally, I think I still have a few V2xx and a Wyse or two.) Many of these eBay listings are effectively permanent, from commercial resellers who are waiting for the rare case that some business somewhere really wants an exact replacement for an old system component that no one wants to risk changing.
I may still have a Sun 3/60 pizza box (as well as a Sparc or two), and maybe even keyboard and cables (one of the common problems — I've had people excited about a ‘free’ SGI Indy but they come to their senses when they realize it's a blue paperweight without time, money, and luck finding the ancillaries). Fortunately I found takers for my (three!) deskside Sun 3/160s about a decade ago. But even for a single pizza box, shipping has become a killer for non-local transfers (I'm outside US; SW Ontario).
A few of my pieces are quite desirable and valuable, most of them not. I looked at the numbers, and all together 40-50% of what I paid is the ballpark of today's value, not including any consignment fees.
I've said this before, and for you I'm assuming there's no rush, but the best person to sell the "valuable" part of the collection is you.
Now granted, most collections are not art - so I'm assuming you gave fewer distinct pieces than say stamps.
My dad had a serious stamp collection. Had he died with it complete, we would have sold it for a few $ to a dealer. The cost of (him or us) going through it to find "the good stuff would be too high.
Take your art. Unless you've cataloged it, had it appraised, and keep that updated every few years, your heirs will likely just sell it as a job-lot to a dealer. Given his costs, and risks, he'll pick a small number (like $50 per). Your Rembrant is his to find.
What my dad did was sell off the expensive stuff himself before he died (and told us). He knew what he had, and where to find it. (He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread). At least we knew that what was left was basically worthless and we could donate it with a clear conscience.
When collecting there's a selling price and a buying price. The difference can be -substantial-.
For example, stamps have a catalog. Literally a giant book, with all the stamps and variations, and the current value. (Ahem, buying value). Think if it as a giant "vendor neutral" price guide. [1]
Now obviously when you come to sell you mostly sell to a dealer. So you expect him to take some margin. He has to make a living. But the margin they expect will make your eyes water. (50% to 90% is common). Do test $100 stamp you have is say $10.
But eBay- sell direct. Sure you get more. But still a lot less than book value (partly because scams etc makes eBay risky for good stuff.) And it's it's lot of extra work. Useful for one or two pieces, less useful for 50. (And, of course, scams happen in both directions.)
That's if you know what you have. Selling someone else's collection on eBay when you don't know what you have is equally tricky.
In short, collections are expensive to acquire and hard to get rid of. The value in collecting is the joy of acquiring and having. Collections are (with rare exceptions) not a financial investment.
[1] my insight into stamp collecting died 20 years ago, so I'm guessing this catalog is online now.
I'm a lifelong collector of a variety of (very) niche things, and have at times sold or tried to sell items from my collections, or whole collections at once. You're right about everything, I would only add that each category of thing is its own world in terms of liquidity and how certain you can be of obtaining a guide price. It also pays off to learn about the collector cultures and communities surrounding each type of thing, so you know what obscure periodical or special interest show, etc. to target when you are trying to sell. Never be in a rush, and the other thing that can make a difference is developing good product photography/videography skills.
Patient buyers are another characteristic of long tail markets on eBay.
The pool of stamp collectors etc. is small relative to say guitar players; there’s not an endless September; and buying from dealers is the “socially acceptable” way of starting.
So potential buyers on eBay tend to be experienced bargain shoppers when it comes to ordinary collectability. They will happily wait for the bragging rights price or at least the no way to lose money price.
Sellers don’t control when a sale will happen in the ways buyers do. Once you decide to buy you can — assuming the item is already for sale.
That already for sale part is the difference. Sales have lead times. Even at fire sale prices the decision to sell precedes someone buying. It takes time for the right person to find your item.
Pricing and advertising and marketing can help. But they don’t force the timing of a sale.
I appreciate the advice. My collection is catalogued with what I paid and current-ish fair market values. The future executor will know which handful ones are worth consigning individually and at what galleries, and the rest will likely be bulk sold.
I have bought a lot of stuff at estate auctions. Yeah, a generic estate sale will not generate a lot of money, but if you have serious art (i.e., it would sell to more than a local audience), it can bring in quite a bit. I saw an Alan Bean (the astronaut) painting at one; ended up going for over $30k. And the estate gets all of that; the auction house charges a premium (in this case, 25%) paid by the buyer, but the official auction price is what the seller gets.
That can be a good outcome if things go to someone who values them as much as the original owner.
My Dad had a collectable car. We sold it for a fair price to an enthusiast who drives it, looks after it and keeps in in a public museum when it's not being driven. That was a good outcome. Better than someone in the family hoarding it and letting it deteriorate.
The money was immaterial, main reason for asking a fair price was to discourage someone who didn't value the car from flipping it for a tidy profit. We were also lucky, in that a member of Dad's car club was prepared to vet buyers for us.
Disbanding a closed computer museum isn't a bad thing if the items go to others who will value and display them.
There was a private tank collection in Portola Valley. There was a way to arrange tours but it didn't have anything like regular hours. It was just a guy with lots of money spending it on buying and restoring tanks. Most of them could run under their own power. Stuff like a German Tiger parked facing an American Sherman and a Russian T34. 2 huge garage fulls of these things. And visitors were allowed to climb onto and into all the tanks. It's how I learned that British tanks are righthand drive.
Anyway, guy died, his heirs preferred money to tanks, and they all got sold off. At best they are on display somewhere on the east coast behind velvet rope where no one will touch or drive them again.
Reminds me of the guy (Ken Fritz) who built a $1M listening room that his kids sold for (essentially) parts after he died.
> The total take for the million-dollar stereo system, including the speakers, the turntable, the dozens of other components from detached cones to the reel-to-reel decks? $156,800.
> but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it
That's not the issue, he set up the parts of his empire he cared about so they'd live on (Allen Institute for example) and instructed his sister to sell the rest. She could have gone against his instructions, but the point is he clearly he didn't care whether the Cinerama or the Living Computer Museum continued on. That's on him, not his heirs.
The fact that no other Seattle-adjacent computer billionaires like Gates, Bezos, Simonyi, Ballmer has offered to continue it just shows the generally low quality of people that have gotten rich from tech.
Or the fact that they don't see maintaining a home for a bunch of old computers for people to look at is a priority given other museums and world needs.
It's not like there's a shortage of money for art museums or natural history museums, but we do seem to be closing museums (this one and previously the Boston one) detailing the history of one of the biggest innovations in human history.
When you say "world needs" you mean sports teams and personal space travel? It's safe to say all of them have plenty of money to save this small museum and still fund their hobbies and causes.
What are you basing this assertion on? It was closed because of the pandemic. When that was over Allen had been dead for several years, his instructions had been to sell everything and give it to charity so that's what his sister has been doing. No one attempted to reopen with alternative benefactors or see if visitors would come.
I was there right before the pandemic and there were a decent number of visitors (given that it was a weekday afternoon).
I adored the Living Computers Museum. Being able to just sit down and use an Apple 1, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, and so many more in the same place was incredible. And then, a friendly museum employee being there to show you how to use it, tell you about what made it unique, etc. was even better. It was so much better than most look-but-don’t-touch museums.
It’s really a travesty that Paul Allen’s sister seems bent on dismantling everything he left behind.
The dude was sick on and off for years, could have had an army of lawyers setting up these places to continue after him, and didn't bother. Don't blame his sister who was left this mess.
The best I can tell from talking with insiders at a couple of his properties, is that he did a beyond bad job at “succession planning”. The light exception being MoPOP of course but that’s a different beast. So without setting up foundations/entities to fund/run your projects and getting people aligned before you pass, odds are your estate won’t.
So want to blame the family. But really Paul Allen’s fault here.
The same thing happened to another one of Paul’s wacky passion projects, the Cinerama theater. That ended up being taken over by the Seattle Film Festival after being shut down for a few years.
My impression is that Paul died somewhat suddenly and simply didn’t make arrangements to keep these things going. His sister is not interested in them so she’s winding them down.
It’s too bad he didn’t set up some kind of endowment before he passed. Maybe he didn’t want to or maybe he just didn’t get around to it.
I wonder what will happen to MoPop/EMP. AFAIK that’s always been a financial black hole.
Jodie Allen (his sister and only heir) is just following his instructions, from what I understand. She isn't financially benefiting from shutting down the computer museum, she is just executing his will:
> According to multiple reports Paul Allen’s will states that the Paul G. Allen Trust, which contains billions in assets, including the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, will be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects. Paul Allen died in October 2018 and the Trail Blazers have been rumored to be on the sales block for the past few years, but all’s quiet on the Seahawks front. Is Jody Allen trying to hold onto the Seahawks against her brother’s wishes?
The problem is, a lot of projects didn't make it into his list of passion projects. More:
> Sealed lips aside, here’s what we know: In 2010, Allen pledged to bequeath the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. (During his lifetime, Allen gave away more than $2 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.) Tasked with this mammoth undertaking is his sister Jody Allen, trustee and executor of his estate, who is bound by her brother’s wishes as set out in the trust.
One can accuse his sister of not following his instructions, I guess, but unless we know what those instructions are, it isn't a very easy accusation to back up.
I doubt she hates her late brother, any more than any widow who sells off or throws away her late husband's computer collection after his death (which occurs so, so often that it is probably the normal outcome after the collector's death, as opposed to an exception) hates him. It's disinterest.
People get rid of most of the stuff that they inherit, even if it's a "collection" that the relative cared a lot about--especially if it's worth a significant amount of money.
I asked my dad to keep a collection of books for me, about 1.4m x 60cm of bookshelf. They were booked from my mum's family some dating from late 1800s. "They weren't worth anything, I gave them away" ... of course I'm probably the only person to whom they were really worth much. My mum and I shared a love of poetry at one time ...
