I was on the team that decommissioned the CDC 6500 at Purdue University back in 1989. We didn't care about that old machine, since we were getting our own Cray to replace it. If we had only known that it would have been preserved by Cray and displayed at this Museum later, we would have done things a little differently. I did get to help on the restoration because I wrote the two dead start routines to boot it. If you look at the Dead Start panel, you'll see white and yellow tags that indicate the two different dead start configurations, which selected the boot devices.
It's all anecdotal, but the story I heard was that the director/staff was so excited about the new, much faster machine that they didn't really care about the old one!
@@DavesGarage Yep, we planned for the new machine for quite a while, and just used cable cutters to separate the frames, it was much faster then unscrewing all those cables. We had no idea. You have to remember, that machine was 20 years old by then.
I was at University of Washington when its CDC 6600 was decommissioned... the poor thing was dismantled into individual boards and people took them home as souvenirs. Was always so great to see the 6500 running at LCM.
Kind of heartbreaking that Mr Allen didn't make provisions to set up a museum endowment sufficient to keep it running (or hire a team to fund it) before his demise. So much labor and love were put into the restorations, it's sad to see it all up for auction like a sheriff's sale.
It's too bad that "other computer guy" with billions, who's spending Warren Buffet's money for him cuz Buffett doesn't know what to do with it all, wouldn't take an interest in it... If anything, buy it and give it to the Smithonian, oh wait, they'll just trash it.
I know Dave said not to count other people's money, but I think history will judge all of the Silicon Valley and Redmond millionaires and billionaires very poorly for not preserving the museum.
There was an in-progress effort to transfer the rest of Paul's collection to the museum and finish up making it a "real" nonprofit/museum that was almost immediately squashed by his estate after his passing. This isn't how he wanted things to happen.
@@classiccomputers6211He could have set up a trust to ensure that what he wanted to happen did happen. He didn’t want it badly enough to ensure it would happen, obviously.
I can imagine. I bet they're bitter, feeling a mix between it being merely unfortunate vs having been taken advantage of. But Paul died young, which is how we got into this mess, and that's the ultimate tragedy here. We shouldn't lose sight of that because we love the hardware.
@@DavesGarage Very true, and Paul's passing is tragic. But I'm glad you are here voicing the discontent on how this is handled. And doing so with a smile and informative video. Thanks so much.
Why Paul did not setup a foundation ??? Was he as mad as internet says, only able to enjoy life, not willing to be microsoft. In 10 years, nobody knows what it was, MS Dos, Windows and intel...
Tibetan monks spend a year or more making elaborate art out of colored sand. When they are finished, they destroy it right away to signify the fleeting nature of humans and their creations.
@@lucasrem There' plenty of people that just don't like to think about that sort of thing. Some extremely rich people don't even leave a will! I live in Minneapolis, and when Prince died, he left NO WILL. So essentially his entire estate was a matter of a court battle among his siblings and half siblings. They all sold their parts of his estate off to some large corporation. Don't count on your family to care about anything you care about. Paul Allen is a perfect example of that. Look at his sister, who seems to treat his computer museum like just another asset to be sold off. The guy died with an estate of 20 billion dollars... and she wants a few million dollars for god knows what.
17:59 - If you or your family "donated" to the museum, then dig up the old paperwork and make certain that you are not due a refund of the donation. Note a family donated the Carderock facility to the US Navy with the proviso that their son's name would not be removed from the facility. The Navy attempted to put a new name on it, and the family sued. Navy backed down in about a half second...
I did as well from Lewis Jr. High School (San Diego) teletype, connected to a HP-2100 at the SDUSD main facility... learned BASIC in 1973 using the BASIC BASIC book.
Also thanks for not moving the camera constantly when you're showing these. Some people will go to a thing and try and film all the things... but they never stop moving the camera. They move it just like they are looking at it at the time. But you took the time to slowly and carefully show the shelves so we can actually take a moment and get a good look. Thanks!
Well, as someone that helped donate a working computer to the museum, one where I'd been one of the main OS developers for the prior 20 years, I can say fairly authoritatively that there is considerable sadness at the collection being parted out. I'd hoped to see the system again one last time in your short tour, but I'm not really surprised I didn't.
Wow, what a shame this collection is being dismantled. I was a few years post big iron and my entry point started on an Atari 800. I had no idea this was a place, and now I wished I had. Thanks for the tour and good memories Dave.
This museum was one of the most important places in Seattle to me. I took many friends here when they visited from out of town, and I'm genuinely so distressed at the loss of this incredible resource. I was completely fascinated by the PLATO system they had there, and was delighted to use their Apple Lisa. I hate Jody Allen more than a little for liquidating this museum's collection and selling it for tens of thousands of dollars on the Christie's auction site. Word to the buyer of the Lisa: Its CRT is on its last legs. It's going to die. It's not worth $35,000.
The PLATO system is the first actual computer I ever programmed. It was at Malcolm X College in Chicago, down the street from my High School. I graduated H.S. and went to UI Urbana, which was the home of PLATO, and I spent many hours in various labs around campus.
I visited the museum a few years back. It was so amazing to see all these machines that I read about working and available to actually sit down and use. This brought back so many memories from my childhood. It is very sad to hear that the machines are being sold off and not kept as a collection.
I couldn't stop thinking about how Wozniak or Gates should ultimately be the ones. Especially Gates given he has godly wealth status and actual attachment to so much of that.
@@InsideOfMyOwnMind Gates / Microsoft have contributed NOTHING to the information technology industry. The company's success is purely because his mum was on the board of IBM and as a lawyer he (Bill) wrote a licensing agreement for Windows and the money from that, enabled Microsoft to cheat, steal from and bully any innovator.
@@Yarumasi Microsoft have their own museum or used to have when I did some work on the campus when I worked for EDS. Maybe they will buy some of the kit which they don't have in the collection.
I live in Portland, Oregon and got to visit the museum twice before it closed. The last time I was there I was chatting with one of the engineers maintaining the KL-10 and got invited to GO INTO THE BASEMENT ! This was where the stockpile of computer projects not yet started were stored. I thought I was in Disneyland. Row upon row of PDP-11's (11/70 included), IBM System 360's and 370's, IBM 1130, Univac systems, a Sequent Computer Systems system, disk drives, line printers, Datapoint systems... the list is endless. I don't know if these non-functional systems are included in the auction as I don't know where to get an auction listing. Just as Dave is lusting after an 11/70, I am lusting after the PDP-12 (functional) complete with dual DecTapes and A/D panel and their PDP-7 which was running BSD Unix last time I visited. I am just heartbroken the place is shut down forever. A LOT of nostalgia there ...
Thank heavens at least you captured footage of that great place. I'm an old fogey that worked on the CDC 3100 many years ago as a technician. Saw all the generations of computers come and go through the ages. What a travesty that this treasure will be lost forever. So sad.
Still insane to me that the little brick I'm holding in my hand and watching this on is orders of magnitude more powerful than those room sized supercomputers.
We designed ICs with 6 micron design rules in Carver Mead’s class at Caltech in 1976. Chips are now down below 6 nanometers, a 1000:1 dimensional shrink. That means there are now 1,000,000 transistors for every single transistor in the old ICs.
@@w6wdh They're not really down below 6nm. The "nm" nomenclature has been decoupled from actual gate length for some time now, so for example TSMC's "5nm" process has a gate length of about 18nm. For marketing reasons semiconductor manufacturers started using smaller numbers more than a decade ago. Intel has stopped using any measurements to name its nodes, now opting for just numbers (Intel 7, etc.)
Yep, a small cheap microcontroller for a single Euro can emulate the machines of yore just fine. My current project by the way, a board with a RP2040 emulating machines from the 70s that you can attach a real terminal to. Currently working is a PDP11 that can run Unix v6 and RT11 of course and a Z80 machine that can run CP/M. If Dave wants a beta board i could throw one into the post, then he has a small PDP11 too. :)
I had no idea this place closed down. I visited before COVID during my birthday and had a blast. It was so incredible to see all those vintage computers in working order and actually being able to play around with them. I enjoyed the recreation of what was like an 80s living room with a bunch of old Magazines with BASIC programs. Also, the super computer section at the top and the guy who gave the tours was really awesome. Such a shame that I will never be able to visit it again, but I am glad I got the opportunity. A truly unique place.
