I'm not from Seattle but I'm surprised given the huge tech presence there that no one took over and tried to re-open it, even by crowd funding.
via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41288051
There were several more HN threads - just search for 'Living Computer Museum'
The answer to your question is, the people who made fortunes in this industry -- some of them in Seattle -- are not interested in the history of their industry, even when they made some of it.
It's a telling contrast to the wonderful Museum of Flight, also in Seattle.
I don't get how it could cost 10 million / year
10 million is not even a lot - a typical McDonalds can cost over a million dollars a year to operate.
Here are the 2023 numbers.
https://www.franchisechatter.com/2023/09/25/fdd-talk-mcdonal...
Unlike the Museum of Flight, nearly everything at WAAAM is still in flyable condition and they have an amazing restoration team on site.
An endowment of 200M at a pittance 6% interest rate would more than cover the costs of running the museum, but they probably wouldn't have even needed that much after working on figuring out how to make it generate a bit more revenue.
I'm sad that I never got to attend, but would have easily paid close to $100 to visit.
On the topic of making a bit more revenue, one of the interesting things about the Museum of Flight is that you can rent its grand gallery/main hall for high budget private events with catering. It's not cheap, but if you're having some kind of grand corporate party or high-budget wedding or something, it's a very unique facility. Their catering contractors can set up tables and chairs all around the empty walking space in the main hall.
Compared to the airplane - a properly maintained airplane can last for quite a while. We aren't buried in airplanes - if they were that common, I'm pretty sure no one would care about the history of airplanes.
And we came to the same conclusion. There is an impulse to accuse him of negligence for not setting up these trusts. But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. How many people really bother setting up permanent legacy estate systems while young?
He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 1983, got non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2009, and died in 2018. That's 35 years of reminders—more than half his life!—to plan his legacy.
Someone close to me wants me to pick out my favorite things from their collection, so they can have the pleasure of giving them to me. Took me a while to understand.
Not everyone is worried about a legacy or where there stuff goes after they're gone. It's the least of my worries, personally.
Negligence does not mean that he was obligated to show more care than he did. Pick whatever word you want, my point is just that he had ample warning and opportunity to get affairs in order if he cared about the longevity of those projects.
Paul Allen could have set up an endowment if he wanted the collection to last. But he didn’t for some reason, despite having founded other formally endowed organizations like the Allen Institute.
It's a little different when we're talking about someone so rich that they could pay (to them) peanuts to have someone else take care of it for them, but I still get the impulse to just be done with it, permanently.
Having volunteered for a small not-for profit for nearly a decade now, there's definitely a whole lot of people that just want something with no desire to give back to that community. You really do get what you put in though.
Allen's decision was to require those people who care to pony up millions of their own dollars to acquire his personal collection, and keep it running. I'm glad you volunteer your time, but that's a whole other magnitude than purchasing and running a multi-million-dollar business. It's not reasonable to expect volunteers to spring up from nowhere and perform that kind of labor.
You would think there would be a provision that if they ever close you have the option to take it back.
annoying.
We were members. It was a fun and interesting place to go to with kiddos every now and then -- particularly on a rainy day. Kids could goof off or, if interested, actually learn. And it was a great resource and community for us local adult nerds.
Okay, one photo of my (then much younger) daughter, for old times' sake: https://davepeck.org/random/kiddo-lcm.jpg
The Connections Museum in Seattle has several working telephone central office switches.[1] They're only open for a few hours a week. I wonder how much longer that will last.
[1] https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/
Unless you were willing to donate your cash to the Allen family so that they could throw it on top of their Scrooge McDuck wealth pile, the museum was doomed. They weren't interested the actual cultural value of the collection.
With that said, keep a close eye on MoPop's collection should they ever run into any financial difficulty.
I'm not going to say it was greed on the part of the estate, but they effectively just gave the middle finger to the museum.
> Vulcan LLC, a conglomerate that maintains the Allen family’s estate and many business ventures, has been under the leadership of Paul Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, since the former’s death. A controversial billionaire in her own right, Jody Allen has sustained her brother’s more prominent investments, like ownership of the Seattle Seahawks and Sounders. However, more niche projects like LCM+L and the Cinerama theater in Belltown (also closed indefinitely) seem to be of less interest to Vulcan’s new upper management.
https://seattlecollegian.com/paul-allen-living-computers-mus...
It would have been trivial for Paul to, at any point in his life, set up trusts for his various projects - the LCM, Cinerama, the SciFi museum, MoPop, etc.
