Living Computer Museum

[Chris Hanson]

On May 28, 2020, at 9:41 AM, Robert Harrison via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know what it would take to sustain the museum until it can reopen? Are tickets a major source of income? 
> This is the first I have heard of the museum, so I don’t know much about it, but it sounds like something worthy to try to save.

LCM+L is owned and operated by Paul Allen’s $20 billion estate. They are not hurting for cash, though I’m certain some bean-counter at Vulcan sees continuing its operations during the pandemic as a drain on resources. Management by the numbers.

The actual Living Computer Museum + Labs was *great* to visit, and from the outside worked exactly like you would expect a museum about computing history to work: A visitor to the museum could actually *interact* with most of the systems they had, they weren’t just displaying static artifacts behind a velvet rope or pane of glass with a placard describing them. The stuff you couldn’t interact with directly you could still interact with through terminals and even the Internet.

This is one of the things that disappointed me most about the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Sure you can’t let the public interact with *everything*, but since so much of computing since its inception has been about interaction with active systems, just displaying them is leaving out a large amount of what really makes them interesting. The CHM does a lot of great preservation, archival, and curatorial work, but this really feels like a glaring omission.

  -- Chris