I took my very young son there when I moved back to the Seattle area back in 2016. We've been waiting for it to open again to go back and view everything. Heartbreaking to see the museum being terminated.
I also went there in Feb 2020, the wood paneled "basement" was great, and I sat at the Apple II you showed in the computer lab to do the demo they had on the overhead projector. There was also a machine for making punched cards. I was with a group of friends, and we all took the time to make some punched cards. Another really fun area was off to the side of the first floor where they had a Connection Machine, I think it was a CM-2 with the front panel LEDs set up to be a digital clock. Purely eye candy. Very fun place and a long-time bucket list item. I'm really sad that this is how it ended. I wish it were still there so I could take more people with me to visit it.
I'm so heartbroken that the museum had closed. I was fortunate enough to purchase a membership and would visit often playing with restored computers from my youth in the '80s. After the museum closed, and it's future in doubt, prompted me to start my own little retro computer collection of an Apple IIe, Mac Plus, Commodore 64, and IBM PCjr. These systems were so influential for my love of computing and technology. LCM you will be missed!
This is fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to do this sir. I sincerely hope that all of the equipment in the museum find a great home that will properly maintain them for the historical value and relevance these old devices provide us.
I was very fortunate to be able to visit the museum for my first and only time back in July of 2018. It is genuinely one of the most artful, soulful computing spaces ever composed, and it's devastating that it's shut down for good and being liquidated. I do hope that whoever ends up acquiring these machines -- especially the CDC 6500 -- have the skills, knowledge, and space needed to bring them back online and make them accessible to the public again. These computers deserve to sing their song for as long as they possibly can. The spirit of the machine meets you in the room where these are alive. Humanity is forever changed by the impact these machines had on our world, and I hope they can continue to bring people joy for decades and centuries to come.
Wow - what a tour! I've used many of those computers through my life. OMG - the memories! Thank you for sharing. Those NeXT cubes were incredible machines.
I remember going to the NeXT computer company and installing a Powership computer from FedEx. Those black NeXT computers really stand out and I wanted one!
I bought several Burroughs, Sperry UNIVAC, and Unisys items from the museum during the liquidation. I live in North Carolina. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to visit the museum. I wish..... I wish, I could have visited the museum before it closed and the liquidation! Thank you soooooooooo much for sharing!!!
Thank you for showing this! I've never made it out to that area of the world until after it closed and would have loved to see this. Thank you for immortalizing some of the hard work the countless number of volunteers did to make this place special!
Wonderful video, I'm 78 years now, grew up with most of these computers you are talking about. Now I'm the proud owner of a new computer with all the latest software motherboards and processor. I always bring young people to the computer museum. I live near the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara California. This is also a great museum, young people after visiting the museum, now have a appreciation for the dedicated steps taken, to have what we have today. THANKS AGAIN.
Yes, the CHM is great. I recorded a lot of footage there, I could actually do an episode on it... but definitely worth visiting! I'm always wondering how complete the machines they have are, since they're not put to the test of actually running as the LCM machines were. I like to think they're pristine museum-quality examples, but could be empty boxes for all I know!
Toonman, We need to support the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara. Hope a school can keep these systems in working conditions, students need to see what they did. museum, keep it fresh, you need visitors, Seattle ?
Thank you Dave. Paul G. Allen had so many great projects going in so many aspects of life. His presence is felt and carried on into more than just this museum. It is sad it didn't keep going, but so much of his work is timeless and lives on from the smallest of things like brain mapping to the vastness of outer space. He was an extraordinary individual.
No other computer museum has a commitment to keeping machines working. Even the act of restoring these machines, which involves replacing old wiring, failed electrolytic capacitors, etc., is considered vandalism by many conservators. They want to preserve the machines as fossils and don't place much value in the working machines.
Some artifacts should be saved, but keeping old mainframes running is foolishness, in my opinion. The CDC 6xxx systems, for example, had full time maintenance engineers at each site to look after them, backed up by experts at headquarters. As noted here, parts are no longer available.
@@GH-oi2jf It's hard to comprehend how these large systems operated unless you see an operator loading and unloading tapes on 8 tape drives and changing disk packs on 10 more or disk drives while loading card decks, vacuuming a printer before loading another box of fanfold, and responding to alerts on those round displays.
Dave, I truly appreciate the time you take to share things like this with us. Your videos never cease to amaze, inform, teach me something or bring a smile!
Same! I kept meaning to go and then Covid happened and Paul Allen died and his sister cut off the two best things he was keeping running in Seattle. This museum and the Cinerama. Thankfully SIFF took over Cinerama but it's a shame that nobody is taking over this institution. Feels like MOHAI should have just bought the entire thing and kept it running.
@@BenWolkWeiss The combat museum was even better and suffered the same fate. Incredible collection of WWII aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles from every nation involved in the war, and like these computers they were all operational.
I have Donor's Remorse. Donated several pieces to a museum that has shutdown and the hardware disappeared. The items I donated included a IMSAI 8080 in pristine condition with a working teletype and papertape reader/punch, acoustic modem, Tadpole (Sun1 laptop) and a Compaq 286 which had the original 30MB hard drive replaced. Back then MS/DOS 3.1 couldn't address 30MB so Compaq had a partitioning utility to make 10MB virtual drives.
Dave, it almost feels like the ancient Egyptians would be like "who the heck will read all this history on these walls of the King's tomb." Sell it and let it sit in someone's show garage and later in a dumpster. Sad days for these magical pioneers, the Smithsonian should have taken them - even if powered off. Thanks for the amazing footage, you are a legend in my book! Any of the legendary Dr Dobb's journals? lol, way above my freshman head in the 90s :)
Hey Dave, thanks for this video tour. It serves as a bit of a final goodbye to the museum for me and a little bit of closure. Hopefully some of the artifacts and systems make it back to public display. I now see a number of the notable systems missing (Such as the IBM 360/91, Cray 1, metal case Apple I) have been transported to Christie's in New York as part of a separate auction. I know LCM was a labour of love for so many of the volunteers and staff. I sincerely hope that they've been able to find a new outlet for their passion and knowledge.
Those wires on the CDC-6500 are each of a specific length. The last card modules for that series of CDC machines were built in the late 70's Thanks for the video and the trip down memory lane.
@ericolson9695 if you take the circumference of the hole it would be say 6 feet (instead 2 feet) and straight it out the wires would have to be 6 feet long so the cray would have run 3 times slower because long distance the signals would have to travel. Cray hired Asian women to do the wiring because they were small enough to fit into the space.
Thanks for covering this venue, I attended BlueHat there in 2017 and was amazed at the collection, I really wanted to return with my kids so I was really sad to see it had closed!
Donators remorse is very real, and this is a crime that his sister, who inherited billions from her brother yet had nothing to do with his success and his creativity, profited handsomely from it, but she can’t find a few million to keep this slice of history alive. Yet another thing she got from Paul that she has completely botched up.
Thanks for cataloging and sharing this before it's scattered to the winds. I only went to the museum once despite working literally down the road from it. I was looking forward to attending a retro computing event there right before they closed for covid, and ultimately, forever.
I was a technician at DEC's Marlboro plant in the late 1070's. I was the first person to power on a PDP-10 after it left the assembly area. The KA-10 had ECL logic which was very hard to diagnose and repair with the scopes and logic analyzers of that era. I also repaired PDP-11s, which have my favorite machine instruction set. Later I became a software engineer and programmed the character generator microprocessor for DEC's VT240 graphics terminal.