The sad thing about book collections is that they're not worth buying for book antiquities because chances are that most won't sell at all and the few games might just be worth a few $ so most just end up in the recycling bin once the owner dies. On the other hand that means if you're willing to buy whole shelves filled with books that haven't been preaccessed they can be incredibly cheap.
This, not buying armfuls of books off individual sellers, is how used book stores get much of their stock. Running a good one (not just full of shitloads of Stephen King and Nora Roberts) means going to lots of estate sales.
Also, a lot there for a while but less now that they’re almost all gone, being there with cash in hand to buy the remaining stock in bulk when a competitor/colleague goes out of business.
Sometimes in a good used book store you can spot substantial remnants of some particular enthusiast’s collection, like a whole bunch of German-language original 19th century scholarship on the history of the conquest of South America or whatever. Some improbable number of books on some niche topic, nearly all of which probably belonged to one person (or, sometimes, institution) before landing there.
The official story, at least, is that his will dictates his former holdings be sold off and the proceeds donated to charity. So it sounds like she's doing her duty as executor of his estate. Similar questions have lingered for years over what will become of the Seahawks and the Trailblazers.
I think she doesn’t care about it enough to hold it in contempt except insofar as it represents an asset of Paul’s that hasn’t been converted into money.
Around two months ago I stopped by the building and saw through a window that the interior seemed mostly untouched. So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in until a very loud intercom told me to get off the property. Probably not the reason for this announcement but I can’t help but feel partially responsible.
The RE-PC vintage computing warehouse nearby also has a small museum with equipment going back to the 60s, you can’t touch anything but other sections of the warehouse have plenty of 90s and 2000s desktops set up that you can play with. It’s a good place to look for ancient cables, obscure controllers (I saw two SideWinders there last time), and older displays, I’m planning to go back to pick up the Apple Studio CRT https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...
They didn't say they intended to break in, they said they looked to see if there was a way to break in. If they could see a way, then so could anyone else, which would suggest that they aren't being protected. No actual ingress needed to come to that conclusion.
Question to see if they’re not being neglected? It wouldn’t be the first financially failed museum that thinks just letting the building fall into disrepair is a cheap way of getting rid of their collection.
if the building is unguarded and full of valuable items, someone will loot it. if you're the one that loots it, you get to decide what happens to them. if you don't, someone else will
Eeeeh, I think there is a more good-faith take on the events. My personal take is that they were just trying to do the meatspace equivalent of a bug bounty, without even attempting to touch or take any items.
Kinda like how, typically, you would be incliner to file user bugs and report any vulnerabilities you find in a product you care about. Despite having zero monetary incentive to do so (more often than not).
this is pretty unfortunate. iirc they had the only digital pdp-10 in the world that's currently in working order — the line of computers on which emacs, microsoft basic, simtel-20, and compuserve all originated. most of the arpanet was pdp-10s at one time. nasa's gsfc spacelink ftp site, where you could download space photos, was the only one i ever encountered running
hopefully that machine will find a good home in the auction and not be destroyed in the process
the fact that it's shut down is, as bobaliceinatree said, a terrible indictment of paul allen's estate planning. unless he just didn't care about the people who survived him
Very far from the only working one. I have a working one, for now, but we don't know how much longer I will be here because I am currently dying from a government paperwork error that nobody in government has the authority to fix.
Long story short, my Medicare records got screwed up. Some database entry isn't in the correct state that allows their processes to proceed. None of the humans I can get in contact with has the authority (or knows anyone with the authority) to manually correct the record, because that would be outside of their processes. Since the record isn't in a valid state, my access to medications I need to stay alive is being cut off. The retail cost of the just one of the medications is more than 100% of my income.
Have you contacted your US senator or US representative? They can often clear up these kinds of issues by locating the single person in government that you actually need to talk to.
I wonder what would happen if you contacted your representative's political opponent, esp this being an election year. You might be able to use the leverage from the opponent to make the incumbent fix the problem.
Currently looking into overseas mail-order. I'm too far from Mexico or Canada to drive there; I haven't considered darknet/alibaba because if I get sold a fake, I won't be able to tell without lab tests, and I can't afford the lab tests. There's also some concern that by the time I have negative lab results that would indicate a fake it may be too late to save the kidney anyway.
You need to talk to an attorney, as this understanding is incomplete. Parties can and do sue the federal government all the time. Look at the Supreme Court decisions this week alone which include several cases against the United States.
But I also suggest physically going to your congressperson’s office (the local one in your district, not DC) and explaining the situation. Instead of calling/waiting for a response.
yes, and maybe xkl still makes pdp-10s, and kv10 may be ready soon. not sure what happened to conroy's pdp-10/x hdl. but there is value in artifacts too
It’s so incredibly stupid to sell off each piece of the museum - 50K for a DEC-10? Does the Allen estate really need the cash? Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy.
It was extremely cool and educational to visit the museum as an EE undergraduate, to visually see and use parts of the history of computing. It’s a massive loss to loose this collection. Some of the items we will never get back or see again.
> Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy.
Jody Allen is respecting her brother’s wishes. Paul Allen wanted his estate liquidated and the proceeds donated to charity. That’s exactly what’s happening.
as i said in another comment, that's possibly the only dec-10 in working condition in the world
selling it off piece by piece probably improves the chances that the most important pieces will be preserved rather than the whole thing going to a scrap metal dealer
I doubt this. Not because I doubt your sincerity; I'm just pessimistic given the hostility displayed by the administrative class toward anything that doesn't have a currency symbol in front of it.
pdp-10 fans have currency symbols tho. lots of people on hackers-l are, as they say, financially independent, and a fair fraction of them are donors to the chm and fans of the pdp-10. plus you have the modern #pdp-10 freenode crowd
The article doesn't clearly distinguish between the museum auctioning off the item it owns and the Allen estate auctioning the items that it had loaned to the museum, but there's a difference.
This was one of my favorite museums in the world, probably with no analogues.
When I interned in Microsoft in 2014, I got to experience Seattle — and the Living Computer Museum was one of the highlights of that experience.
Simply being able to walk in and close-up something simple (say, Fibonacci sequence) on a typewriter terminal of the PDP-10 — and then see the typewriter type the output back to you on the same piece of paper was absolute magic (and a part of computing I wish we still had).
you know, you can plug a dot-matrix printer into a parallel port on a linux box and redirect stdout and stderr to that port. last time i did this was 27 years ago (my monitor had been broken in shipping, but i had an inkjet printer that printed text line by line), but it probably still works. i recall i had to telnet to localhost to get it to not be line-buffered, and you might have to hack that a different way nowadays
around here office supply stores still sell fanfold paper and printer ribbons
of course your linux box isn't a pdp-10, but that doesn't seem to be what you're missing
There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You could plop yourself down at a Xerox Alto and hack away to your heart's content. Being able to share this experience with my son is something I will always remember about this museum.
A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.
Some embarrassingly rich person needs to give the Computer History Museum enough money to buy all of it.
It's puzzling why all his stuff was organized in such a way that it could get wound down like this. Seems like it would have been way better to create a nonprofit then endow it with enough money to keep operating independently.
I submitted this message, feel free to copy the same text and submit yourself also:
-----------------------------
I recently became aware that the Living Computers Museum, which was created by Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder), is shutting down. As someone in the technology industry, I find that very sad! The museum was really magical. I'm wondering if the Gates Foundation can step up and save the museum from closing?
> Presumably billg is reading this thread already.
I would assume he's not wasting his time with HN. He's rich enough and well-known enough that I'd think he'd be able to get superior versions of everything HN can provide.
I mean, if you have billg money, I guess you could have a couple ex-FAAMG software developers on payroll just so you could call them up at any hour of the day and have them give you uninformed hot-takes about an article you found online and just forwarded them, and need them to tell you something based on the headline without actually reading the article, but that seems a bit weird. I don't even have Snoop Dogg money to pay someone to roll joints for me though, so what do I know about having billg-levels of money.
“Hello, Phil? Yeah, doing fine, look, I need 200 takes on React, 50 of them actually having nothing to do with it, 100 that are just flames, 40 that are deeply stupid, and 10 that are at least informed and a bit insighthful, but not really that interesting or valuable. Please just jumble them up rather than sorting them by quality or usefulness, I want to have to waste a bunch of time and emotional energy finding the good ones. Great, thanks.”
the hn experience wouldn't be complete with only uninformed hot takes; it also requires that they argue with everything you say and then accuse you of being disingenuous
I think CMoA acquired the contents of David Larsen’s museum in Floyd, VA. Larsen was one of the authors of the Bugbook series and the museum was kind of a snapshot of the mid to late 70’s micro scene. I’m glad the Apple I didn’t end up in a Goodwill bin somewhere.
I haven't had the pleasure to visit this specific museum, but I did manage to visit https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/ in my native country of The Netherlands on my last trip to Europe, and it's a real gem, also allowing hands-on interaction. I also "adopted" my first PC.
(for those familiar with The Netherlands, it's located in Helmond)
The museum was also a generous community space; I remember attending a Seattle Indies game jam and other events before the pandemic. It was very special to be surrounded by reminders of early-computing exploratory spirit.
Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement that the market has never seen such a diverse collection “that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity — much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing.”
These honeyed words ring deeply hypocritical when you consider Christie's sees the collection purely as an asset capable of yielding a significant commission once sold.
The closure came as the estate began to deal with a number of properties that no longer had a billionaire benefactor to help keep the doors open, and in line with what the estate says was Allen’s desire to sell his assets after his passing.
I wonder about this. If someone has made a vast fortune in technology, retired from that field to take up philanthropy, built a museum to share the benefits of their experience and insight with the next generation, it seems rather unlikely to me that their greatest posthumous aspiration is to have it dismantled and dispersed.
I find the auction of assets like fine art (also mentioned in the article) easier to understand as art collections are semi-ephemeral and the trading and circulation of fine art among the wealthy has been going on for many centuries. But it also strikes me that having raised $1.6 billion by selling off the art, the estate is not exactly short of funds to keep the museum functioning.
