Unlike many other computer museums, the exhibited computers were almost all up and running, and volunteers and staff encouraged you to play around with them, even the IBM mainframes. You could even get remote access to the computers for telnet or ssh!
LCM's indefinite closure was announced not too long ago in the CoViD era, but fits with a longer pattern. Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.
However, Allen's main business Vulcan (https://www.vulcan.com ) continues and remains locally famous as a commercial real estate developer and Amazon's main landlord in Seattle.
This is devastating, not just for computer geeks in Seattle, but all over the world. The LCM was one of a kind.
I organize an annual developer conference [1], and one of the highlights of my life was renting this place out and inviting ~400 fellow devs to spend the night playing with mainframes & vintage PCs [2] and signing karaoke.
I was at that cascadia conference and getting to visit LCM was the most amazing and unexpected treat I could have ever imagined. It was an entire evening of geeked out bliss. I can't thank you enough for making that happen. The talks were all great but this for me was the highlight of the conference.
> Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.
I'd hope if she doesn't want to support a computer history museum any more, she might at least donate the historical assets to somewhere like the Computer History Museum in California? (If they even have room to store them all...)
Personally, I hope that someone acquires the museum as a whole and relocates it further up into downtown. The current location is in SoDo amongst a bunch of warehouses, with a crummy parking lot and is not very well served by transit. It'd be a great complement to something like Seattle Center, in downtown near Westlake Park / monorail, or even somewhere on/near the UW campus.
The corresponding increase in rent / real estate costs / property taxes might not be great for its solvency, though. Not only is it several floors of exhibits, there's also a huge basement full of the rest of the collection.
Unlike many other computer museums, the exhibited computers were almost all up and running, and volunteers and staff encouraged you to play around with them, even the IBM mainframes. You could even get remote access to the computers for telnet or ssh!
LCM's indefinite closure was announced not too long ago in the CoViD era, but fits with a longer pattern. Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.
However, Allen's main business Vulcan (https://www.vulcan.com ) continues and remains locally famous as a commercial real estate developer and Amazon's main landlord in Seattle.