I remember visiting The Computer Museum in Boston when it was open. It was so awesome for a computer geek: they actually showed informative exhibits of how computing works, early rope memory, and the earliest digital computers. Luckily I think most all that was there is in the current The History Computer Museum in California.
As far as I know pretty much everything went to the CHM. I was one of the founder members of the Computer Museum in Boston. As I was (correctly) unsure about its long-term future I didn't give them anything outright but let them have some things on loan. They are still on loan to the CHM.
@@jeremybarker7577 Thanks for chiming in. I have family in the region, so it's more reason to visit the current museum in CA. I thought the exhibit space in Boston was just enough as far as informing you how computing started and having exhibits that were informative for kids and adults. Being on the warf, it was also a great space. When I saw the announcement of its closing, it was a sad day for me.
This video brought back so many memories from my childhood. TRS-80. Commodore PET. C64. Amiga. Thank you for this! It would be wonderful if this collection could be currated in another collection. Emulation is always possible. But there is just something magical about the feel (and the sounds, and the smells) of the actual hardware.
It's a shame that Paul Allen created the museum but didn't provide for it and that no one else stepped up to keep it going. A lot of what he collected may never be seen again, vanishing into private collections that may be tossed as trash by the new owner's heirs when they pass.
AFAIK Paul had no heirs the head of his estate is his Sister...Everyone is waiting for her to sell the Seahawks Football Team and we're expecting Jeff Bezzos to buy them.
There were conversations about keeping the place going by various parties. It just never seemed like keeping the place operating is what the family wanted. Perhaps if someone had been able to pay auction value for the whole lot.
Dave, thank you so much for posting such a great great video. I grew up during the home computer boom, started programming in basic on an Atari 400. So to say this was a walk down memory lane would be an understatement. Thank you again for taking the time to help preserve history.
Just when I was getting the willpower to toss all my old magazines :) I did toss a case or 2 of some stuff. I had Byte, Creative Computing, PC magazine, PC compute. I might have had the engineering type mag that had the first ad for Altair? but a quick browse 10 years ago didn't find it.
That slogan was for Dr. Dobb's Journal, not Byte Magazine. I still have many issues of both, that haven't quite yet fallen to downsizing and mishaps during moves over the years. Along with some issues of Computer Design magazine, which was more about the mainframes and minicomputers of the time. Some of those issues included ads featuring artwork with creatures made out of computer components.
great video Dave. Brings me back for sure. My first computer had 640KB RAM and the computer I'm on right now has 64GB, 1 millions times more ram than I started with. Amazing to think about. I learned to code on the C64,Apple2E and the Tandy 1000 TX. I'm surprised I didn't see any Tandy in the video, maybe I missed it.
I could go there and not get this much information out of it. I fell like I'm getting a tour by a father of technology through a museum of technology. Thanks for this, Father! =D
WOW thanks for this, Dave!!! That brings back so many memories, seeing all those different systems. I only hope that some place can keep all these for the future.
Thanks Dave. I remember a job I had in 2006 helping Paul move his office from Kirkland to Seattle. I was on the team that inventoried all of his stuff that got moved. During the moving process I mentioned that it would be great to have a museum set up with his computer collection. When he actually did it I was one of the first ones to visit and get a membership. I remember loving to play with the robots and sit in the self driving car exhibit. I loved getting to take my daughter there to play with all the computers. I had a telnet account on the mainframes too. I remember attending the 10 year anniversary celebration of WordPress when Matt Mullenweg came into town for a visit. I was at at the 1 year party for the LCM when they brought in a replica of the Back to the Future Delorian and had it in the parking lot. I loved the time line of computer history they had on one of the walls. So much history now lost and scattered to the wind. Perhaps all of the folks that got a part of the lots will re-assemble the collection via video archive here on UA-cam some day. So we can all remember.
I remember visiting with my dad ages ago. he also was a developer at Microsoft back in the 90s. It's a shame I can't go back now since I've gained more of an interest in the stuff.
You’ve made a lot of high quality informative videos Dave…. But I must say this takes the cake. Wow. Thank you so much for making this. I’m no spring chicken (just turned 50 a few days ago) and computers and their history has been a passion since I was 6, and it’s rare that I’m experiencing anything that makes me overly excited or genuinely impressed nowadays…. But this video literally moved me to tears.
My favorite old-computer experience has to be watching the Difference Engine being operated on Ada Lovelace's 200th birthday, while it was on loan to the Computer History Museum in CA. I understand it's now on display somewhere in Seattle, but I don't know if they still operate it regularly.
Yes, the Difference Engine belongs to another former Microsoft executive, Nathan Myhrvold. After leaving the CHM, it went to the lobby of Intellectual Ventures, his patent trolling company in Bellevue. There is a photo gallery from 2016 on Wikimedia suggesting it was being operated, but I'm not finding much info about it ongoing.
Wow Dave, This was a fun episode to view. You and I are about 4 years apart in age, so when you opened with "For those who are 20 years older than I am", I imagined to see some of the units that I had NEVER seen.. What I did see that grabbed my attention was the Apple Lisa Computer, which looked just as the Apple Lisa that I had acquired and kept for several years. It booted and had a desktop, but that was it. Loading a floppy into the drive managed to do nothing. I eventually sold it (slapping myself now) at a garage sale. What I do still have are two or three original Compaq Portables, just as your video showed. The first IT job I landed out of Tech School used these little guys as Print Servers on our Novell Network and were fun to work with. The company we used for hardware and education, had one with the XT Mother board was replaced with (if memory serves) either a 286 or 386 Mother board and was used as a portable file server. I can still remember when years later, I found that server to learn its secrets. In 2005 I then worked for that school / tech house and was in charge of the inventory. Finding that I was able to see how it was upgraded and wanted to turn around and update one of the Compaq Portables I had in storage. I love geeking out with your videos and reading what others have nostalgically found or seen from your channel.. Thanks again for being awesome.
I was lucky to visit around 2016 enjoying the museum from corner to corner. Sad to see it closed and the hitherto well-maintained set of artifacts scattered throughout the world with unknown future. Hopefully some of them will end up in technically interested hands, preserving the treasure for future generations to enjoy and learn from.
Brings back memories. My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. In my employment I worked with Unisys mainframe along with an RCA Spectra and a small IBM system.
My 4 rack pdp-8i system went to this museum. The computer itself worked fine. The tape and disk did not. I pretty much determined later that it was likely a dropped bit on the external interface. Never could find the actual failure. Both tape and disk worked to a point. But with a bit missing it would fail to execute the proper instruction if a boot was attempted. Last I knew it was in a back room somewhere there waiting restoration.
Thanks for giving us such a great tour, Dave. I miss that place. Loved the rooms in the back with the soldering irons, the wall of VR headsets on the main floor, and the smell of the machine room. There was a great library too, I hope it has gone to another museum. I'm sad about having donated some equipment to the museum and now seeing the place parted out. But mostly I'm sad that this great collection won't be available for others to see and learn from.
I've lived within an hour of it as long as it's been there, always figured I'd get off my butt and stop by one day. A reminder to see things like this when you can. Now I never will. At least I got to play with the ATT 3B2 systems a bit before they were moved out of the Connections Museum (and go there if you have any appreciation for Telcom and Ma Bell stuff) to... The Living Computer museum, where they will never be seen again.
This makes me so sad. I wanted to see this museum so badly, but I live on the East Coast. The 80's Classroom / Arcade / Rec Room was my dream exhibit - hopefully something like that will exist again in some form or another soon. So many classic science museums are closing these days - from the Ontario Science Centre, to Holographic Studios in New York City, it's just so depressing - we need more archival work like this to preserve them for posterity. Thank you so much for sharing this!!!
Having been in love with computers since about 1980, it is sad that the Smithsonian Institute doesn't have a provision for such a wonderful collection. 😢 I also love aircraft, and I'm lucky to live near its wonderful facilities.
@@DavesGarage National Museum of American History. I haven't been for years, and can't remember when I saw the last computer exhibit there (it was fairly small). They need a separate building dedicated to computers and calculating machines, radar radio & TV, telephony (back end mechanical switches), and scientific equipment (cyclotrons etc). It would have to be massive, and massively expensive.