If you're ever close to Bonn, Germany, check Out the Artihmeum[0]. It starts at the top floor with the oldest "computers" and gets more modern as you walk down. They even have an original Enigma encryption machine.
I thought it was so sad that they shut down the computer museum in Boston years ago. It makes me think of how much more geographically diverse the computer industry was in the US back in the 1980s and how Boston has just given up on its history. It used to be associated with the Boston Children's Museum which had a DEC-10 way back in the early 1980s. They were pretty lucky because DEC would usually donate PDP-8s or PDP-11s to places like that.
It’s still around but it was moved to the old SGI building in the SF/Bay Area. I went to the old one growing up; my dad worked at DEC and it was great fun to see all the hardware at the CHM.
the computer museum history center existed as a separate entity before being transferred the assets of the boston computer museum; it's not simply a relocated boston computer museum
I'm from Europe and I've never been to the States, but I loved the remote access to the Living Computers Museum. I'd often do `ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org` to see what was up. I'm glad to see that this will now be `ssh menu@tty.sdf.org`. Will it only be emulators or will there be some real computers?
Paul Allen sure didn't have great foresight for post death. First Cinerama and now the computer museum. The current sentiment with seattle lifers is that he used Seattle as a playground and didn't actually care about the longevity.
EMP now MoPop just keeps hanging on by a thread as well and has gone through lots of turmoil.
Not just billionaires. Gov-funded Ontario Science Centre, which helped to motivate thousands of science museums globally since 1969, hosting 50 million visitors, is being shut down, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752904
Unfortunately not in this case. It's a kind of political issue right now with the current provincial government, and it's looking a lot like greed got in the way since it is in a prime location.
Justifying the adjacent "Science Center" subway station, increasing real estate value of the science museum land. If the land was going to be auctioned to the highest bidder, a tech company consortium could have bid for the opportunity to protect this science student feeder of US/Canada university and industry tech talent.
Instead of Ontario Science Center, why not Apple/Bell/Google/Rogers/Samsung/Shopify or even Toronto Science Center, if that would forestall destruction of a priceless historical landmark? Same principle for the Living Computer Museum, why not Amazon/Microsoft/Valve Living Computer Museum?
Because companies are there to make money, especially those owned mostly by nameless shareholders and run by committee.
And this "brand building" that you describe here has basically zero return on investment.
Of course some company - proablably a private one (not public), could invest into it, but if you want to burn money on something your CEO likes or the owners like, you can use other ideas like paying millions to put your logo on soccer tshirts for hundreds of millions. Or hosting a forum ;)
On a side note, I worked in a company that paid a lot of money for golf sponsorships and couldnt figure out why this "marketing" does not work in countries where nobody plays golf. I think they still havent figured out that there are countries outside of USA.
250,000 students a year benefit from Ontario Science Center, the best of whom go onto the engineering and computer science programs of Canadian universities like U of Waterloo and U of Toronto, from where they are recruited by North American tech companies.
> zero return on investment
Any junior i-banker can produce a spreadsheet showing the lifetime labor value of high-quality technical talent educated at Canadian universities, many of whom are recruited to work for US technology companies.
When you translate a sentence using Google, or ask Siri to send a text, or play a song recommended by Spotify, you are using a technology that owes much to the innovative research of Geoffrey Hinton.. “deep learning” – a form of artificial intelligence (AI) based on neural networks.. Hinton’s revolutionary contributions to the field have earned him the nickname “the godfather of deep learning,” and have made Canada a hotbed for high tech.. for his excellence as a global pioneer in deep learning, Hinton received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa from the University of Toronto, where he is a University Professor Emeritus.
> companies are there to make money
Nvidia agrees and invested in the future long before others. Thanks Geoff Hinton for planting seeds of science and money!
Any junior banker can produce a spreadsheet for you that will claim anything you want - it is called Management Consulting.
Anyway, since you know better how those big companies can invest, you can use your own money to reap the benefits. Money is literally lying on the street for you.
Yeah, Foundations with Endowments need business people to run them and manage them and finding ones you trust and creating a corporate culture for them to last is hard. I can't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Paul Allen wasn't interested in establishing those sorts of legacy foundations for some of the same corporate politics reasons he was said to have struggled with Microsoft over the decades.
Even for someone like Allen a few minutes with Quicken Willmaker would have been able to setup a trust to keep any of these things going in perpetuity.
He had cancer decades ago and it came back a few times, didn't he?
He probably convinced himself into thinking he wasn't going to die until it was too late, and things like this probably drop down to fairly low priority at that point.
Not trying to excuse him though; if he actually cared he should've been thinking about it when he was opening the museum.
(His original diagnosis with Hodgkin's Lymphoma was in 1983 according to Wikipedia. Most of the these projects in his life through 2018 were under the specter of that cancer. Even the complication of the additional non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2009 still gave him possibly luckily a few years to have handled some things.)
Not that it makes it that much easier to deal with if you live that much time after a frightening diagnosis, especially because you likely can't know how much time you will actually have. But then again, none of us really know how much time we have. (How's your estate plan? Mine could use work.)
I was lucky enough to go to this in 2019 (thanks Gary for organizing Deconstruct right at the moment in my life where I could make the trip!), and honestly it was _so motivating_.
There's obviously some nostalgia, but seeing a bunch of machines with self-contained tooling and in working order, that you could goof around in with people around you was so satisfying.
I get the complications of running all of that stack, but a part of me would be hopeful for some systemic reproductions of some environments. Something like a "mini Windows 98" with 10 games or so and that copy of QBASIC and some VB.
We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at least not to somebody you'd want to sell) or donate it. There's no organizations dedicated to preserving such properties, as far as I know. So, what do you do? You shut them down, you have not other alternative.
If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs.
If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actual data somewhere, not the actual website.
An one-time snapshot is not the active site under the original domain. You can do a snapshot (even though there's no organized procedure even for that, afaik) but that's not the same as keeping the site running in perpetuity.
And unfortunately archive.org is woefully underfunded. We take it for granted and it could be gone someday. Please support it if you have the means to do so.
Exactly. Unless you've setup a sufficient endowment and a legal entity of some sort, it's not reasonable to expect a relative to keep your passion project going. And even if they do for sentimental reasons for a while, that's just kicking the can a bit down the road.
This is so sad for me on so many levels. Not the least of which that I came very very close to giving them my PDP-5 because they would keep it running and the curator at the time gave the impression that Paul was setting up a trust to keep the Museum operating (which he could have, but did not).
Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy.
> Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy.
I think it is unfair to blame his heir when based on all the information we have his wish was to liquidate the estate and donate the proceeds to charity. His heir doesn’t personally benefit financially from this auction.
He could have set up an endowment to keep the museum going. He didn’t. That’s not the executor’s fault.
David Singmaster, author of the first book on how to solve the Rubik Cube, had a vast collection of mathematical books, papers, ephemera, and a huge collection of twisty puzzles, and other puzzles.
His wish was that it remain in the UK, and he really, really wanted it to stay as a collection. But it's effectively impossible.
Collections, even significant collections[0], are hard to keep together. I wish I had the money necessary to acquire and make accessible collections like this.
[0] I'm not saying David's collection is significant, but it is substantial, and contains many things potentially of interest.
I wish another area group formed to reopen the museum and acquire lots. I assume they tried and those who made so much from the computers success had so little interest in keeping that history living.
I don’t blame the sister as many do, I realize it’s his wish actually. And in some ways it’s the way it should be. The people who love the computer should keep the museum around. It’s just a shame so many wealthy tech people don’t have that love.
Whaaa? Maybe they should donate to, I don't know, the Computer History Museum rather than allow speculative collectors to pick the bones of historical artifacts.
I've wanted to get my hands on an IBM or other with an orange plasma display for a while. Or really any old terminal. It's funny because buying them is very expensive, but places showcasing them are few now.
So, what is the estate going to do with that money? Surely the family has billions they will never be able to spend, but they must liquidate everything that Paul built and loved?
Well, everything except the professional football team and the basketball team oh and also the giant real estate company. All of the stuff that generates lots and lots of money, which seems like you would want to sell for your trusts big philanthropic mission to have the greatest impact.
usually when someone's estate includes a business with employees, shutting it down and selling off its assets is not what the executors do. usually they keep the company running so they can get a reasonable sale price for the whole company
The cinerama and the museum were shut down for Covid and just never came back.
They found someone to take on the Cinerama. But the living computer museum was a taller order. Which is tragic because it was an unbelievably cool place. Being able to use a Xerox Alto and an orginal Microsoft Surface (the one built into a table) was a gift. It's sad that this won't be available for others in the future.
I don't think anyone has a solid public answer about why they didn't reopen with other museums after 2020. It might be too costly, people leaving the organization, etc. to the point that the board didn't think it could reopen.
Surprising. Visited right before Covid, and it seemed rather popular. Children wandering around playing with exhibits. Would have not expected a place like that to go under. Think every floor had maybe 10? folks while I was there.
Really one of the better hands-on museums with the "lab" component. Had lots of neat digital wall displays to play with, and programmable science toys.
Only downside was location. Tried walking cause I had no idea where it really was, and super-quick realized it was way past the coliseum and almost down to the badlands warehouse district by the freight harbor. Right between the railyards. Bad mental model of Seattle distances. Signage was also really difficult to spot. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SPCCJhT7B9aBfANNA Can you even tell there's a museum there?
Weird part from my own perspective, is Gate's runs a non-profit in his spare time as a hobby(?). Even if they weren't best-bros afterward, it would still take something like finger wagging to a functionary to not have this be a PR dumpster fire.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They probably can't, for the same reason it's not going to stay open: it wasn't specified in the will what to do with the LCM, and it does specifically say that the default is to liquidate.
rest in peace, thank you for giving me the memory of what root on an '11 felt like for dms, and a little of that all asm love for the single cve. Someday i will write it a sister and publish in TLCHM memory. farewell friend and thank you for the fish
It sickens me something like this is happening to this unique museum. I knew it was a matter of time, but, still, it’s a tragedy that’s hard to comprehend.
