Living Computers, Dying Computers

This was to have been part two of my Retro Workshops post,
but something came up this week that I want to write about
instead, namely the closure of the late Paul Allen's Living
Computers: Museum + Labs (LCM+L) in Seattle.  Or should I
say, "final closure" since its status has been in limbo ever
since its doors were shut in the spring of 2020.

The closure had a fair bit of coverage in the tech press
this week, along with discussion in various online forums,
so I doubt this is news to many folks here.  Particularly
given the SDF connection, SDF having now become the
maintainer for the museum's online systems/exhibits. (Yay,
SDF!)

I'm not going to speculate about why things played out the
way they did. There's already been plenty of that elsewhere
and I'm not sure it's all that helpful.  My goal here is to
keep things a. Personal, and b. Professional.

a. Personal

I will be forever grateful that I had the opportunity to
spend two full days visiting LCM+L in the spring of 2019, in
the context of attending and presenting at the Vintage
Computing Festival Pacific Northwest. Grateful to my
employer, for paying my way, and also to myself, for finally
getting around to taking a trip I'd been contemplating for
several years previously. (Seattle isn't that far from where
I live, but the logistics of ferry travel are optimized for
Seattle-based day trippers or overnighters, not the other
way around.  Even a "day trip" from here on the Island
requires staying over two nights, so the cost is a bit of a
deterrent. )

I have long been interested in the history of computing, but
never before then had I the chance to get hands on with so
many of the foundational, yet often rare and expensive,
computing systems of yesteryear.  It was sheer joy to fumble
around with an Altair, an Apple I, a Plato terminal, a Xerox
Alto, a PDP-10 ... never before, and likely, never again.
The amount of effort and technical know-how required to keep
those old systems operational is such that few if any other
computer museums can manage it at such a scale.  Which is a
shame, as there's a character to these old systems that
cannot be well represented by a room full of inert and
silent machines.  Even video documentaries, while helpful,
lose something in translation.  It's one thing to read about
punch card processing; it's quite another to see a batch of
punch cards drawn by vacuum at great speed through a card
reader in real life.  The ingenuity that went into designing
these old systems is never more palpable than when they are
in operation.

Another memorable experience that weekend: an impromptu,
one-on-one tour of Living Computers' back rooms, courtesy of
their librarian Dr. Cynde Moya.  And let me tell you: what
was out in their public areas was just the tip of the
iceberg.  Behind the scenes there was an entire warehouse
with rows of shelving bays stacked with rare and valuable
computers.  It was a truly massive collection, which I'm
thinking was an important factor in letting random members
of the public get up close and personal with the equipment.
The Altair out on the floor is not quite as precious when
it's just one of dozens, and can be readily swapped out
should the need arise.


b. Professional 

I am myself a librarian by trade, and as part of my day job
I curate a collection of older computers and try to keep
them running, as best I can. Which is to say, I have a
certain professional interest in this kind of thing.

This may not be an entirely original observation, but it's
one I think hasn't had enough play this week: which is, when
LCM+L shut down operations in the spring of 2020, laying off
all its staff, it lost something at least as valuable as the
computers themselves - namely, the people with the skills
and experience to keep them running.  Seems to me, the
longer it stayed closed, the harder it would have been to
bring those folks back, or replace them with new ones ...
particularly as we aren't really making new folks with
decades of mainframe maintenance experience, anymore.  Four
years later, even if some deep-pocketed billionaire had
stepped in to save the museum, there's a good chance that at
least some of the harder to maintain exhibits wouldn't ever
have been turned back on.

There is a world of difference between a "Living Computers:
Museum + Labs" and a "Computers: Museum", but even that
would have been preferable to the sad reality, wherein the
computers will be auctioned off for charity.  Which in fact
I have trouble imagining having seen the size of the
collection.  Sure, the big-ticket rarities they're flogging
at Christie's, like Allen's PDP-10, will doubtless do well.
But what about the scads of Apple IIs, Commodores, PC XTs,
etc, etc, lurking in those back rooms?  Are they just going
to dump them on Ebay, or what?  And, at the other end of the
spectrum, what happens to the gigantic mainframe systems
that maybe don't have enough collector value to justify the
storage and transportation costs of keeping them around?
Just how does one go about dismantling a collection that
big?  Where does it all end up?

And in the end I wonder, what does this closure portend for
the future of our technological past?  It is somewhat
concerning that none of our contemporary tech moguls care
enough to develop a sustainable plan for preserving it. If
they don't, who will?

Of course, LCM+L wasn't the only computer museum in the
world, and at least some of the others, CHM for example,
appear to have diversified their revenue streams beyond a
single point of failure.  The hobbyist community has done
wonders to keep this stuff alive, and to be honest I have
come to place more hope in underfunded amateurs than in many
of our institutions of collective memory, despite the fact I
work in one.

Perhaps paradoxically, I find it somewhat comforting to
reflect that ultimately all of this is temporary, that none
of this hardware can be maintained forever in its original
state, no matter what we do.  Eventually, all that's left
will be emulation, documentation, inoperable hardware, and
no doubt a few Ships of Theseus in varying degrees of
fidelity to their originals.  While it doesn't make the
closure of the LCM+L any less of a cultural loss, it does
help to keep it in perspective.


Posted: Sat Jun 29 16:47:22 PDT 2024
Minor updates: Sun Jun 30 09:26:44 PDT 2024