The Smithsonian has a Cray-1 and other computer artifacts. They would be more selective than the Allen museum, and I'm sure they don't try to operate the mainframes.
Such a shame this great museum didn't survive. We need to appreciate this vintage technology. I'm an old TRS-80 hack, myself. Long time ago. Oddly, I'm not sure I wasn't more productive as a teenager than as an adult.
Used the CDC 6500 at Purdue from 1970-74 and then again from 1980-81. On a good day in the early 70's you could run your program and get your paper output in 15 minutes. Fortran IV was the preferred language back in the day. Hope it goes to a good hone.
I didn't see any IBM Series 1 mini mainframe computers that I worked on in early 1980s. The company I worked for paired these with a CDC disk drive with removable disk paks. These were about the size of a dishwasher and stored about 300mb. Thanks Dave for sharing this bit of computer history. Most of these companies are long gone.
I was fortunate enough to have visited this museum once a year or two before it closed, it was an amazing experience. Most museums have everything roped off or in glass cases but here it was all up and running and you actually got to use it, amazing. Makes me really sad to see it all being auctioned off, it was an absolute treasure to have everything set up in one place. As for the IBM PC, that's the standard CGA color monitor IBM offered, I have a PC/XT with exactly the same monitor that someone gave me when I was a kid. Mine has an EGA card in it which allows the CGA monitor to produce a much wider range of colors than the intended CGA, however the higher EGA resolutions are not supported.
Dave, if you know any of the people (person, really) responsible for shuttering this museum I hope you gave them an earful. It's shameful what they did to the museum.
Wouldn't that be Paul Allen's sister Jody? But I think his museums were owned by the Allen Family Foundation trust. I think it needs to hand out at least 5% of the value each year.
No one seems to preserve Sun equipment. Sun at Stanford was instrumental in bringing Ethernet connectivity mainstream. It was Sun’s John Gage who coined the slogan “The network is the computer” in 1984. A lot of the Commodore Amiga work converting Tripos over to Amiga DOS and developing Intuition was done on Sun 3 systems.
@@wtmayhew My university used to have a salvage store where you could buy up rooms full of old computer and other lab equipment for almost nothing. I have a friend who bought up a bunch of sun workstations set up a very large network and used it to heat his house.
@@sundhaug92 … and the remnants of DEC were absorbed into Compaq prior to the HP acquisition. IBM is pretty much the last electronic computing machinery maker with an unbroken path tracing back to the 1940s - older still if one counts electromechanical machines.
I actually diagnosed a bad power supply in a Compaq Portable used by a local office supply company. I was scared to death I would be wrong, but was delighted when it came to life and worked perfectly after I replaced it 🙂
Thank you for sharing this special insight into these computers in history. I managed to go through this museum when it was open and I am sad to see it dismantled. I remember many of these computers and had the opportunity to play with or work with them. There are a number of them that I have to admit was not aware of plus you gave a lot of great detailed information about them and their power. Your knowledge of these special machines is a gift and I appreciate this video.
I started my career on the Decsystem-10 , COBOL , Fortran in school and then managed these systems at digital (the KL10 variant) back in 1980. Soon after the Vax systems came on the scene. Great times!
Xerox Sigma 9 - this and the IBM 1130 at GCRI gave me the intro to computing that made it a lifelong experience - great memories and thanks for sharing.
Cray Supercomputers have a special place in my heart. Mainly because of Jurassic Park. In the book, Hammond buys Cray computers to sequence the dinosaur DNA. Something about that small detail of the book always fascinated me.
At 13:20 is a Processor Technology Sol-20 with what looks like a pair of NorthStar Floppy drives. Very hard to tell, but depending on where it was sold, I could have set that one up for someone. When I was working at the Bellevue Byte Shop, we set up quite a few Sol-20’s in this configuration. Also, sold a Centronics parallel printer cable for $75.00, it was an active cable to solve the issue with the Sol-20’s hand shaking problem. (Dirty little secret, the active part was just a 7400-chip set up as a J-K flipflop. Most of its cost was the labor to make this custom cable.) Late 70’s.
I have an IMSAI with PT boards. What I really need is a ROM board with the OS. I booted using the Cutter tape and I'm 90% sure it won't load after all these years. If you have one or in idea where I could get one I would be very greatful!
@@rickclapp6560 The only ROM board I have is a Processor Technology ALS-8 firmware board and I wish to keep it. It’s part of the ‘let's share’ problem I am trying to create. The share between the ALS-8 and the NorthStar floppy drive controller. Look up the FLEX64K RAM/EEPROM board. That may help you. You should be able to load anything on it.
I was hoping to see a Tandem NonStop system. I worked at a newspaper and that was our mainframe after a Harris editorial system. We ultimately donated out NonStop to a museum such as this but I don’t remember which one. I’m 72 and I DID hear you the first time! 😀
Spectacular. Thank you for gathering all this wonderful tech. I've volunteered at our local computer club since 1992 and fascinated by it all since my teens. Love this 💙🌻💙
Dave I was on Sigma 9 design team and wrote all the diagnostics software with another engineer. Btw it could have up to 4 processors in a master slave configuration. All access to up 16 mb I think. I miss the blinking light control panel as well. Sigh. Best to you and thanks for the vid.
I have to agree with a lot of folks here that it is a shame and great loss that this place closed. It was one of the few museums that I really have always wanted to visit.
The ymp at my university was flaming pink and located in a large but empty flat black room with a track light and an SGI terminal (128MB of RAM!!!). Despite the spartan presentation, I think the artistic budget was half the price tag. The Cray 1 at Los Alamo not so much. That looked like a rusted junk heap from Star Wars.
I was there for VCF Pacific North West 2019, it was amazing. Wouldn't have believed a year later it would be gone. Hopefully some of those artifacts went the national computer museum in Atlanta, they have a lot of floor space. Thanks for sharing it with everyone here.
Wow, I watched your shop talk vid before this one, haters gonna hate, but seeing these beautiful machines, yeah it sucks a museum won't preserve them, but dedicated enthusiasts like yourself is just as good. To most of us they are worth nothing, but when cared for and with knowledge on their history and how to run them, that's priceless. I'm someone that does find it hard to want to use old technology, but my love for the Commodore Amiga (and indeed the Commodore 64 and Vic 20) is something I will never lose, so I respect and admire the nerd levels for this old tech, and preserving it. I guess I am one of the few (but also many) that really appreciate the stunning images from this video of our computing history, again I have to ask, how the hell are these machines so immaculate in condition? They're from an age where everyone smoked cigarettes, and yet they look like they just popped off the factory line, how is this possible? Not to mention 40 odd years of dust build-up. I still have 2 Amiga 500's in the loft, and one of them I believe still works. It is my dream to have enough space to set it up on a Sony Trintron 32 inch TV I still have (that weighs an absolute ton!). It's strange hearing you say Paul Allen, I now understand who he was, but being a film buff moreover than a computer nerd, Paul Allen was an intrinsic player in the film 'American Psycho', I've not researched it, but I hope his name was used in tribute. I do find it a shame that Bill Gates would not contribute to keep this a museum, but despite what people think, I believe he is trying to use his immense wealth to make more positive impact on the world than preserving outdated technology. The desire from successful people like yourself to preserve these remnants of history is very much appreciated. Thank you.
Lucky to have had the opportunity to visit. Couldnt comprehend the amount of effort that likely went into getting all those systems up and running. Sadly, didn’t see Oregon Trail 😢
This is a bit heartbreaking. I went there a couple times with my dad and I had a field day each time. At that time, I'd only seen pictures of mainframes in computer books I read, but actually being able to seen one in person and the space that they took up was just incredible. I still have a couple of hats and I think a mousepad from when I visited.
