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Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

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Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#91

Post by kragen »

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

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#92

Post by walterbell »

rvba wrote: post #76
walterbell wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 t…

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...

   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!

Nvidia Science Centre?

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#93

Post by kragen »

buildbot wrote: post #4

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…

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

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#94

Post by vundercind »

qludes wrote: post #77
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#95

Post by xhkkffbf »

bpodgursky wrote: post #88
spaceguillotine wrote: post #43

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.

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.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#96

Post by kragen »

romwell wrote: post #47

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 outpu…

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

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#97

Post by kragen »

astrodust wrote: post #81
esafak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#98

Post by kragen »

caphector wrote: post #17
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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 P…

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

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#99

Post by kragen »

lilyball wrote: post #87
algebra-pretext wrote: post #58

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 com…

> 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?

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

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#100

Post by vundercind »

fragmede wrote: post #85
tivert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

“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.”
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