Charitably, you can blame HN's (intentionally?) poor UI design, placing tiny up and down arrows right next to each other so that it's easy to hit the wrong one.
The best living computer museum I ever went to was The Weirdstuff Warehouse. Between it and Fry's I had everything I needed. It is too bad this is closing down, but then again it is hard to keep everything from the past and still move forward.
> A highlight of the sale is a computer which Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.
What? I know lots of people who would save them the trouble and buy it now for $50K. How bad of an investment could that be?
Edit: I'm picturing something large refrigerator sized like the PDP-8 at RePC down the street. If it's cheap because it's a 20-ton white elephant that's a different story.
A dec-10 is pretty big (at the LCM it is in a room that's something like 40' by 20'), needs air conditioning, and needs a beefy electrical supply.
Nobody really knows the market price for such a thing because very few are left in running order and there are very few people with the resources to provide it with water and hay.
Putting an item up for sale to the highest bidder insulates a seller from future claims that the item was sold for a low-ball price in some kind of sweetheart/kickback deal.
The sad reality is that you can spend a lifetime collecting something, the but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it, is pretty close to zero. That's true of multi-million dollar vintage computers, or your childhood stamp collection that's mostly worthless. Paul's mistake was not properly establishing a foundation & endowment to maintain this musuem, which almost certainly leaks lots of money.
I personally have a decent art collection that I've amassed over the past couple decades. I have a few pieces earmarked in my will to specific friends & family that have really liked certain pieces (they don't know), but the reality is that my estate executor is going to sell the vast majority of it, and at 50¢ on the dollar of what I paid.
The issue with estate sales is that they are usually estate disposals. People inheriting their parents’ stuff are usually themselves grown adults with their own busy lives, and the average estate consists of immense amounts of clutter that the inheritor has approximately zero interest in. They’re grieving, they’re seeking closure. Not looking to spend years sifting through hundreds of thousands of items of household bric-à-brac looking to extract value. They want your house cleared so they can sell it and hopefully pay off a bit of their own mortgage.
This is all sadly too true, which is why I think we should do our best to declutter as we age. Ideally when our time comes, we should only have things of immediate use and value to us left, and pretty much none of "might be good to have one day".
I've seen instances where people couldn't get rid of things due to grief and decided to keep it all tucked away for several decades, leaving the decluttering to the following generation(s). Better then to be a bit proactive.
I’m sure if somebody came along with a serious offer for the collection with the goal of exhibiting it somewhere else it would be accepted.
Well, yes. But that assumes someone with the capital and interest in kicking off a probably money-losing museum. After all, another computer museum with some significant holdings also went out of business 20-30 years ago. Silicon Valley is not unique but computers and other industrial artifacts are just not what most people have in mind when they're looking for a museum to go to.
My Dad collected antique cap guns. By the "collector's bible" its "worth" $40 - $50 grand. He got zero offers for it when it became clear he needed to liquidate some of his "stuff" to pay for health care. So yeah, I don't think my collection of "classic" computers will return anything to my heirs sadly.
Well, I see classic 1970s-80s computers that I'm interested in selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay etc.
Gen-Xers who grew up with them are getting nostalgic, and many of them have a lot of disposable income and plenty of space to house them.
But it is a lot of work to get that kind of money for each individual machine. And I suspect it will be a passing fad. In some decades when the Gen-Xers start to log out, the younger generations will not sustain the same kind of market.
The problem is it’s only valuable to those who hold value to it because they grew up with it. Once those collectors get old and start dying off, the bottom falls out of the market because subsequent generations don’t have the same nostalgia. and thus those once valuable collectibles are then basically worthless.
I have first hand experience of this happening too. My dad collected a specific type of model railway. His collection used to be worth thousands but by the time I inherited it all the other collectors were also dead and neither myself nor my brother wanted to maintain the collection. So we sold it for practically nothing.
Dad would be turning in his grave if he knew but frankly, he was the only person who had sentimental value to that collection and we needed the space. It wasn’t even about the money for us, it was literally just multiple boxes of stuff we knew we wouldn’t ever use and didn’t want to keep indefinitely just to honour the memory of dad (we have far better ways to honour his memory).
This isn’t meant to sound insensitive because I loved my dad and still miss him a lot.
I have a large collection of retro gaming consoles and 8 and 16 bit computers. Plus hundreds of games on physical media. I love my collection just like my dad loved his trains. But I know my family will sell it for a pittance the moment I pass away. And I’m fine with that. I own it because it brings me pleasure. I didn’t buy it thinking my family should honour my legacy by hoarding it too.
I enjoyed stamp collecting as a kid. I inherited a stamp album from a distant relative who I think was a clipper ship captain or something along those lines. Was probably worth some money once upon a time. I should look at it one of these days. I'm sure it (and my own collection) are worth nothing today.
Easy thing to do with Unwanted Stamps is Donate to Oxfam Canada. Address to mail your donation to is at this link: https://www.oxfam.ca/take-action/support-oxfam/stamp-out-pov...
This is sad because it's true. Thank you for writing this.
Yeah, I'm really nostalgic for 90s era computer & gaming stuff — turns out, that stuff is pretty expensive right now cause all of us that grew up with it have the disposable income to re-buy it. 30-40 years from now when we're all dying & downsizing? I'm sure that market will crater.
We've seen this play out before. This couple in Wisconsin stocked up on antique phones when the demand was hot in the 1980s, now they are in their 80s and they can't get rid of them:
https://madison.com/news/local/phoneco-wisconsin-telephones-...
They should advertise up here in Canada. Functional rotary phones are selling like hotcakes for $50-80 a pop. Especially original non-standard (not-black) colours.
That's like collector cars that peak in value for the generation after they were made. If it was a poster on your wall growing up, you want it when you are old and wealthy. The generation after is less interested.
I wonder if anyone is buying them at those prices though.
I collected a few machines when they were either being given away at work or nearly given away on eBay.
Computer prices are a bathtub curve for interesting computers. Very expensive at the start, then they're worthless garbage for 10-40 years, then prices start to rise. If it's not interesting, then they just stay worthless.
Examples:
- Supercomputer parts
- SGI, HP 9000, Sun SPARC machines and parts
- More esoteric UNIX workstations
- PDPs
- VAXen (how many complete cabinet-style VAXen still exist?)
- Apples
- Terminals (since almost all of these were tossed, these are surprisingly expensive even in bad condition)
And probably need to be in pretty mint condition and find the right buyers. Nothing I have is mint and I wouldn't even try to sell it. The minicomputer boards are from a once major minicomputer maker but very few people have probably even heard of them today.
Yes, I have a number of things on the parent list (e.g. UNIX workstations, deskside and rackmount VAXen, terminals) and I can't give them away.
Really? Looking at the asking prices on eBay, a VT100 terminal seems to go for many hundreds of dollars even in poor condition?
You wouldn't happen to have SUN 3 workstations?
VT100 has some demand; not later less iconic terminals. (Personally, I think I still have a few V2xx and a Wyse or two.) Many of these eBay listings are effectively permanent, from commercial resellers who are waiting for the rare case that some business somewhere really wants an exact replacement for an old system component that no one wants to risk changing.
I may still have a Sun 3/60 pizza box (as well as a Sparc or two), and maybe even keyboard and cables (one of the common problems — I've had people excited about a ‘free’ SGI Indy but they come to their senses when they realize it's a blue paperweight without time, money, and luck finding the ancillaries). Fortunately I found takers for my (three!) deskside Sun 3/160s about a decade ago. But even for a single pizza box, shipping has become a killer for non-local transfers (I'm outside US; SW Ontario).
I had not done an eBay search for "sold" items until now, some people seem to be paying high prices for Atari Falcon systems.
I have a SPARC Station 2, Ultra 1, Ultra 2 and a Macintosh Quadra 950 that all work and would maybe have resale value if I wanted to get rid of them.
Like the other poster wrote, it is time dependent.
The stuff that went into dumpsters in the 1990s can sell for thousands today on eBay. But in 30 years, they might be dumpster bound again.
I just double checked to make sure, and an Atari Falcon early 1990s 68030 CPU computer sells for around $3000 today.
You're not going to get 50 cents if I know anything about it.
Maybe if you started selling today you could get that, an estate auction will get a few pennies.
A few of my pieces are quite desirable and valuable, most of them not. I looked at the numbers, and all together 40-50% of what I paid is the ballpark of today's value, not including any consignment fees.
I've said this before, and for you I'm assuming there's no rush, but the best person to sell the "valuable" part of the collection is you.
Now granted, most collections are not art - so I'm assuming you gave fewer distinct pieces than say stamps.
My dad had a serious stamp collection. Had he died with it complete, we would have sold it for a few $ to a dealer. The cost of (him or us) going through it to find "the good stuff would be too high.
Take your art. Unless you've cataloged it, had it appraised, and keep that updated every few years, your heirs will likely just sell it as a job-lot to a dealer. Given his costs, and risks, he'll pick a small number (like $50 per). Your Rembrant is his to find.
What my dad did was sell off the expensive stuff himself before he died (and told us). He knew what he had, and where to find it. (He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread). At least we knew that what was left was basically worthless and we could donate it with a clear conscience.
> He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread
You got me curious...
When collecting there's a selling price and a buying price. The difference can be -substantial-.
For example, stamps have a catalog. Literally a giant book, with all the stamps and variations, and the current value. (Ahem, buying value). Think if it as a giant "vendor neutral" price guide. [1]
Now obviously when you come to sell you mostly sell to a dealer. So you expect him to take some margin. He has to make a living. But the margin they expect will make your eyes water. (50% to 90% is common). Do test $100 stamp you have is say $10.