I was on the team that decommissioned the CDC 6500 at Purdue University back in 1989. We didn't care about that old machine, since we were getting our own Cray to replace it. If we had only known that it would have been preserved by Cray and displayed at this Museum later, we would have done things a little differently. I did get to help on the restoration because I wrote the two dead start routines to boot it. If you look at the Dead Start panel, you'll see white and yellow tags that indicate the two different dead start configurations, which selected the boot devices.
It's all anecdotal, but the story I heard was that the director/staff was so excited about the new, much faster machine that they didn't really care about the old one!
@@DavesGarage Yep, we planned for the new machine for quite a while, and just used cable cutters to separate the frames, it was much faster then unscrewing all those cables. We had no idea. You have to remember, that machine was 20 years old by then.
@@DavesGarage That's probably the story that covers every old computer.
I was at University of Washington when its CDC 6600 was decommissioned... the poor thing was dismantled into individual boards and people took them home as souvenirs. Was always so great to see the 6500 running at LCM.
@@williamsteele it's just like now, thar's a thing that didn't change at all. those PCs that are 20-25 years old are valued the least.
Kind of heartbreaking that Mr Allen didn't make provisions to set up a museum endowment sufficient to keep it running (or hire a team to fund it) before his demise. So much labor and love were put into the restorations, it's sad to see it all up for auction like a sheriff's sale.
It's too bad that "other computer guy" with billions, who's spending Warren Buffet's money for him cuz Buffett doesn't know what to do with it all, wouldn't take an interest in it...
If anything, buy it and give it to the Smithonian, oh wait, they'll just trash it.
I know Dave said not to count other people's money, but I think history will judge all of the Silicon Valley and Redmond millionaires and billionaires very poorly for not preserving the museum.
It's not as if he didn't have way more than enough money to keep the museum staffed and running for centuries.
There was an in-progress effort to transfer the rest of Paul's collection to the museum and finish up making it a "real" nonprofit/museum that was almost immediately squashed by his estate after his passing. This isn't how he wanted things to happen.
@@classiccomputers6211He could have set up a trust to ensure that what he wanted to happen did happen. He didn’t want it badly enough to ensure it would happen, obviously.
I can''t imagine how all the volunteers feel about the hours they put in restoring those computers.
I can imagine. I bet they're bitter, feeling a mix between it being merely unfortunate vs having been taken advantage of. But Paul died young, which is how we got into this mess, and that's the ultimate tragedy here. We shouldn't lose sight of that because we love the hardware.
@@DavesGarage Very true, and Paul's passing is tragic. But I'm glad you are here voicing the discontent on how this is handled. And doing so with a smile and informative video. Thanks so much.
Why Paul did not setup a foundation ???
Was he as mad as internet says, only able to enjoy life, not willing to be microsoft.
In 10 years, nobody knows what it was, MS Dos, Windows and intel...
Tibetan monks spend a year or more making elaborate art out of colored sand. When they are finished, they destroy it right away to signify the fleeting nature of humans and their creations.
@@lucasrem There' plenty of people that just don't like to think about that sort of thing. Some extremely rich people don't even leave a will!
I live in Minneapolis, and when Prince died, he left NO WILL. So essentially his entire estate was a matter of a court battle among his siblings and half siblings. They all sold their parts of his estate off to some large corporation.
Don't count on your family to care about anything you care about. Paul Allen is a perfect example of that. Look at his sister, who seems to treat his computer museum like just another asset to be sold off. The guy died with an estate of 20 billion dollars... and she wants a few million dollars for god knows what.
17:59 - If you or your family "donated" to the museum, then dig up the old paperwork and make certain that you are not due a refund of the donation. Note a family donated the Carderock facility to the US Navy with the proviso that their son's name would not be removed from the facility. The Navy attempted to put a new name on it, and the family sued. Navy backed down in about a half second...
The museum staff did an excellent job of cleaning and detailing this stuff, the condition of everything is stunning.
I started computing in high school in 1967 with a teletype computer terminal connected by phone line to a mainframe computer.
I did as well from Lewis Jr. High School (San Diego) teletype, connected to a HP-2100 at the SDUSD main facility... learned BASIC in 1973 using the BASIC BASIC book.
Also thanks for not moving the camera constantly when you're showing these. Some people will go to a thing and try and film all the things... but they never stop moving the camera. They move it just like they are looking at it at the time. But you took the time to slowly and carefully show the shelves so we can actually take a moment and get a good look. Thanks!
Well, as someone that helped donate a working computer to the museum, one where I'd been one of the main OS developers for the prior 20 years, I can say fairly authoritatively that there is considerable sadness at the collection being parted out. I'd hoped to see the system again one last time in your short tour, but I'm not really surprised I didn't.
That makes me sad to hear :-( Which system was it? I have donator's remorse too :(
@@mdeloura A Unisys V400 if I recall correctly.
Wow, what a shame this collection is being dismantled. I was a few years post big iron and my entry point started on an Atari 800.
I had no idea this was a place, and now I wished I had. Thanks for the tour and good memories Dave.
My Atari 800 is still my favorite computer to play on.
I was today years old that I learned this place is closed. I visited here before my cruise to Alaska in summer of 2017 and had such a great time!
I visited Seattle in 2016 for my birthday, and I still have a punch card I made at LCM
@@rampagerick hell yeah hang onto it
And I'm sad because I never got to go there before it's closing. I had heard about it years ago too.
This museum was one of the most important places in Seattle to me. I took many friends here when they visited from out of town, and I'm genuinely so distressed at the loss of this incredible resource.
I was completely fascinated by the PLATO system they had there, and was delighted to use their Apple Lisa.
I hate Jody Allen more than a little for liquidating this museum's collection and selling it for tens of thousands of dollars on the Christie's auction site.
Word to the buyer of the Lisa: Its CRT is on its last legs. It's going to die. It's not worth $35,000.
The PLATO system is the first actual computer I ever programmed. It was at Malcolm X College in Chicago, down the street from my High School. I graduated H.S. and went to UI Urbana, which was the home of PLATO, and I spent many hours in various labs around campus.
@@numbr6 This is really fascinating! Thank you!
I knew you’d comment on this Digi. It’s truly a heartbreaking loss.
I visited the museum a few years back. It was so amazing to see all these machines that I read about working and available to actually sit down and use. This brought back so many memories from my childhood. It is very sad to hear that the machines are being sold off and not kept as a collection.
I'm stunned that no one has stepped up to keep this collection together and open to the public. 😢
I couldn't stop thinking about how Wozniak or Gates should ultimately be the ones. Especially Gates given he has godly wealth status and actual attachment to so much of that.
Too busy with world domination
@@Yarumasi I seriously doubt Gates gives a rat's ass about anything historic even to his own success.
@@InsideOfMyOwnMind Gates / Microsoft have contributed NOTHING to the information technology industry. The company's success is purely because his mum was on the board of IBM and as a lawyer he (Bill) wrote a licensing agreement for Windows and the money from that, enabled Microsoft to cheat, steal from and bully any innovator.
@@Yarumasi Microsoft have their own museum or used to have when I did some work on the campus when I worked for EDS. Maybe they will buy some of the kit which they don't have in the collection.
I live in Portland, Oregon and got to visit the museum twice before it closed. The last time I was there I was chatting with one of the engineers maintaining the KL-10 and got invited to GO INTO THE BASEMENT ! This was where the stockpile of computer projects not yet started were stored. I thought I was in Disneyland. Row upon row of PDP-11's (11/70 included), IBM System 360's and 370's, IBM 1130, Univac systems, a Sequent Computer Systems system, disk drives, line printers, Datapoint systems... the list is endless. I don't know if these non-functional systems are included in the auction as I don't know where to get an auction listing. Just as Dave is lusting after an 11/70, I am lusting after the PDP-12 (functional) complete with dual DecTapes and A/D panel and their PDP-7 which was running BSD Unix last time I visited. I am just heartbroken the place is shut down forever. A LOT of nostalgia there ...
the link is in the description
Thank heavens at least you captured footage of that great place. I'm an old fogey that worked on the CDC 3100 many years ago as a technician. Saw all the generations of computers come and go through the ages. What a travesty that this treasure will be lost forever. So sad.
