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Living Computer Museum Opens To Public In Seattle
New submitter seawall writes "Paul Allen just opened the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. The 'Living' means many of the computers are actually running. There's a Xerox Sigma 9, which was introduced in 1971 and is quite similar to the computer that sent the first signal over Arpanet. There's also Tops-10 on original DEC hardware, an operating TOAD-1 system, and a DEC PDP-7 that's one of only four in the world."
..some other idiot who refuses to upgrade his computers but will probably still want customer support.
What do they do when they wear & tear them out?
otherwise it's gonna be like, totally empty.
student & miltary $2, adult $5. Not really expensive but I cannot think of a reason not making it a completely free museum.....
Anyhow, I might just pay a visit today and see if it's any good
One might be disillusioned into thinking that something that has changed the world so profoundly, and a museum championed by one of it's leading lights would have a venue of architectural merit instead of a plain box.
To be fair, AC could have been talking about a primitive core-dump. All that silverware might have magnetic properties.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Doesn't the "living" part of Living Computer make it a zoo?
...prehistoric devices like the Zune?
...when my own core i7-laptop ( Asus ) will be old enough to make it there. Before I die, prolly....
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
My first computer! Oberlin College basically ran off of one Sigma-9. Doing software support sustained me for 4 years at the college.
... before a dialog box pops up on these systems and states that Adobe Flash Reader needs to install a Critical Update.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I like how all of the links on the site are blocked by our proxy server at work for "Job Search/Careers"
Also, the first time I clicked on "The Collection" with javascript disabled I got a page full of Lorem Ipsum garbage.
I would not want to be the IT guy who gets to fix 40 year old computers.
I think I had lunch with this guy Paul Allen last week in London.
I went here a year or so ago, back when it was appointment only. They have a ton of old hardware, most of it still booted up and working. If you're a fan of computing history (or maybe you lived it), I highly recommend going to see this. At the time, the guy who gave us our tour was extremely knowledgeable and immersed in his role as a historian and archivist (plus, he wore a kilt, which equals bonus points). The museum was housed in an old warehouse, which gave it a gritty industrial feel that supplemented the sense of history. I don't know what it looks like now, but I hope they haven't shined it up or modernized it too much.
Anyway, if you're in Seattle, this is totally worth a visit.
I was surprised to see they don't have an Amiga 1000, the first true multimedia PC that out of the box could handle digital sound, animation, preemptive multitasking, and text to speech synthesis. It was based on a Motorola 68000, and was considered a decade or so ahead of the "IBM Compatibles" at the time.
The Xerox Sigma 5 was the second machine I worked on. It was replaced by a Sigma 9. Of all the machines I've used since then, none were as elegant as the Sigma series of machines. Xerox provided the source code to the operating system, compilers, assemblers, and every other piece of software on the machine. It was an absolute treasure trove of knowledge!
I hope the museum's Sigma gear lives on for many more years.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Thing is, it will be heavily biased towards the US version of history. It will miss out on all the important contributions that the UK and Europe made.
As someone who draws immense joy from replacing old clunky equipment like servers and networking equipment this place just looks like a junkyard to me. Hopefully others will enjoy it as it probably took a few hundred admins to get this stuff working again.....
Instead of free wifi do they offer a connection to their token ring?
It's really sad to think that most of these systems can be emulated on your cell phone nowadays, and will also run faster than the original.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
thanks to www.bitsavers.org, NOT LCM (who uses bitsavers a LOT)
So there's probably no computers from the early 2000's especially the Dell Optiplex. The motherboards have all failed by now with leaking capacitors.
On a completely unrelated note in computer history, I went to a yard sale recently and bought 6 Pentium II's, still in their shrink-wrapped boxes, for $2 total. If I keep them for 10 years they might be worth something!
don't forget also the Museo dell Informatica Funzionante" de Palazzolo Accreide in Sicilia http://museo.freaknet.org/en/ were all computers are running ...
Remove the facebook & twitter links and you have a very 90s looking website complete with inline CSS & jscript :)
I run the MARCH computer museum, based at the InfoAge Science Center, in Wall, New Jersey. I personally know and can vouch for the awesome work done by Allen's technical staff. I applaud them for opening their museum to the public, where so many systems -- especially DEC minicomputers -- are frequently up and running. Meanwhile, /. people in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast can visit our museum here in NJ to see similar things -- all manner of 8-bitters, S-100, minis, and of course the Apple 1 reproduction that we displayed at HOPE (as recently featured here on /.)
Computers got interesting because people hacked on them.
I can understand why a museum wouldn't want that, but without it you've taken the real life out of the machines. "Working" in that case would simply mean "light show" and be as meaningless to the onlookers.
Great opportunity for an Ask Slashdot here: What makes a Science/Tech/Computer museum _work_?
(Disclaimer: I played tic-tac-toe against a PDP-11. I really liked that science museum. Way better than any theme park.)
You and everyone else. That is why almost none of these machines still exist.
Call out the waaaabulance. Lets see how many US systems are in China's computer musuems in 2050
The National Museum of Computing (http://www.tnmoc.org/) has stacks of working machines you can play with or just oggle at. Everything from huge mainframe stuff, through 80s PCs to modern machines. And when I was there the volunteers were actively restoring even more cool stuff like the dekatron-based WITCH. If your visiting England then I can't recommend it highly enough.
Mind you, this has given me new impetus to visit Seattle.
Any CP/M systems?
Doesn't the "living" part of Living Computer make it a zoo?
No, they obviously meant "living" in the "literal" sense (as the word is commonly used).
living : Living Computer Museum :: literally : "I literally died when I heard the news!"
The sad part is that my initial presumption was that this museum was about the female computers that helped to create Allied ballistic tables in WWII. I was literally sad to see that they meant "living" in the "literal" sense.
big deal. This is bankrolled by a billionare.