But eBay- sell direct. Sure you get more. But still a lot less than book value (partly because scams etc makes eBay risky for good stuff.) And it's it's lot of extra work. Useful for one or two pieces, less useful for 50. (And, of course, scams happen in both directions.)
That's if you know what you have. Selling someone else's collection on eBay when you don't know what you have is equally tricky.
In short, collections are expensive to acquire and hard to get rid of. The value in collecting is the joy of acquiring and having. Collections are (with rare exceptions) not a financial investment.
[1] my insight into stamp collecting died 20 years ago, so I'm guessing this catalog is online now.
I'm a lifelong collector of a variety of (very) niche things, and have at times sold or tried to sell items from my collections, or whole collections at once. You're right about everything, I would only add that each category of thing is its own world in terms of liquidity and how certain you can be of obtaining a guide price. It also pays off to learn about the collector cultures and communities surrounding each type of thing, so you know what obscure periodical or special interest show, etc. to target when you are trying to sell. Never be in a rush, and the other thing that can make a difference is developing good product photography/videography skills.
Sometimes the best thing you can do with a collection is bequeath it to someone in the hobby who's much younger.
Weeel.. maybe. The joy in collecting is the collecting. Getting it all at once kinda robs the fun..
But bequething them one or two significant pieces can get them started, and perhaps carries more meaning...
Patient buyers are another characteristic of long tail markets on eBay.
The pool of stamp collectors etc. is small relative to say guitar players; there’s not an endless September; and buying from dealers is the “socially acceptable” way of starting.
So potential buyers on eBay tend to be experienced bargain shoppers when it comes to ordinary collectability. They will happily wait for the bragging rights price or at least the no way to lose money price.
Collecting is a hobby. Picking is a business.
[I’m not the person who said it.]
Sellers don’t control when a sale will happen in the ways buyers do. Once you decide to buy you can — assuming the item is already for sale.
That already for sale part is the difference. Sales have lead times. Even at fire sale prices the decision to sell precedes someone buying. It takes time for the right person to find your item.
Pricing and advertising and marketing can help. But they don’t force the timing of a sale.
I appreciate the advice. My collection is catalogued with what I paid and current-ish fair market values. The future executor will know which handful ones are worth consigning individually and at what galleries, and the rest will likely be bulk sold.
That's the way to do it! Mind you paintings are bigger than stamps so it feels like you're cheating.... :)
I have bought a lot of stuff at estate auctions. Yeah, a generic estate sale will not generate a lot of money, but if you have serious art (i.e., it would sell to more than a local audience), it can bring in quite a bit. I saw an Alan Bean (the astronaut) painting at one; ended up going for over $30k. And the estate gets all of that; the auction house charges a premium (in this case, 25%) paid by the buyer, but the official auction price is what the seller gets.
The liquidation value of the average middle-class house is $10k - according to my divorce attorney.
$10k sounds high to me if we're talking about home electronics, furniture, etc?
Do people have a lot of expensive jewelry that's included, or does it include vehicles?
If we're talking the contents, you can get to $10k pretty easily, think appliances (a hundred or so each), laptops, stereo, etc.
If you held a garage sale today and let people go throughout your entire house, you could probably net $10k.
The ones I’m talking about are definitely not middle class.
Few is if they're lucky. More like 1.
Personal collections are for enjoyment, not investment.
I liquidated some of my fathers things for effectively nothing. That he spent decades acquiring.
That can be a good outcome if things go to someone who values them as much as the original owner.
My Dad had a collectable car. We sold it for a fair price to an enthusiast who drives it, looks after it and keeps in in a public museum when it's not being driven. That was a good outcome. Better than someone in the family hoarding it and letting it deteriorate.
The money was immaterial, main reason for asking a fair price was to discourage someone who didn't value the car from flipping it for a tidy profit. We were also lucky, in that a member of Dad's car club was prepared to vet buyers for us.
Disbanding a closed computer museum isn't a bad thing if the items go to others who will value and display them.
A collectable car is one thing. A bevy of collectable figurines, another thing all together.
There was a private tank collection in Portola Valley. There was a way to arrange tours but it didn't have anything like regular hours. It was just a guy with lots of money spending it on buying and restoring tanks. Most of them could run under their own power. Stuff like a German Tiger parked facing an American Sherman and a Russian T34. 2 huge garage fulls of these things. And visitors were allowed to climb onto and into all the tanks. It's how I learned that British tanks are righthand drive.
Anyway, guy died, his heirs preferred money to tanks, and they all got sold off. At best they are on display somewhere on the east coast behind velvet rope where no one will touch or drive them again.
Reminds me of the guy (Ken Fritz) who built a $1M listening room that his kids sold for (essentially) parts after he died.
> The total take for the million-dollar stereo system, including the speakers, the turntable, the dozens of other components from detached cones to the reel-to-reel decks? $156,800.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fr...
I don't blame them at all. It was his passion, not theirs.
In this case he didn’t have heirs and seems to have asked in his will to auction it off instead of endowing it.
This is one of the reasons why I avoid "collecting" anything. (Another is space, maintenance, etc.)
There's just not much point, unless you absolutely love something. But many people collect with the end-game of making a profit, which is a mistake.
Agree, the passion and effort one puts into a collection may not be shared by future generations
> but likelihood that any of your potential heirs is also interested in it
That's not the issue, he set up the parts of his empire he cared about so they'd live on (Allen Institute for example) and instructed his sister to sell the rest. She could have gone against his instructions, but the point is he clearly he didn't care whether the Cinerama or the Living Computer Museum continued on. That's on him, not his heirs.
The fact that no other Seattle-adjacent computer billionaires like Gates, Bezos, Simonyi, Ballmer has offered to continue it just shows the generally low quality of people that have gotten rich from tech.
Or the fact that they don't see maintaining a home for a bunch of old computers for people to look at is a priority given other museums and world needs.
It's not like there's a shortage of money for art museums or natural history museums, but we do seem to be closing museums (this one and previously the Boston one) detailing the history of one of the biggest innovations in human history.
When you say "world needs" you mean sports teams and personal space travel? It's safe to say all of them have plenty of money to save this small museum and still fund their hobbies and causes.
They depend on people actually willing to pay to support them. Both through donations and admissions.
If the museum was open I'm sure it would have plenty of visitors and support. Can't visit a museum that isn't open.
But the fact is that most museums rely, in least in part, on grants and benefactors in addition to visitors.
Except it apparently didn't have sufficient donors and benefactors--or vistors.
What are you basing this assertion on? It was closed because of the pandemic. When that was over Allen had been dead for several years, his instructions had been to sell everything and give it to charity so that's what his sister has been doing. No one attempted to reopen with alternative benefactors or see if visitors would come.
I was there right before the pandemic and there were a decent number of visitors (given that it was a weekday afternoon).
Is there any value to a museum for that art?
I adored the Living Computers Museum. Being able to just sit down and use an Apple 1, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, and so many more in the same place was incredible. And then, a friendly museum employee being there to show you how to use it, tell you about what made it unique, etc. was even better. It was so much better than most look-but-don’t-touch museums.
It’s really a travesty that Paul Allen’s sister seems bent on dismantling everything he left behind.
The dude was sick on and off for years, could have had an army of lawyers setting up these places to continue after him, and didn't bother. Don't blame his sister who was left this mess.
why is she doing this? for the money, or out of some form of spite?
The best I can tell from talking with insiders at a couple of his properties, is that he did a beyond bad job at “succession planning”. The light exception being MoPOP of course but that’s a different beast. So without setting up foundations/entities to fund/run your projects and getting people aligned before you pass, odds are your estate won’t.
So want to blame the family. But really Paul Allen’s fault here.
It’s a shame, was such a great museum.
It's crazy that Bill wouldn't step in and solve this problem. This place is a rounding error on his checking account.
I would guess that there's also family politics at play and I can't imagine anyone wanting to get involved with that.
It sounds like all his family want is cashdollars, so they might put on their Sunday suits and play nicey-nicey if Bill showed an interest?
The same thing happened to another one of Paul’s wacky passion projects, the Cinerama theater. That ended up being taken over by the Seattle Film Festival after being shut down for a few years.
My impression is that Paul died somewhat suddenly and simply didn’t make arrangements to keep these things going. His sister is not interested in them so she’s winding them down.
It’s too bad he didn’t set up some kind of endowment before he passed. Maybe he didn’t want to or maybe he just didn’t get around to it.
I wonder what will happen to MoPop/EMP. AFAIK that’s always been a financial black hole.
This is what I wrote earlier on HN when this last came up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34840654):
Jodie Allen (his sister and only heir) is just following his instructions, from what I understand. She isn't financially benefiting from shutting down the computer museum, she is just executing his will:
> According to multiple reports Paul Allen’s will states that the Paul G. Allen Trust, which contains billions in assets, including the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, will be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects. Paul Allen died in October 2018 and the Trail Blazers have been rumored to be on the sales block for the past few years, but all’s quiet on the Seahawks front. Is Jody Allen trying to hold onto the Seahawks against her brother’s wishes?
https://theshadowleague.com/the-instructions-are-clear-the-s...
The problem is, a lot of projects didn't make it into his list of passion projects. More:
> Sealed lips aside, here’s what we know: In 2010, Allen pledged to bequeath the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. (During his lifetime, Allen gave away more than $2 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.) Tasked with this mammoth undertaking is his sister Jody Allen, trustee and executor of his estate, who is bound by her brother’s wishes as set out in the trust.
https://crosscut.com/culture/2022/11/16b-sale-paul-allens-ar...
One can accuse his sister of not following his instructions, I guess, but unless we know what those instructions are, it isn't a very easy accusation to back up.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Bodyguards-Vulcan-CE...
It doesn't seem like she was the nicest person.
That's geoblocked.
