Comment by PaulHoule
3 days ago
It amazes me how difficult it is to keep computer museums alive.
Like Boston used to have a great computer museum in the 1980s back when Boston had a computer industry. I guess though it is hard to keep a PDP-10 alive today and it's not impressive to kids today to play LUNAR LANDER on a VT-102.
Not all computer museums fail - there are a few that have endured. The one in Mountain View, for instance, is a direct continuation of the one from Boston.
A lot of very nice computer collections are parts of bigger ones in larger, less specialised, museums.
It’s rare for museums to keep artefacts operational. The ones that still work are usually treated as the big attraction because they demand attention and maintenance.
I was recently in Bletchley Park, where I saw a partially working Bombe (they only run it partially because of the wear), and their smaller computer museum (there are a lot of machines that are available for visitors to play with) and the one in Cambridge, which has classrooms with BBC micros, as well as many other interesting machines - Suns, SGIs, Amigas, Ataris, Spectrums, and even a Lisa, which had a boot issue.
I have to say the kids in the last two seemed thrilled to play Lemmings on Amigas and Archimedes machines. Not a PDP-1, but still cool.
> It’s rare for museums to keep artefacts operational.
The Living Computer Museum tried until the money ran out. Here's the auction list from when the Living Computer Museum was liquidated.[1]
[1] https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-...
Paul Allen did not structure the financials for it to succeed, which is unfortunate. I got to go there once and it was amazing.
1 reply →
Wow I’m surprised by how high the realized prices are
Who is buying these things? Private collectors?
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There is Large Scale Systems Museum in Western PA.
https://www.mact.io/
Rhode Island Computer Museum https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home
Usually these appeal mostly to people in the field. I've tried to take many people to computer museums but generally they aren't interested unless they are software engineers themselves.
I suspect this applies to almost all museums.