Computer enthusiasts who sold or donated vintage items to Paul Allen and Seattle’s Living Computers Museum + Labs are concerned that their contributions could be auctioned off, scattered, discarded, or lost forever with the museum’s permanent closure.
The former owners of such machines as a Decsystem 2020 mainframe, an Altair microcomputer, and a first-generation Raspberry Pi, all contacted GeekWire to inquire about the intentions of executors of the late Microsoft co-founder’s estate.
Allen’s estate announced this week that it was closing for good the 12-year-old museum that Allen built as a showcase for his personal collection of rare computing technology and as an immersive learning space. Some objects are headed to an auction by Christie’s, titled “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection.”
Right now, Christie’s is only sharing details about one machine that will be featured in the first of three auctions of Allen items, called “Firsts: The History of Computing.”
That machine is 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. Allen reportedly helped restore it at the museum, and Christie’s expects it to fetch somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 to $50,000 — money that will go to charity as per Allen’s wishes.
Details about other computers that could end up in the auction catalog won’t be released for weeks. But the museum was home to marquee items such as the Apple I computer that once sat in Steve Jobs’ office. Former Living Computers Executive Director Lāth Carlson told GeekWire in 2017 that it was “the most important computer in history.” Apple’s broad appeal and the association of the machine to Jobs could draw big bucks at auction if the computer lands there.
But what are other, lesser-known machines worth?
Representatives of the Allen estate and his Vale Group holding company said they could not speak at this time to questions about plans for individual machines owned by Allen or housed at Living Computers Museum.
Here are the stories of some of the machines and their original owners.
‘The memories would be safe’
Christopher Zach is a longtime IT and cybersecurity specialist from Baltimore who emailed GeekWire this week with details about his devotion to a machine that ultimately ended up at Living Computers.
The computer was a Decsystem 2020 KS-10 mainframe known as MIT-AI, because it came out of the MIT AI Lab at the Massachusetts school. In the 1980s, Zach had guest or “tourist” access — alongside what he calls legendary hackers — to an operating system called the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS).
“I learned a lot on these systems and made friends who lasted a lifetime,” Zach said.
By the 1990s, the machine and two others needed to leave MIT. This began a pattern of Zach rescuing MIT-AI from the junk pile. Each time, he had to make a drive with a friend and a truck, to places such as FTP Software, Sandstorm, Digex. Each time, Zach said, he left a note and contact info in the machine: if they got tired of storing or displaying it, give him a call.
“I found myself being like the knight at the end of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ — cursed to forever guard the holy grail, looking for someone worthy to take up my stead but falling short every time,” Zach said.
MIT-AI finally ended up at Zach’s house. In 2006, it went up for auction on eBay, where he says it caught the attention of Allen and Vulcan Inc., who won it with a $15,500 bid. Zach says Rich Alderson, a systems engineer and eventual curator at Living Computers, came to Maryland to help pack and ship the machine.
“I was confident that I had finally found a person who would love, respect, and take care of this bit of history,” Zach said, adding that he left another note inside MIT-AI. “As it left I felt that sense of satisfaction that I had transferred my burden, that the memories would be safe and retold for generations to come.”
When the pandemic hit and the museum first closed in March 2020, Zach began to worry. His machine was small compared to other systems and would be overlooked, he thought.
Fast-forward to this week, when he heard that the museum was gone for good and an auction was planned, Zach said, “OH NO!”
“I don’t think they know what it is, or what it meant to a lot of people,” he said.
Now he’s willing to make another drive, and retrieve a machine he calls the former “soul of the MIT AI Lab.”
“I would love it if someone who knew, who cared, who wanted to preserve it for future generations would take it under their wing. Maybe Bill Gates could do it,” Zach said.
“But if it’s going somewhere to be forgotten and lost forever and the option is I drag my ass out to Seattle with a U-Haul … well, I’ve done it before.”
‘Great sentimental value‘
Bob Powell, of Vashon Island, Wash., says he sold his first-generation MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer and several crates of related materials to Living Computers for $1 not long before it closed in March 2020.
In an email to GeekWire, Powell said he thought the museum would be a better home for the Altair. But he found this week’s news and the potential for items to be sold off by the Allen estate “distressing,” and that he was interested in inquiring about getting his stuff back, calling it “personal” and of “great sentimental value.”