Strange, I'm in Mexico and if anyone gets blocked it's usually me. But I can read this one.
Anyway here you go:
https://archive.ph/ru5Jm
Many US newspapers block users from the EU because they fear GDPR.
Not sure why newspapers are "leading" on that front. All the tech sites are open.
The advertising networks and associated trackers on many news sites would not pass gdpr
Sure. But I doubt the tech sites which are mostly open use significantly different ad networks.
I doubt she hates her late brother, any more than any widow who sells off or throws away her late husband's computer collection after his death (which occurs so, so often that it is probably the normal outcome after the collector's death, as opposed to an exception) hates him. It's disinterest.
People get rid of most of the stuff that they inherit, even if it's a "collection" that the relative cared a lot about--especially if it's worth a significant amount of money.
I asked my dad to keep a collection of books for me, about 1.4m x 60cm of bookshelf. They were booked from my mum's family some dating from late 1800s. "They weren't worth anything, I gave them away" ... of course I'm probably the only person to whom they were really worth much. My mum and I shared a love of poetry at one time ...
The sad thing about book collections is that they're not worth buying for book antiquities because chances are that most won't sell at all and the few games might just be worth a few $ so most just end up in the recycling bin once the owner dies. On the other hand that means if you're willing to buy whole shelves filled with books that haven't been preaccessed they can be incredibly cheap.
This, not buying armfuls of books off individual sellers, is how used book stores get much of their stock. Running a good one (not just full of shitloads of Stephen King and Nora Roberts) means going to lots of estate sales.
Also, a lot there for a while but less now that they’re almost all gone, being there with cash in hand to buy the remaining stock in bulk when a competitor/colleague goes out of business.
Sometimes in a good used book store you can spot substantial remnants of some particular enthusiast’s collection, like a whole bunch of German-language original 19th century scholarship on the history of the conquest of South America or whatever. Some improbable number of books on some niche topic, nearly all of which probably belonged to one person (or, sometimes, institution) before landing there.
The official story, at least, is that his will dictates his former holdings be sold off and the proceeds donated to charity. So it sounds like she's doing her duty as executor of his estate. Similar questions have lingered for years over what will become of the Seahawks and the Trailblazers.
Money and an absolute disinterest in anything Paul cared about.
This is not just disinterest. It feels like active contempt.
I think she doesn’t care about it enough to hold it in contempt except insofar as it represents an asset of Paul’s that hasn’t been converted into money.
It's assassination at one fundamental level.
Spite is one way to put it. She has no love for anything computers, technology, or otherwise.
The impact it had on its visitors will endure
Around two months ago I stopped by the building and saw through a window that the interior seemed mostly untouched. So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in until a very loud intercom told me to get off the property. Probably not the reason for this announcement but I can’t help but feel partially responsible.
The RE-PC vintage computing warehouse nearby also has a small museum with equipment going back to the 60s, you can’t touch anything but other sections of the warehouse have plenty of 90s and 2000s desktops set up that you can play with. It’s a good place to look for ancient cables, obscure controllers (I saw two SideWinders there last time), and older displays, I’m planning to go back to pick up the Apple Studio CRT https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...
> So, out of concern for the condition of any items that may still be inside, I snooped around the perimeter looking for a way in
How does concern for the items inside lead you to looking for a way to break in?
They didn't say they intended to break in, they said they looked to see if there was a way to break in. If they could see a way, then so could anyone else, which would suggest that they aren't being protected. No actual ingress needed to come to that conclusion.
That's my maximally charitable take, at any rate.
Question to see if they’re not being neglected? It wouldn’t be the first financially failed museum that thinks just letting the building fall into disrepair is a cheap way of getting rid of their collection.
if the building is unguarded and full of valuable items, someone will loot it. if you're the one that loots it, you get to decide what happens to them. if you don't, someone else will
Eeeeh, I think there is a more good-faith take on the events. My personal take is that they were just trying to do the meatspace equivalent of a bug bounty, without even attempting to touch or take any items.
Kinda like how, typically, you would be incliner to file user bugs and report any vulnerabilities you find in a product you care about. Despite having zero monetary incentive to do so (more often than not).
I love HN morality takes.
Shhh, you said the quiet part out loud!
I’m sorry but that’s a terrible take
> Someone else might loot it, and they could do who knows what with it, so I’ll loot it instead
it's obviously self-serving and can be used to justify just about any act
Bad take, unsolicited pentesting can be a net positive without being exploitative.
it can be used to justify good acts too, not just bad ones
National Treasure 3: Relics of the Silicon Valley
in this case it's a relic of boston tho
this is pretty unfortunate. iirc they had the only digital pdp-10 in the world that's currently in working order — the line of computers on which emacs, microsoft basic, simtel-20, and compuserve all originated. most of the arpanet was pdp-10s at one time. nasa's gsfc spacelink ftp site, where you could download space photos, was the only one i ever encountered running
hopefully that machine will find a good home in the auction and not be destroyed in the process
the fact that it's shut down is, as bobaliceinatree said, a terrible indictment of paul allen's estate planning. unless he just didn't care about the people who survived him
Very far from the only working one. I have a working one, for now, but we don't know how much longer I will be here because I am currently dying from a government paperwork error that nobody in government has the authority to fix.
Holy cow. What happened?
Long story short, my Medicare records got screwed up. Some database entry isn't in the correct state that allows their processes to proceed. None of the humans I can get in contact with has the authority (or knows anyone with the authority) to manually correct the record, because that would be outside of their processes. Since the record isn't in a valid state, my access to medications I need to stay alive is being cut off. The retail cost of the just one of the medications is more than 100% of my income.
Entirely serious suggestion: Make an aggressive sign, go stand in front of a federal office, and call a few news outlets.
A man who is going to die because of an incompetent government clerical error is the kind of thing that makes for a great outrage story.
And will also likely get someone intervening at a high level immediately once it's the subject of the news.
You shouldn't have to do this, but as far as methods within your grasp to fix it - it can be one of the most effective.
Have you contacted your US senator or US representative? They can often clear up these kinds of issues by locating the single person in government that you actually need to talk to.
The Medicare people advised this as well. I have attempted to contact my Congressional representative, but have not received an answer yet.
I wonder what would happen if you contacted your representative's political opponent, esp this being an election year. You might be able to use the leverage from the opponent to make the incumbent fix the problem.
can you buy it from overseas mail order pharmacies, by driving to mexico, on darknet markets, or on alibaba?
Currently looking into overseas mail-order. I'm too far from Mexico or Canada to drive there; I haven't considered darknet/alibaba because if I get sold a fake, I won't be able to tell without lab tests, and I can't afford the lab tests. There's also some concern that by the time I have negative lab results that would indicate a fake it may be too late to save the kidney anyway.
best of luck
Have you sued DHHS / CMS?
No; It is my understanding you cannot sue the federal government or its constituent parts, they have sovereign immunity.
I would never join a cartel like the American Bar Foundation myself, but that's not my understanding.
https://www.aarp.org/health/medicare-insurance/info-2020/obs...
I hope you all the best. We live in a Second World country.
they have to assert it in court and usually don't
You need to talk to an attorney, as this understanding is incomplete. Parties can and do sue the federal government all the time. Look at the Supreme Court decisions this week alone which include several cases against the United States.
But I also suggest physically going to your congressperson’s office (the local one in your district, not DC) and explaining the situation. Instead of calling/waiting for a response.
Good luck.
thank you for the correction
At least you can run ITS under simh, there a github repo to set everything up almost automagically.
yes, and maybe xkl still makes pdp-10s, and kv10 may be ready soon. not sure what happened to conroy's pdp-10/x hdl. but there is value in artifacts too
It’s so incredibly stupid to sell off each piece of the museum - 50K for a DEC-10? Does the Allen estate really need the cash? Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy.
It was extremely cool and educational to visit the museum as an EE undergraduate, to visually see and use parts of the history of computing. It’s a massive loss to loose this collection. Some of the items we will never get back or see again.
> Jody Allen is simply bent on destroying her brother’s legacy.
Jody Allen is respecting her brother’s wishes. Paul Allen wanted his estate liquidated and the proceeds donated to charity. That’s exactly what’s happening.
as i said in another comment, that's possibly the only dec-10 in working condition in the world
selling it off piece by piece probably improves the chances that the most important pieces will be preserved rather than the whole thing going to a scrap metal dealer
I doubt this. Not because I doubt your sincerity; I'm just pessimistic given the hostility displayed by the administrative class toward anything that doesn't have a currency symbol in front of it.
pdp-10 fans have currency symbols tho. lots of people on hackers-l are, as they say, financially independent, and a fair fraction of them are donors to the chm and fans of the pdp-10. plus you have the modern #pdp-10 freenode crowd
First time hearing "administrative class" and god that's fitting for the MBA crowd
aparatchiks we called them where i am from
Could perhaps UW (for instance) EE or CS alumni arrange to bid and give the collection to the department at UW across town?
> Does the Allen estate really need the cash?
The article doesn't clearly distinguish between the museum auctioning off the item it owns and the Allen estate auctioning the items that it had loaned to the museum, but there's a difference.
> It’s so incredibly stupid to sell off each piece of the museum - 50K for a DEC-10? Does the Allen estate really need the cash?
Supposedly the proceeds are going to "charitable causes", though the article doesn't go into any more detail.
How much would you pay to get to see the DEC-10 again?
Is there that much non-sentimental value about a working specimen as compared to docs and pictures?
Oh no! What a crying shame.
This was one of my favorite museums in the world, probably with no analogues.
When I interned in Microsoft in 2014, I got to experience Seattle — and the Living Computer Museum was one of the highlights of that experience.