Still insane to me that the little brick I'm holding in my hand and watching this on is orders of magnitude more powerful than those room sized supercomputers.
Yup. Between me, my cell phone, and my PDP-11/34, I've got 128.002G of RAM!
We designed ICs with 6 micron design rules in Carver Mead’s class at Caltech in 1976. Chips are now down below 6 nanometers, a 1000:1 dimensional shrink. That means there are now 1,000,000 transistors for every single transistor in the old ICs.
@@w6wdh They're not really down below 6nm. The "nm" nomenclature has been decoupled from actual gate length for some time now, so for example TSMC's "5nm" process has a gate length of about 18nm. For marketing reasons semiconductor manufacturers started using smaller numbers more than a decade ago. Intel has stopped using any measurements to name its nodes, now opting for just numbers (Intel 7, etc.)
Yep, a small cheap microcontroller for a single Euro can emulate the machines of yore just fine.
My current project by the way, a board with a RP2040 emulating machines from the 70s that you can attach a real terminal to. Currently working is a PDP11 that can run Unix v6 and RT11 of course and a Z80 machine that can run CP/M.
If Dave wants a beta board i could throw one into the post, then he has a small PDP11 too. :)
Funny how they were calling the smaller, not room-sized, machines *_"mini"_* computers (compared to the devices we now have). 🤭
I had no idea this place closed down. I visited before COVID during my birthday and had a blast. It was so incredible to see all those vintage computers in working order and actually being able to play around with them. I enjoyed the recreation of what was like an 80s living room with a bunch of old Magazines with BASIC programs. Also, the super computer section at the top and the guy who gave the tours was really awesome. Such a shame that I will never be able to visit it again, but I am glad I got the opportunity. A truly unique place.
Same. I didn't know it was closed but I was lucky around to be able to see it when it was open
I'm glad I got to visit the museum before he passed. So cool to see all that computer history. A shame it can't continue to be shared.
I took my very young son there when I moved back to the Seattle area back in 2016. We've been waiting for it to open again to go back and view everything. Heartbreaking to see the museum being terminated.
I also went there in Feb 2020, the wood paneled "basement" was great, and I sat at the Apple II you showed in the computer lab to do the demo they had on the overhead projector. There was also a machine for making punched cards. I was with a group of friends, and we all took the time to make some punched cards. Another really fun area was off to the side of the first floor where they had a Connection Machine, I think it was a CM-2 with the front panel LEDs set up to be a digital clock. Purely eye candy. Very fun place and a long-time bucket list item. I'm really sad that this is how it ended. I wish it were still there so I could take more people with me to visit it.
I'm so heartbroken that the museum had closed. I was fortunate enough to purchase a membership and would visit often playing with restored computers from my youth in the '80s. After the museum closed, and it's future in doubt, prompted me to start my own little retro computer collection of an Apple IIe, Mac Plus, Commodore 64, and IBM PCjr. These systems were so influential for my love of computing and technology. LCM you will be missed!
This is fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to do this sir.
I sincerely hope that all of the equipment in the museum find a great home that will properly maintain them for the historical value and relevance these old devices provide us.
This IS AWESOME!!!
I was very fortunate to be able to visit the museum for my first and only time back in July of 2018. It is genuinely one of the most artful, soulful computing spaces ever composed, and it's devastating that it's shut down for good and being liquidated. I do hope that whoever ends up acquiring these machines -- especially the CDC 6500 -- have the skills, knowledge, and space needed to bring them back online and make them accessible to the public again. These computers deserve to sing their song for as long as they possibly can. The spirit of the machine meets you in the room where these are alive. Humanity is forever changed by the impact these machines had on our world, and I hope they can continue to bring people joy for decades and centuries to come.
When this was opened, it was my favorite museum. The machines they had in there were amazing. Really bummed it ended up having to close.
Wow - what a tour! I've used many of those computers through my life. OMG - the memories! Thank you for sharing. Those NeXT cubes were incredible machines.
I remember going to the NeXT computer company and installing a Powership computer from FedEx. Those black NeXT computers really stand out and I wanted one!
I bought several Burroughs, Sperry UNIVAC, and Unisys items from the museum during the liquidation.
I live in North Carolina. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to visit the museum.
I wish..... I wish, I could have visited the museum before it closed and the liquidation!
Thank you soooooooooo much for sharing!!!
I agree its such a pity to see this collection split up, and thank you Dave for the tour.
Thank you for showing this! I've never made it out to that area of the world until after it closed and would have loved to see this. Thank you for immortalizing some of the hard work the countless number of volunteers did to make this place special!
I miss this place so much. I have some great pictures of me and my daughter with the Cray. Well she looks very bored, but I'm having a great time! :D
Wonderful video, I'm 78 years now, grew up with most of these computers you are talking about. Now I'm the proud owner of a new computer with all the latest software motherboards and processor. I always bring young people to the computer museum. I live near the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara California. This is also a great museum, young people after visiting the museum, now have a appreciation for the dedicated steps taken, to have what we have today. THANKS AGAIN.
Yes, the CHM is great. I recorded a lot of footage there, I could actually do an episode on it... but definitely worth visiting! I'm always wondering how complete the machines they have are, since they're not put to the test of actually running as the LCM machines were. I like to think they're pristine museum-quality examples, but could be empty boxes for all I know!
Toonman,
We need to support the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara.
Hope a school can keep these systems in working conditions, students need to see what they did.
museum, keep it fresh, you need visitors, Seattle ?
Thank you Dave. Paul G. Allen had so many great projects going in so many aspects of life. His presence is felt and carried on into more than just this museum. It is sad it didn't keep going, but so much of his work is timeless and lives on from the smallest of things like brain mapping to the vastness of outer space. He was an extraordinary individual.
Raised floor brought back memories. My dad used to take me and my sister to work and let us play with the key-punches.
Man, it's sad that this is closing. Hopefully museums will pick some of these up...
No other computer museum has a commitment to keeping machines working. Even the act of restoring these machines, which involves replacing old wiring, failed electrolytic capacitors, etc., is considered vandalism by many conservators. They want to preserve the machines as fossils and don't place much value in the working machines.
@@pquirk99not all museums has this kind of thinking, but the bigger issue is that most of them can’t afford those auctions anyway
Some artifacts should be saved, but keeping old mainframes running is foolishness, in my opinion. The CDC 6xxx systems, for example, had full time maintenance engineers at each site to look after them, backed up by experts at headquarters. As noted here, parts are no longer available.
@@GH-oi2jf It's hard to comprehend how these large systems operated unless you see an operator loading and unloading tapes on 8 tape drives and changing disk packs on 10 more or disk drives while loading card decks, vacuuming a printer before loading another box of fanfold, and responding to alerts on those round displays.
Dave, I truly appreciate the time you take to share things like this with us. Your videos never cease to amaze, inform, teach me something or bring a smile!
I never made it to the living computer museum when it was open and I have some regrets
Same! I kept meaning to go and then Covid happened and Paul Allen died and his sister cut off the two best things he was keeping running in Seattle. This museum and the Cinerama. Thankfully SIFF took over Cinerama but it's a shame that nobody is taking over this institution. Feels like MOHAI should have just bought the entire thing and kept it running.
No ragrets
Me too, that's why I made sure I at least made it down to the computer history museum in Mountain View.
@@BenWolkWeiss The combat museum was even better and suffered the same fate. Incredible collection of WWII aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles from every nation involved in the war, and like these computers they were all operational.
I have Donor's Remorse. Donated several pieces to a museum that has shutdown and the hardware disappeared. The items I donated included a IMSAI 8080 in pristine condition with a working teletype and papertape reader/punch, acoustic modem, Tadpole (Sun1 laptop) and a Compaq 286 which had the original 30MB hard drive replaced. Back then MS/DOS 3.1 couldn't address 30MB so Compaq had a partitioning utility to make 10MB virtual drives.
