51–60 of 268 posts
If you liked the Living Computer Museum then you may be interested in the https://icm.museum/ Interim Computer Museum.
You can interact with some of them, but not all.
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/jacketcop…
(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, wher…
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.
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.
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/jacketcop…
Why is it shutting down? I scanned the article but failed to find the reason.
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
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...
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/jacketcop…
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.
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.
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/jacketcop…