Powell was never a collector of vintage gear. The computer system and related items and documentation were assembled when he was a teenager in the 1970’s, inspired by the same 1975 Popular Electronics magazine that led Allen and Bill Gates to launch Microsoft.
“He prodded his friend to start a business; I begged my parents to order an Altair kit,” Powell said.
The teenage Powell hooked up with an amateur computer group in New Jersey that he said spawned numerous garage shop computer companies. He worked summers for one of them, and eventually landed at MIT. At one point, he said Allen and Steve Ballmer even visited his dorm room in 1982 to see the Altair and Powell’s custom accessories in operation during a Microsoft recruiting trip.
Powell had a brief career at Microsoft, but said he left in 1983 when the company sold off the Unix/Xenix product to focus on DOS. He changed careers and eventually started a metal fabricating and manufacturing business.
Powell shared a bill of sale that he said he filled out after months of exchanging emails with museum archivist Amelia Roberts and software preservation manager Cynde Moya. He said he has no hard proof that he brought the museum anything at all, and that he has no legal standing to demand anything.
“It just seems like from an ethical position they might offer sentimental items for return to where they came from instead of just auctioning everything,” Powell said. “I don’t know what I’d do with it besides ‘someday’ sorting and piecing it out on eBay.”
Even though he never was able to actually visit Living Computers, he liked the idea of the museum, especially as a final home for his first computer, “knowing that someone was keeping alive memories of the mainframes and minis I grew up with.”
‘Not just remembered but displayed and used’
Frank Catalano, of Bellingham, Wash., is a longtime ed-tech professional and journalist who was a frequent GeekWire contributor, including in 2017 when he recorded a GeekWire Podcast from Living Computers. He gifted a never used, first-generation Raspberry Pi minicomputer to the museum in May 2018.
A user and collector of what he said some would call inexpensive personal technology — dating back to the Radio Shack Model 100 — Catalano said it’s always saddened him when groundbreaking but simple computer technologies simply disappear.
“I donated the Pi because it was a significant advance in low-cost computing for educational purposes and deserved to be not just remembered but displayed and used so people could see what technology of that era could do,” he said. “It’s a passing curiosity to only read about it. It sticks with you when you see it in action.”
In a “deed of gift” document he filled out for his donation six years ago, the language states that it’s an “unconditional donation” and “the Recipient may use the gifted property as it sees fit which may include: refurbishment, use for spare parts, scrap, recycling or resale to raise funds to support Recipient activities.”
Catalano, who has previously donated carefully preserved and documented items to Seattle’s MoPOP and MOHAI, said the thought of losing the Pi to a private collector or maybe even the trash heap bothers him a lot.
“It’s not the dollar value, which was low. It’s the preservation of tech history,” he said. “I’d expect Living Computers, like any respectable museum, would have a well thought-out process to deaccession a holding — to use cultural institution jargon. Anything else is unethical.”
‘A curiosity to computer geeks’
Meanwhile, David Lund is a man without a museum for the tech he’s been holding onto, and once tried to sell to Living Computers.
A retired aerospace engineer living in Texas, Lund started computing at NASA in the mid 1970s on HP 9830A computers. By the early 1980s he was doing aerodynamic modeling on CPM-based machines.
Lund thinks he has one of the earliest copies of Microsoft BASIC that still exists. He shared an image of an 8-inch floppy disc, and binders of software sets with Microsoft’s early Albuquerque, N.M., address on the spine.
Lund said he contacted Living Computers a few years after the museum opened and inquired about selling his materials, but he was directed to someone at Vulcan Inc., because Allen might be interested.
“I offered it to Paul, but he would not meet my outrageous price!” Lund said via email. “Can’t blame me for trying. Back in the day (almost 50 years ago) I spent a lot of $ on his software for my Cromemco computer.”
Lund said at one point he contacted an archive curator at Microsoft, who said his product was “very early” but that she could not appraise it.
So for now, unlike the others, whose pieces actually ended up in Allen’s hands and at the museum, Lund is left to ponder whether there is still a market for his slice of history.
“So I’ve just kept it on the shelf,” he said. “A curiosity to computer geeks.”