Simply being able to walk in and close-up something simple (say, Fibonacci sequence) on a typewriter terminal of the PDP-10 — and then see the typewriter type the output back to you on the same piece of paper was absolute magic (and a part of computing I wish we still had).
you know, you can plug a dot-matrix printer into a parallel port on a linux box and redirect stdout and stderr to that port. last time i did this was 27 years ago (my monitor had been broken in shipping, but i had an inkjet printer that printed text line by line), but it probably still works. i recall i had to telnet to localhost to get it to not be line-buffered, and you might have to hack that a different way nowadays
around here office supply stores still sell fanfold paper and printer ribbons
of course your linux box isn't a pdp-10, but that doesn't seem to be what you're missing
There was a world before the dot com explosion when tinkering with computers was odd, a passion that gripped few, and was looked upon as extremely odd by most. This museum was the closest thing to being able to travel back to that era. You could plop yourself down at a Xerox Alto and hack away to your heart's content. Being able to share this experience with my son is something I will always remember about this museum.
A sad day for computing, and a sad day for Seattle.
Some embarrassingly rich person needs to give the Computer History Museum enough money to buy all of it.
It's puzzling why all his stuff was organized in such a way that it could get wound down like this. Seems like it would have been way better to create a nonprofit then endow it with enough money to keep operating independently.
Bill Gates seems like a prime option.
info@gatesfoundation.org
Email and ask
The email address responded with an automated message saying they are no longer checking the inbox. It directed me to submit my query at their contact for instead: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/contact/write-to-us
I submitted this message, feel free to copy the same text and submit yourself also:
-----------------------------
I recently became aware that the Living Computers Museum, which was created by Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder), is shutting down. As someone in the technology industry, I find that very sad! The museum was really magical. I'm wondering if the Gates Foundation can step up and save the museum from closing?
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-muse...
Thank you for your consideration
Shana Tarbell, Chief Operating Officer: shana.tarbell@gatesfoundation.org
Kim Webber, Senior Program Officer: kim.webber@gatesfoundation.org
Jennifer Alcorn, Deputy Director, Giving Opportunities & Gates Philanthropy Partners: jennifer.alcorn@gatesfoundation.org
Amy K. Carter, Director, Community Engagement: amy.carter@gatesfoundation.org
Jillian Foote, Senior Program Officer, CEO External Engagement: jillian.foote@gatesfoundation.org
Presumably billg is reading this thread already.
> Presumably billg is reading this thread already.
I would assume he's not wasting his time with HN. He's rich enough and well-known enough that I'd think he'd be able to get superior versions of everything HN can provide.
I mean, if you have billg money, I guess you could have a couple ex-FAAMG software developers on payroll just so you could call them up at any hour of the day and have them give you uninformed hot-takes about an article you found online and just forwarded them, and need them to tell you something based on the headline without actually reading the article, but that seems a bit weird. I don't even have Snoop Dogg money to pay someone to roll joints for me though, so what do I know about having billg-levels of money.
“Hello, Phil? Yeah, doing fine, look, I need 200 takes on React, 50 of them actually having nothing to do with it, 100 that are just flames, 40 that are deeply stupid, and 10 that are at least informed and a bit insighthful, but not really that interesting or valuable. Please just jumble them up rather than sorting them by quality or usefulness, I want to have to waste a bunch of time and emotional energy finding the good ones. Great, thanks.”
So far this is not my HN experience. But there are many things one can spend time with. Reading web site might not interest all I admit.
the hn experience wouldn't be complete with only uninformed hot takes; it also requires that they argue with everything you say and then accuse you of being disingenuous
There's a better place to hear software industry insiders' take on the dec-10?
There is a computer museum in Roswell, GA. Just north of Atlanta that is pretty neat. https://www.computermuseumofamerica.org/
I think CMoA acquired the contents of David Larsen’s museum in Floyd, VA. Larsen was one of the authors of the Bugbook series and the museum was kind of a snapshot of the mid to late 70’s micro scene. I’m glad the Apple I didn’t end up in a Goodwill bin somewhere.
I haven't had the pleasure to visit this specific museum, but I did manage to visit https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/ in my native country of The Netherlands on my last trip to Europe, and it's a real gem, also allowing hands-on interaction. I also "adopted" my first PC.
(for those familiar with The Netherlands, it's located in Helmond)
The museum was also a generous community space; I remember attending a Seattle Indies game jam and other events before the pandemic. It was very special to be surrounded by reminders of early-computing exploratory spirit.
Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement that the market has never seen such a diverse collection “that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity — much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing.”
These honeyed words ring deeply hypocritical when you consider Christie's sees the collection purely as an asset capable of yielding a significant commission once sold.
The closure came as the estate began to deal with a number of properties that no longer had a billionaire benefactor to help keep the doors open, and in line with what the estate says was Allen’s desire to sell his assets after his passing.
I wonder about this. If someone has made a vast fortune in technology, retired from that field to take up philanthropy, built a museum to share the benefits of their experience and insight with the next generation, it seems rather unlikely to me that their greatest posthumous aspiration is to have it dismantled and dispersed.
I find the auction of assets like fine art (also mentioned in the article) easier to understand as art collections are semi-ephemeral and the trading and circulation of fine art among the wealthy has been going on for many centuries. But it also strikes me that having raised $1.6 billion by selling off the art, the estate is not exactly short of funds to keep the museum functioning.
If you liked the Living Computer Museum then you may be interested in the https://icm.museum/ Interim Computer Museum.
If you're ever close to Bonn, Germany, check Out the Artihmeum[0]. It starts at the top floor with the oldest "computers" and gets more modern as you walk down. They even have an original Enigma encryption machine.
You can interact with some of them, but not all.
0. https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/
You're underselling it. The bottom floor has vintage hand-cranked calculators that you're allowed to compute with!
They have a basement filled with hundreds if not thousands of computer donations stockpiled like the warehouse scene from Indiana Jones.
Also, it's "LCM" not "LHM".
I would demand the donations back - closing it and selling off the collection is NOT what the donors wanted.
I thought it was so sad that they shut down the computer museum in Boston years ago. It makes me think of how much more geographically diverse the computer industry was in the US back in the 1980s and how Boston has just given up on its history. It used to be associated with the Boston Children's Museum which had a DEC-10 way back in the early 1980s. They were pretty lucky because DEC would usually donate PDP-8s or PDP-11s to places like that.
It’s still around but it was moved to the old SGI building in the SF/Bay Area. I went to the old one growing up; my dad worked at DEC and it was great fun to see all the hardware at the CHM.
the computer museum history center existed as a separate entity before being transferred the assets of the boston computer museum; it's not simply a relocated boston computer museum
It's a very sad news.
I'm from Europe and I've never been to the States, but I loved the remote access to the Living Computers Museum. I'd often do `ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org` to see what was up. I'm glad to see that this will now be `ssh menu@tty.sdf.org`. Will it only be emulators or will there be some real computers?
Paul Allen sure didn't have great foresight for post death. First Cinerama and now the computer museum. The current sentiment with seattle lifers is that he used Seattle as a playground and didn't actually care about the longevity.
EMP now MoPop just keeps hanging on by a thread as well and has gone through lots of turmoil.
Not just billionaires. Gov-funded Ontario Science Centre, which helped to motivate thousands of science museums globally since 1969, hosting 50 million visitors, is being shut down, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752904
I'm guessing covid lockdowns crashed their visitor numbers?
Unfortunately not in this case. It's a kind of political issue right now with the current provincial government, and it's looking a lot like greed got in the way since it is in a prime location.
> it is in a prime location
Justifying the adjacent "Science Center" subway station, increasing real estate value of the science museum land. If the land was going to be auctioned to the highest bidder, a tech company consortium could have bid for the opportunity to protect this science student feeder of US/Canada university and industry tech talent.
Instead of Ontario Science Center, why not Apple/Bell/Google/Rogers/Samsung/Shopify or even Toronto Science Center, if that would forestall destruction of a priceless historical landmark? Same principle for the Living Computer Museum, why not Amazon/Microsoft/Valve Living Computer Museum?
Because companies are there to make money, especially those owned mostly by nameless shareholders and run by committee.
And this "brand building" that you describe here has basically zero return on investment.
Of course some company - proablably a private one (not public), could invest into it, but if you want to burn money on something your CEO likes or the owners like, you can use other ideas like paying millions to put your logo on soccer tshirts for hundreds of millions. Or hosting a forum ;)
On a side note, I worked in a company that paid a lot of money for golf sponsorships and couldnt figure out why this "marketing" does not work in countries where nobody plays golf. I think they still havent figured out that there are countries outside of USA.
250,000 students a year benefit from Ontario Science Center, the best of whom go onto the engineering and computer science programs of Canadian universities like U of Waterloo and U of Toronto, from where they are recruited by North American tech companies.
> zero return on investment
Any junior i-banker can produce a spreadsheet showing the lifetime labor value of high-quality technical talent educated at Canadian universities, many of whom are recruited to work for US technology companies.
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-deep-learning-pioneer-geoff...
> companies are there to make moneyNvidia agrees and invested in the future long before others. Thanks Geoff Hinton for planting seeds of science and money!
Nvidia Science Centre?
Any junior banker can produce a spreadsheet for you that will claim anything you want - it is called Management Consulting.
Anyway, since you know better how those big companies can invest, you can use your own money to reap the benefits. Money is literally lying on the street for you.
There is a difference between investment banking and management consulting.
Three zeros.
Sounds like he was onboard with shutting things down. It wasn’t a foresight thing, more that he wasn’t interested in it going on
Yeah, Foundations with Endowments need business people to run them and manage them and finding ones you trust and creating a corporate culture for them to last is hard. I can't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Paul Allen wasn't interested in establishing those sorts of legacy foundations for some of the same corporate politics reasons he was said to have struggled with Microsoft over the decades.
I think that's too harsh. A lot of people have a blind spot to their own mortality. He died at 65, far before most people have their affairs in order.
But he was given a diagnosis of cancer. It's not like he was hit by a bus. He had several months.