Dave, it almost feels like the ancient Egyptians would be like "who the heck will read all this history
on these walls of the King's tomb." Sell it and let it sit in someone's show garage and later in a dumpster.
Sad days for these magical pioneers, the Smithsonian should have taken them - even if powered off.
Thanks for the amazing footage, you are a legend in my book!
Any of the legendary Dr Dobb's journals? lol, way above my freshman head in the 90s :)
Seeing all these clean machines humming along is amazing and takes me back to the days of bootloaders and Baudot tape.
Hey Dave, thanks for this video tour. It serves as a bit of a final goodbye to the museum for me and a little bit of closure. Hopefully some of the artifacts and systems make it back to public display. I now see a number of the notable systems missing (Such as the IBM 360/91, Cray 1, metal case Apple I) have been transported to Christie's in New York as part of a separate auction. I know LCM was a labour of love for so many of the volunteers and staff. I sincerely hope that they've been able to find a new outlet for their passion and knowledge.
Those wires on the CDC-6500 are each of a specific length. The last card modules for that series of CDC machines were built in the late 70's
Thanks for the video and the trip down memory lane.
Thanks! I was wondering why there weren't routed more neatly, like a car harness, but that's why!
@@DavesGarage No. They were trimmed to length to make the timing work. Eleven inches a nanosecond...
It seems odd that the Cray-2 was circular, supposedly to reduce signal path times, but if you look in its center it has those same big loopy cables.
@ericolson9695 if you take the circumference of the hole it would be say 6 feet (instead 2 feet) and straight it out the wires would have to be 6 feet long so the cray would have run 3 times slower because long distance the signals would have to travel.
Cray hired Asian women to do the wiring because they were small enough to fit into the space.
@@DavesGarageYou'll see similar delay routing on modern PCBs (and I presume down in the silicon, too), but squarer and neater.
Thanks for covering this venue, I attended BlueHat there in 2017 and was amazed at the collection, I really wanted to return with my kids so I was really sad to see it had closed!
Dave, thanks for the tour.
Donators remorse is very real, and this is a crime that his sister, who inherited billions from her brother yet had nothing to do with his success and his creativity, profited handsomely from it, but she can’t find a few million to keep this slice of history alive. Yet another thing she got from Paul that she has completely botched up.
I can’t be the only one who heart breaks, just knowing that all of this is going to be auctioned off!
Thanks for cataloging and sharing this before it's scattered to the winds. I only went to the museum once despite working literally down the road from it. I was looking forward to attending a retro computing event there right before they closed for covid, and ultimately, forever.
I was a technician at DEC's Marlboro plant in the late 1070's. I was the first person to power on a PDP-10 after it left the assembly area. The KA-10 had ECL logic which was very hard to diagnose and repair with the scopes and logic analyzers of that era. I also repaired PDP-11s, which have my favorite machine instruction set. Later I became a software engineer and programmed the character generator microprocessor for DEC's VT240 graphics terminal.
I remember visiting The Computer Museum in Boston when it was open. It was so awesome for a computer geek: they actually showed informative exhibits of how computing works, early rope memory, and the earliest digital computers. Luckily I think most all that was there is in the current The History Computer Museum in California.
As far as I know pretty much everything went to the CHM. I was one of the founder members of the Computer Museum in Boston. As I was (correctly) unsure about its long-term future I didn't give them anything outright but let them have some things on loan. They are still on loan to the CHM.
@@jeremybarker7577 Thanks for chiming in. I have family in the region, so it's more reason to visit the current museum in CA. I thought the exhibit space in Boston was just enough as far as informing you how computing started and having exhibits that were informative for kids and adults. Being on the warf, it was also a great space. When I saw the announcement of its closing, it was a sad day for me.
This video brought back so many memories from my childhood. TRS-80. Commodore PET. C64. Amiga.
Thank you for this!
It would be wonderful if this collection could be currated in another collection.
Emulation is always possible. But there is just something magical about the feel (and the sounds, and the smells) of the actual hardware.
It's a shame that Paul Allen created the museum but didn't provide for it and that no one else stepped up to keep it going. A lot of what he collected may never be seen again, vanishing into private collections that may be tossed as trash by the new owner's heirs when they pass.
Bingo... 😞
AFAIK Paul had no heirs the head of his estate is his Sister...Everyone is waiting for her to sell the Seahawks Football Team and we're expecting Jeff Bezzos to buy them.
There were conversations about keeping the place going by various parties. It just never seemed like keeping the place operating is what the family wanted. Perhaps if someone had been able to pay auction value for the whole lot.
@@nathandanner4030 like MacKenzie Bezos, the money will be wasted now.
They should’ve cut costs and moved out of Seattle
Dave, thank you so much for posting such a great great video. I grew up during the home computer boom, started programming in basic on an Atari 400. So to say this was a walk down memory lane would be an understatement. Thank you again for taking the time to help preserve history.
Wow, I want that lot of Byte magazines. What a treasure trove. "The Magazine of Computer Orthodontia. Running Lighr Without Overbyte."
Just when I was getting the willpower to toss all my old magazines :) I did toss a case or 2 of some stuff. I had Byte, Creative Computing, PC magazine, PC compute. I might have had the engineering type mag that had the first ad for Altair? but a quick browse 10 years ago didn't find it.
That slogan was for Dr. Dobb's Journal, not Byte Magazine.
I still have many issues of both, that haven't quite yet fallen to downsizing and mishaps during moves over the years. Along with some issues of Computer Design magazine, which was more about the mainframes and minicomputers of the time. Some of those issues included ads featuring artwork with creatures made out of computer components.
@@bradlevy2733 WOW. My memory is worse than I thought. Thanks for the correction and fanning the embers of past days of wonder. Be well.
great video Dave. Brings me back for sure. My first computer had 640KB RAM and the computer I'm on right now has 64GB, 1 millions times more ram than I started with. Amazing to think about. I learned to code on the C64,Apple2E and the Tandy 1000 TX. I'm surprised I didn't see any Tandy in the video, maybe I missed it.
I could go there and not get this much information out of it. I fell like I'm getting a tour by a father of technology through a museum of technology. Thanks for this, Father! =D
You're welcome, Timmy!
WOW thanks for this, Dave!!! That brings back so many memories, seeing all those different systems. I only hope that some place can keep all these for the future.
Wish some billionaire or even a corporation like Microsoft had taken over to keep the museum open was always on my bucket list
Thanks Dave. I remember a job I had in 2006 helping Paul move his office from Kirkland to Seattle. I was on the team that inventoried all of his stuff that got moved. During the moving process I mentioned that it would be great to have a museum set up with his computer collection. When he actually did it I was one of the first ones to visit and get a membership. I remember loving to play with the robots and sit in the self driving car exhibit. I loved getting to take my daughter there to play with all the computers. I had a telnet account on the mainframes too. I remember attending the 10 year anniversary celebration of WordPress when Matt Mullenweg came into town for a visit. I was at at the 1 year party for the LCM when they brought in a replica of the Back to the Future Delorian and had it in the parking lot. I loved the time line of computer history they had on one of the walls. So much history now lost and scattered to the wind. Perhaps all of the folks that got a part of the lots will re-assemble the collection via video archive here on UA-cam some day. So we can all remember.
I remember visiting with my dad ages ago. he also was a developer at Microsoft back in the 90s. It's a shame I can't go back now since I've gained more of an interest in the stuff.
You’ve made a lot of high quality informative videos Dave…. But I must say this takes the cake. Wow. Thank you so much for making this. I’m no spring chicken (just turned 50 a few days ago) and computers and their history has been a passion since I was 6, and it’s rare that I’m experiencing anything that makes me overly excited or genuinely impressed nowadays…. But this video literally moved me to tears.
