At the Living Computer Museum you can get your hands on the world’s third-ever supercomputer, one that helped study both nuclear physics and the structure of the cold virus, and which has less compute power than the phone in your pocket.Ĭarlson talks me through the history of some other machines. “Then Paul basically said ‘Okay, enough people are interested, maybe it should be a museum.’”Īn original CDC 6500 module (right) versus the Living Computer Museum’s reverse-engineered version (left).Ī ton of work, but at the end? The CDC 6500 runs. At the time it was just a PDP-10 in a warehouse, nothing fancy. “What happened was they put the website out there, started getting users, and then people would call and say ‘Can I come see the computer?’” says Carlson. And then he put it up on the internet for people to remote login-you may have heard of. Around 15 years ago now, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought this PDP-10, the same model he and Bill Gates used in their earliest years. We’re standing in a bright white room filled with a CDC 6500, a Xerox Sigma 9, an IBM System/360 Model 30, and most importantly, a PDP-10. “The museum actually started kind of backwards from most museums,” says Carlson, shouting over the noise of about a half-dozen mainframes. Inside this unassuming building is probably the foremost PC history museum I’ve ever visited though, if only for one reason: You can actually use the PCs on display. Housed in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood, the Living Computer Museum doesn’t look like much from the outside-it’s cleaner and a bit brighter than the surrounding warehouses, but those who know Seattle know that’s also not saying much. We put a chair.” I toured Seattle’s Living Computer Museum for over an hour with Executive Director Lath Carlson, but it’s that one simple line that stuck with me most-a perfect encapsulation of what makes the Living Computer Museum special. “Other museums put a glass in front of their computers.

I hope you’ll enjoy this look into the museum though, both its public-facing side and the enormous support operation it necessitates, and thanks to Paul Allen for his role in founding such a wonderful institution. Some of the details may have changed in the last 14 months-I don’t, for instance, know whether the museum’s gotten its CRAY-2 up and running yet. What started as a bit of nostalgia for him, a PDP-10 in a nondescript Seattle warehouse, is now one of the best computer museums I’ve ever been to, a truly special place where visitors can go hands-on with everything from a CDC 6500 to an Apple I to a Xerox Alto. Paul Allen passed away October 15, though, and as a result it seems like a great time to celebrate one of his lesser-known ventures. Fall’s busy video game release season buried me, and while I eventually transcribed a full hour of audio and wrote the story, it seemed weird to run it six or eight months after the fact-so it just sat on my hard drive. I took a day off from the show to wander down there, got a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, and then…never got around to writing about it. In 2017 I went up to Seattle for PAX as usual, and while I was up there I heard about the Living Computer Museum, an institution in southern Seattle founded by Paul Allen to preserve PC history.

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