Living Computers Museum + Labs, the Seattle institution created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays, will not reopen, more than four years after closing near the start of the pandemic.
Allen’s estate, which has been managing and winding down his vast array of holdings since his death in 2018, confirmed to GeekWire that the 12-year-old museum is closed for good. The museum website and social media accounts were taken down Tuesday.
The estate also announced Tuesday that some key pieces from Allen’s personal collection of computer artifacts, displayed over the years at Living Computers, will be auctioned by Christie’s as part of a broader sale of various Allen items later this year.
The estate says, in keeping with Allen’s wishes, proceeds from the sale of any items will go to charitable causes. Allen’s sister Jody Allen is the executor of his estate and for several years has been selling pieces of it, ranging from Seattle’s Cinerama movie theater, the Everett, Wash.-based Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum, Vulcan Productions, Stratolaunch, the superyacht Octopus, and more.
The estate previously teamed up with Christie’s for a November 2022 auction of 155 masterpieces from Allen’s extensive art collection. It was the world’s most successful single-owner fine art auction ever, raising a record $1.62 billion.
The new auction, titled “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection,” is billed as “a celebration of first-generation technologies and the pioneering minds behind them.”
The event will feature more than 150 items in three separate auctions, including “Firsts: The History of Computing,” an online sale closing Sept. 12. This auction pays homage to Allen’s role shaping the modern computing landscape. A highlight of the sale is a computer that Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.
Christie’s said details about other computers and related items from Allen’s collection will be shared this summer.
The other two auctions of Allen property include “Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity,” a live auction on Sept. 10 that will feature items intended to tell the story of scientific and technological achievements spanning centuries. The top item is a 1939 signed letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt credited as the impetus behind the establishment of the Manhattan Project. It’s estimated to fetch $4 million to $6 million.
The third auction is “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future,” an online auction closing Sept. 12, showcasing art devoted to interplanetary travel. A sale highlight is Chelsey Bonestell’s “Saturn as Seen from Titan,” circa 1952, and estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.
Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement that the market has never seen such a diverse collection “that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity — much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing.”
“It is a testament to the uniqueness and importance of these objects that one of the greatest innovators of our day collected, preserved, and in dozens of cases, restored them, while both drawing his own inspiration from them and sharing many of them publicly,” Porter said.
The permanent closure of Living Computers brings an end to another chapter in the extensive and often-celebrated legacy of Allen in his hometown. While the facility served as a place to showcase yet another of his unique collections — much like the Museum of Pop Culture has done for his music and science-fiction items — it also provided historical context, educational opportunities, and immersive experiences around tech.
Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, called Living Computers a very important resource in the city that went beyond just sharing the story of the tech industry over the years, or celebrating the legacy of Microsoft and leaders like Allen and Gates.
He said he hopes some of the pieces from Allen’s collection remain in the Seattle area.
“There is interest in our community for preserving and exploring and sharing that history, because it was transformational to our community over so many decades, and continues to be,” Garfield said. “Preserving the history of that and making it available in our community is something that is important, and it was incredibly valuable that Mr. Allen was able to do that with the Living Computers Museum. Hopefully some of that heritage and that storytelling and that opportunity to really appreciate that history will remain within our community as well.”
Core building blocks of technology
Seattle-based tech vet Devang Thakkar is the global head of Christie’s Ventures, a venture fund launched in 2022 by the 258-year-old art auction house.
Thakkar, who previously spoke to GeekWire about his Christie’s role in 2022, spent 12 years at Microsoft working on everything from Windows to Teams. He called himself “the resident expert” at Christie’s when it comes to technology, and he’s been working closely with the business and auction teams on objects in the sale and what the narrative of the event will look like.
“I come from a technology background, so for me those objects are a history of my own life in some ways,” said Thakkar, who first visited Living Computers in 2016. He remembered seeing a map of computer operating systems on a museum wall, pinpointing Microsoft programs that he helped code.