Even for someone like Allen a few minutes with Quicken Willmaker would have been able to setup a trust to keep any of these things going in perpetuity.
He likely didn't like thinking about it.
He had cancer decades ago and it came back a few times, didn't he?
He probably convinced himself into thinking he wasn't going to die until it was too late, and things like this probably drop down to fairly low priority at that point.
Not trying to excuse him though; if he actually cared he should've been thinking about it when he was opening the museum.
He was lucky enough to have several decades.
(His original diagnosis with Hodgkin's Lymphoma was in 1983 according to Wikipedia. Most of the these projects in his life through 2018 were under the specter of that cancer. Even the complication of the additional non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2009 still gave him possibly luckily a few years to have handled some things.)
Not that it makes it that much easier to deal with if you live that much time after a frightening diagnosis, especially because you likely can't know how much time you will actually have. But then again, none of us really know how much time we have. (How's your estate plan? Mine could use work.)
Not really. Anyone that rich has financial advisors who will certainly bug them about that.
Related: http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-living-computers-muse...
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802686 but we merged those comments hither)
I was lucky enough to go to this in 2019 (thanks Gary for organizing Deconstruct right at the moment in my life where I could make the trip!), and honestly it was _so motivating_.
There's obviously some nostalgia, but seeing a bunch of machines with self-contained tooling and in working order, that you could goof around in with people around you was so satisfying.
I get the complications of running all of that stack, but a part of me would be hopeful for some systemic reproductions of some environments. Something like a "mini Windows 98" with 10 games or so and that copy of QBASIC and some VB.
Deleted all the social accounts and website offline too? Harsh :-(
We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at least not to somebody you'd want to sell) or donate it. There's no organizations dedicated to preserving such properties, as far as I know. So, what do you do? You shut them down, you have not other alternative.
If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs.
If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actual data somewhere, not the actual website.
An one-time snapshot is not the active site under the original domain. You can do a snapshot (even though there's no organized procedure even for that, afaik) but that's not the same as keeping the site running in perpetuity.
And unfortunately archive.org is woefully underfunded. We take it for granted and it could be gone someday. Please support it if you have the means to do so.
Exactly. Unless you've setup a sufficient endowment and a legal entity of some sort, it's not reasonable to expect a relative to keep your passion project going. And even if they do for sentimental reasons for a while, that's just kicking the can a bit down the road.
I took the photos for the cover of my first book on an Alto that was rescued from the museum. This was when it was "closed for the pandemic."
Anyhow, this guy had two working Altos in his basement in Bothell.
What a damn shame, I went in 2019 and had an amazing time. Played with a NeXT cube, Sun/3, Lisa, Alto, and so many more machines.
This is so sad for me on so many levels. Not the least of which that I came very very close to giving them my PDP-5 because they would keep it running and the curator at the time gave the impression that Paul was setting up a trust to keep the Museum operating (which he could have, but did not).
Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy.
> Guess his heirs would rather have his billions than his legacy.
I think it is unfair to blame his heir when based on all the information we have his wish was to liquidate the estate and donate the proceeds to charity. His heir doesn’t personally benefit financially from this auction.
He could have set up an endowment to keep the museum going. He didn’t. That’s not the executor’s fault.
Perhaps this is a case of the opposite of love being indifference not hate.
David Singmaster, author of the first book on how to solve the Rubik Cube, had a vast collection of mathematical books, papers, ephemera, and a huge collection of twisty puzzles, and other puzzles.
His wish was that it remain in the UK, and he really, really wanted it to stay as a collection. But it's effectively impossible.
Collections, even significant collections[0], are hard to keep together. I wish I had the money necessary to acquire and make accessible collections like this.
[0] I'm not saying David's collection is significant, but it is substantial, and contains many things potentially of interest.
Alliance Bernstein published a white paper about transferring ones collection and preserving value
http://bernstein.com/our-insights/insights/2024/whitepaper/c...
I wish another area group formed to reopen the museum and acquire lots. I assume they tried and those who made so much from the computers success had so little interest in keeping that history living.
I don’t blame the sister as many do, I realize it’s his wish actually. And in some ways it’s the way it should be. The people who love the computer should keep the museum around. It’s just a shame so many wealthy tech people don’t have that love.
I think it is a loss for the tech community and those interested in the history of computing.
Whaaa? Maybe they should donate to, I don't know, the Computer History Museum rather than allow speculative collectors to pick the bones of historical artifacts.
That said, some collector's items only gain value much later. Think 200+ yo stuff. Kinda need several generations to hold on to it though.
I hope german HNF museum will get it's hands on at least some of this stuff
I've wanted to get my hands on an IBM or other with an orange plasma display for a while. Or really any old terminal. It's funny because buying them is very expensive, but places showcasing them are few now.
You could have had them for free (or nearly) when computing centers were getting rid of them in the 1990s.
The Toshiba luggables T3100 / T5x00 with gas plasma display are still around; as are the Compaq luggables as well.
So, what is the estate going to do with that money? Surely the family has billions they will never be able to spend, but they must liquidate everything that Paul built and loved?
Well, everything except the professional football team and the basketball team oh and also the giant real estate company. All of the stuff that generates lots and lots of money, which seems like you would want to sell for your trusts big philanthropic mission to have the greatest impact.
If it was donated by someone, shouldn't they give it back to the person who donated it? How does it get sold for cash?
In short, because it was donated and not loaned. Once it leaves your hands, the museum can do as it wishes (within the restrictions of its bylaws).
“Philanthropic trust” is probably the concept you missed here. Don’t worry, it looks like Allen missed it too.
And with fairly unusual exceptions, museums don't tend to like a lot of restrictions on what they can do with donations.
Why is it shutting down? I scanned the article but failed to find the reason.
Estate liquidation.
I can't imagine they ran out of money, so I speculate that the executors simply did not want to maintain it.
It's not their job to maintain it unless that was specified somehow in advance.
usually when someone's estate includes a business with employees, shutting it down and selling off its assets is not what the executors do. usually they keep the company running so they can get a reasonable sale price for the whole company
The cinerama and the museum were shut down for Covid and just never came back.
They found someone to take on the Cinerama. But the living computer museum was a taller order. Which is tragic because it was an unbelievably cool place. Being able to use a Xerox Alto and an orginal Microsoft Surface (the one built into a table) was a gift. It's sad that this won't be available for others in the future.
I wonder why no trust fund has been set up to keep it going.
I don't think anyone has a solid public answer about why they didn't reopen with other museums after 2020. It might be too costly, people leaving the organization, etc. to the point that the board didn't think it could reopen.
It required very specialized knowledge to keep those computers running so this is a very keen take
I am saddened that I never was able to visit this museum.
With all of that money it could have easily been fully funded for 100 years.
Surprising. Visited right before Covid, and it seemed rather popular. Children wandering around playing with exhibits. Would have not expected a place like that to go under. Think every floor had maybe 10? folks while I was there.
Really one of the better hands-on museums with the "lab" component. Had lots of neat digital wall displays to play with, and programmable science toys.
Only downside was location. Tried walking cause I had no idea where it really was, and super-quick realized it was way past the coliseum and almost down to the badlands warehouse district by the freight harbor. Right between the railyards. Bad mental model of Seattle distances. Signage was also really difficult to spot. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SPCCJhT7B9aBfANNA Can you even tell there's a museum there?
Weird part from my own perspective, is Gate's runs a non-profit in his spare time as a hobby(?). Even if they weren't best-bros afterward, it would still take something like finger wagging to a functionary to not have this be a PR dumpster fire.
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...
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
How about donating them to the Computer History Museum in SV?
They probably can't, for the same reason it's not going to stay open: it wasn't specified in the will what to do with the LCM, and it does specifically say that the default is to liquidate.
When is the auction? Anyone have the details available?
The items are being auctioned by Christie's, closing Sept 12. The webpage gives very little information at this time: https://www.christies.com/stories/gen-one-paul-allen-history...
Damn, this is a gut punch. I used to love this place. Just hanging out with the old systems was a flood of nostalgia and good memories.
It's a shame that there isn't a computing company near Seattle that could fund it or revive it.
Bummer, this place was a bunch of fun
This is so sad, Living Computer Museum was one of the best places I've ever been.
rest in peace, thank you for giving me the memory of what root on an '11 felt like for dms, and a little of that all asm love for the single cve. Someday i will write it a sister and publish in TLCHM memory. farewell friend and thank you for the fish
It sickens me something like this is happening to this unique museum. I knew it was a matter of time, but, still, it’s a tragedy that’s hard to comprehend.
[flagged]
Charitably, you can blame HN's (intentionally?) poor UI design, placing tiny up and down arrows right next to each other so that it's easy to hit the wrong one.
Send the inventory to the Computer Museum of America (Roswell, GA)
The best living computer museum I ever went to was The Weirdstuff Warehouse. Between it and Fry's I had everything I needed. It is too bad this is closing down, but then again it is hard to keep everything from the past and still move forward.
> A highlight of the sale is a computer which Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.
What? I know lots of people who would save them the trouble and buy it now for $50K. How bad of an investment could that be?
Edit: I'm picturing something large refrigerator sized like the PDP-8 at RePC down the street. If it's cheap because it's a 20-ton white elephant that's a different story.
A dec-10 is pretty big (at the LCM it is in a room that's something like 40' by 20'), needs air conditioning, and needs a beefy electrical supply.
Nobody really knows the market price for such a thing because very few are left in running order and there are very few people with the resources to provide it with water and hay.
Putting an item up for sale to the highest bidder insulates a seller from future claims that the item was sold for a low-ball price in some kind of sweetheart/kickback deal.
It’s about destruction, not making sense in my opinion.
> How bad of an investment could that be?
Probably pretty bad.
There’s a picture in TFA, with a desk for scale. It would be several refrigerators, but might still fit in your garage.
A HUGE cultural loss and I'm grateful that I got to visit it a few years ago.
Après moi, le déluge?