Paul was surrounded with a fleet of lawyers. These kind of trusts are not esoteric knowledge - they're something any upper middle class or upper class family is likely using to keep assets intact without going through probate.
Paul could have set up 5 foundations, given each of them an absurd initial donation of $200M each, and not noticed at all. The fact that he did not do even the minimum legal paperwork to keep them intact rather than part of his estate means that Paul never cared about these things as public benefits or experiences and instead just wanted tax dodges for his toys.
This is not a hypothetical. Without doxxing myself too much, I know some people who were involved in running Paul's household and projects. They tried to convince Paul to set up such trusts prior to his death and were not successful.
Paul's public image was fairly positive during his life but I've soured on him quite a bit as it has become more obvious that it was a facade. Perhaps his plan to turn South Lake Union into a massive park was legitimate, but the other projects were not.
Calling something a "museum", as Paul did multiple times, implies a consistency of existence and a theme that is more than just "my collection". The LCM, in particular, was unique. The Computer History Museum is great but is primarily a bunch of powered-off piles of metal and silicon. The few things that are running are demos, not interactive.
The LCM let you go up and play with nearly all of the machines. You could write a program on a PDP or an Apple. You could punch cards. You could stand in next to a powered on Cray and a Mainframe and witness how loud they were. More than the exhibits, they had a staff of people who knew the machines - who repaired them, who had worked with them, who could answer your questions about them. That kind of expertise assembled in one place doesn't exist anywhere now.
I was sad to see that most of your downtown had been replaced with Amazon campuses and seemingly sanitized, and that your council is butchering the already awful waterfront with a new highway, but at least they mounted the pink elephant sign next to some fake grass out front, and have ample parking.
In that context, I can see how a few more sentimental cultural spaces going away would hit a bit harder. Take the Showbox away and that would be another hit. But when it does, it doesn't mean the owner hates the Seattle population, it means time marches on, people value what they value, and you adapt.
What you describe is hypocrisy, not malice.
Which of course doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of his character or personality.
But that’s not much different from most other people, including most HN users.
Jody Allen is a complete black box that answers to no one. She doesn't care about the sports teams either, so it's a mystery why the entire org doesn't just cash out at this point.
There is the retro computer museum [1] which I've been to in Leicester which I was very impressed with, when talking to the guy he mentioned that they receive no funding and it's all run by volunteers. It's entirely self supporting and very good!
There is a national museum of videogames [2] which was ok, but ran out of money on it's site in Nottingham and later reopened in Sheffield. I believe this gets a large amount of [maybe lottery] funding >1 million / year.
Then there is stuff like Bletchley park site which I need to visit at some point which I assume gets a lot of state funding, I don't know much about this though.
You can buy a ticket for €10,- or "adopt" a computer for 128,- per year. They will turn on/off the device daily. Your name can be on a card next to it.
They also collect new(er) laptops to give them to families who cannot afford one.
Check the dropdown with computers which are not adopted yet, its huge!
https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/museum/bezoekinformatie...
The full collection: https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/en/collectie/
What is the biggest one in the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Museum_of_Computi... has a working rebuild of a Colossus Mark 2.
Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, GA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Museum_of_America
Not a computer museum but I have a soft spot for the Connections Museum in Seattle, WA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_Museum
I find the claims throughout the HN comments that the LCM board was openly taking offers disingenuous at best. My personal attempts to contact the museum in 2021 about this were met with no reply. I even reached out to former staff members and a Seattle Times reporter who covered the LCM via their social media accounts, and they were equally in the dark about what was happening internally. It was only at the Christie's auction in 2024 that the true intentions of the board became clear.
If you look at the 2023 IRS filings from the LCM, they donated $1.1 million to the "Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum" [1], another one of Paul's collections/museums. This museum was also closed under the same COVID circumstances and only reopened after Steuart Walton purchased the collection [2]. It is mind-boggling that the same thing did not occur for the LCM, considering the number of multi-millionaires and billionaires in the Seattle area whose fortunes were built on the backs of the computers the LCM aimed to preserve and share with the world.
We will look back at this decision to abandon and sell off the LCM as a shameful disruption of Seattle's own computing culture and industry, which transformed our world. For now, the small museum at RePC (non-living, unfortunately) or the homes of personal computer collectors are all that remain in our city.
RIP LCM — while you're gone for now, I will never forget the time I was able to use your Xerox Alto [3] and, to my surprise, meet one of the original engineers who crafted its software.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Heritage_%26_Combat_Arm...
[3] https://medium.com/vulcan-inc/xerox-alto-is-rebuilt-and-reco...