Thakkar called the mainframe PDP-10 that Allen and Gates worked on at Computer Center Corporation in Seattle’s University District “very important.” He said Allen dedicated his personal time to working on the machine in the early days of the museum.
“He fully connected with it, he could talk about this computer,” Thakkar said of Allen. “He could see the pieces of the puzzle because he built BASIC on it.”
Allen tweeted about a similar machine in September 2018, just a month before his death, calling it “the workhorse machine for us Lakeside kids and the first 3 years of Microsoft,” in a reference to the school he and Gates attended.
While it may seem like Allen was a singular entity when it came to the interest and financial resources he had for acquiring such machinery, Thakkar expects the objects in the auction to have a broad appeal because of how they’ve served as the core building blocks of technology that we all use today.
“The reason that you and I can sit on an iPhone and take this call and record this is all because of that PDP-10, like, 50 years ago,” Thakkar said. “I personally would love to have all of them. Of course, my wife is not going to let me have them.”
Presale exhibitions of select auction highlights will launch in New York beginning in July. The exhibition will be on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center Sept. 5-9.
A museum becomes a lab
Located on First Avenue South in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood, Living Computer Museum opened in 2012, five years after Allen’s Vulcan Inc. first purchased a TOAD-1 System from XKL Systems Corp., an engineering firm in Redmond, Wash.
The museum expanded in 2016 with the addition of first floor exhibits featuring current technology, as well as three hands-on computer science learning labs. It then took on the name Living Computers Museum + Labs.
The museum grew to become home to the world’s largest collection of fully-restored and useable supercomputers, mainframes, minicomputers and microcomputers.
Collection items included the 10,000-pound Control Data Corporation 6500 — part of a line of machines that were the first to be called “supercomputers.” Acquired by the museum in 2013, the Living Computers team of engineers dedicated more than 9,000 hours to restoring the system, calling it their toughest restoration ever at the time.
Allen and Gates got together at the museum in 2013 during a celebration of computing pioneers to recreate a classic photograph from 1981, in which the Microsoft co-founders were surrounded by personal computers.
In 2017, Living Computers opened a permanent exhibit on the history of Apple, acquiring what the museum’s former executive director called “the most important computer in history” — an Apple I that once sat in founder Steve Jobs’ office. Allen met Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak for the first time during a reception for that exhibit, in which Allen called Microsoft and Apple “fierce competitors and friendly collaborators” who shared a common vision “to bring the computing world to people’s fingertips.”
The museum’s love for vintage technology extended into the 1980s, with the 2018 opening of an exhibit titled “Totally ’80s Rewind” that celebrated a variety of items and experiences from arguably one of the greatest decades for pop culture. The immersive exhibit featured separate rooms as they would have appeared in a typical American setting in the 1980s, including a classroom, game arcade, and basement rec room.
In addition to the collection of old machines and software programs that the museum restored and kept operational, Living Computers served as a learning institution highlighting modern technologies such as robotics, augmented and virtual reality, self-driving cars, digital art, video games, big data and artificial intelligence.
When the museum suspended operations on March 5, 2020, a note on its website blamed the COVID-19 crisis and the “devastating effect on many cultural organizations, especially those that rely on public gatherings and special events to achieve their mission.”
The closure came as the estate began to deal with a number of properties that no longer had a billionaire benefactor to help keep the doors open, and in line with what the estate says was Allen’s desire to sell his assets after his passing.
Beyond the auction of some items from Allen’s collection, Living Computers’ remote vintage emulated systems have been acquired by the nonprofit SDF.org. The so-called Super Dimension Fortress is a community of free software authors, hobbyists, researchers, enthusiasts and others whose mission “is to provide remotely accessible computing facilities for the advancement of public education, cultural enrichment, scientific research and recreation.”
The emulations are simulations of computers, terminals, and operating systems which allow users to run old programs as they would in a physical version of the machine.
A source close to Living Computers told GeekWire that over the past four years of closure, two full-time staff members have kept machines up and running.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the museum’s closure date in 2020.