Wow, thanks for the kind words! I was worried about things like my hair was too messy, so it means a lot 🙂
My favorite old-computer experience has to be watching the Difference Engine being operated on Ada Lovelace's 200th birthday, while it was on loan to the Computer History Museum in CA. I understand it's now on display somewhere in Seattle, but I don't know if they still operate it regularly.
Yes, the Difference Engine belongs to another former Microsoft executive, Nathan Myhrvold.
After leaving the CHM, it went to the lobby of Intellectual Ventures, his patent trolling company in Bellevue. There is a photo gallery from 2016 on Wikimedia suggesting it was being operated, but I'm not finding much info about it ongoing.
Wow Dave, This was a fun episode to view. You and I are about 4 years apart in age, so when you opened with "For those who are 20 years older than I am", I imagined to see some of the units that I had NEVER seen.. What I did see that grabbed my attention was the Apple Lisa Computer, which looked just as the Apple Lisa that I had acquired and kept for several years. It booted and had a desktop, but that was it. Loading a floppy into the drive managed to do nothing. I eventually sold it (slapping myself now) at a garage sale. What I do still have are two or three original Compaq Portables, just as your video showed. The first IT job I landed out of Tech School used these little guys as Print Servers on our Novell Network and were fun to work with. The company we used for hardware and education, had one with the XT Mother board was replaced with (if memory serves) either a 286 or 386 Mother board and was used as a portable file server. I can still remember when years later, I found that server to learn its secrets. In 2005 I then worked for that school / tech house and was in charge of the inventory. Finding that I was able to see how it was upgraded and wanted to turn around and update one of the Compaq Portables I had in storage.
I love geeking out with your videos and reading what others have nostalgically found or seen from your channel.. Thanks again for being awesome.
I was lucky to visit around 2016 enjoying the museum from corner to corner. Sad to see it closed and the hitherto well-maintained set of artifacts scattered throughout the world with unknown future. Hopefully some of them will end up in technically interested hands, preserving the treasure for future generations to enjoy and learn from.
Brings back memories. My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. In my employment I worked with Unisys mainframe along with an RCA Spectra and a small IBM system.
My 4 rack pdp-8i system went to this museum. The computer itself worked fine. The tape and disk did not. I pretty much determined later that it was likely a dropped bit on the external interface. Never could find the actual failure. Both tape and disk worked to a point. But with a bit missing it would fail to execute the proper instruction if a boot was attempted. Last I knew it was in a back room somewhere there waiting restoration.
Thanks for giving us such a great tour, Dave. I miss that place. Loved the rooms in the back with the soldering irons, the wall of VR headsets on the main floor, and the smell of the machine room. There was a great library too, I hope it has gone to another museum. I'm sad about having donated some equipment to the museum and now seeing the place parted out. But mostly I'm sad that this great collection won't be available for others to see and learn from.
I've lived within an hour of it as long as it's been there, always figured I'd get off my butt and stop by one day. A reminder to see things like this when you can. Now I never will.
At least I got to play with the ATT 3B2 systems a bit before they were moved out of the Connections Museum (and go there if you have any appreciation for Telcom and Ma Bell stuff) to... The Living Computer museum, where they will never be seen again.
This makes me so sad. I wanted to see this museum so badly, but I live on the East Coast. The 80's Classroom / Arcade / Rec Room was my dream exhibit - hopefully something like that will exist again in some form or another soon. So many classic science museums are closing these days - from the Ontario Science Centre, to Holographic Studios in New York City, it's just so depressing - we need more archival work like this to preserve them for posterity. Thank you so much for sharing this!!!
Having been in love with computers since about 1980, it is sad that the Smithsonian Institute doesn't have a provision for such a wonderful collection. 😢
I also love aircraft, and I'm lucky to live near its wonderful facilities.
Interesting point... is there a national or Smithsonian computer collection of any kind?
@@DavesGarage National Museum of American History. I haven't been for years, and can't remember when I saw the last computer exhibit there (it was fairly small).
They need a separate building dedicated to computers and calculating machines, radar radio & TV, telephony (back end mechanical switches), and scientific equipment (cyclotrons etc).
It would have to be massive, and massively expensive.
The Smithsonian has a Cray-1 and other computer artifacts. They would be more selective than the Allen museum, and I'm sure they don't try to operate the mainframes.
@@GH-oi2jf they have a ton of stuff, but little is on display...
It's all a bit before my time but really cool to see. Extremely disheartening to see the museum go, I hope everything finds a good home!
Such a shame this great museum didn't survive. We need to appreciate this vintage technology. I'm an old TRS-80 hack, myself. Long time ago. Oddly, I'm not sure I wasn't more productive as a teenager than as an adult.
Used the CDC 6500 at Purdue from 1970-74 and then again from 1980-81. On a good day in the early 70's you could run your program and get your paper output in 15 minutes. Fortran IV was the preferred language back in the day. Hope it goes to a good hone.
It wasn't closed because of COVID. It was closed because of the same people in the Paul Allan org that closed the Cinerama.
I didn't see any IBM Series 1 mini mainframe computers that I worked on in early 1980s. The company I worked for paired these with a CDC disk drive with removable disk paks. These were about the size of a dishwasher and stored about 300mb.
Thanks Dave for sharing this bit of computer history. Most of these companies are long gone.
Nice tour.
Blinking lights make me happy. @10:58
I was fortunate enough to have visited this museum once a year or two before it closed, it was an amazing experience. Most museums have everything roped off or in glass cases but here it was all up and running and you actually got to use it, amazing. Makes me really sad to see it all being auctioned off, it was an absolute treasure to have everything set up in one place. As for the IBM PC, that's the standard CGA color monitor IBM offered, I have a PC/XT with exactly the same monitor that someone gave me when I was a kid. Mine has an EGA card in it which allows the CGA monitor to produce a much wider range of colors than the intended CGA, however the higher EGA resolutions are not supported.
The artifact that blew me away when I visited the museum was the 4-rotor Enigma machine.
I covered that in the other episode, but I agree.
Really enjoyed watching this video Dave :) thanks so much for putting it out there....
Dave, if you know any of the people (person, really) responsible for shuttering this museum I hope you gave them an earful. It's shameful what they did to the museum.
Wouldn't that be Paul Allen's sister Jody?
But I think his museums were owned by the Allen Family Foundation trust. I think it needs to hand out at least 5% of the value each year.
If I ever do get to meet Jody I'll see if I can work it into the conversation :-)
OMG, all the rarities for auction, must be preserved.
It is interesting that I never see a Tandem Non Stop at any computer museum.
No one seems to preserve Sun equipment. Sun at Stanford was instrumental in bringing Ethernet connectivity mainstream. It was Sun’s John Gage who coined the slogan “The network is the computer” in 1984. A lot of the Commodore Amiga work converting Tripos over to Amiga DOS and developing Intuition was done on Sun 3 systems.
CHM has several models of Tandem servers in storage; none are on public display
@@wtmayhew My university used to have a salvage store where you could buy up rooms full of old computer and other lab equipment for almost nothing. I have a friend who bought up a bunch of sun workstations set up a very large network and used it to heat his house.
Tandem became Compaq, which became HP (which was split into HP and HPE) so maybe someone still has some stuff
@@sundhaug92 … and the remnants of DEC were absorbed into Compaq prior to the HP acquisition. IBM is pretty much the last electronic computing machinery maker with an unbroken path tracing back to the 1940s - older still if one counts electromechanical machines.
Thank you Dave.
I actually diagnosed a bad power supply in a Compaq Portable used by a local office supply company. I was scared to death I would be wrong, but was delighted when it came to life and worked perfectly after I replaced it 🙂
What is Compaq ?
@@lucasrem Compaq was a PC manufacturing company that was acquired by HP in 2002.
Thank you for sharing this special insight into these computers in history. I managed to go through this museum when it was open and I am sad to see it dismantled. I remember many of these computers and had the opportunity to play with or work with them. There are a number of them that I have to admit was not aware of plus you gave a lot of great detailed information about them and their power. Your knowledge of these special machines is a gift and I appreciate this video.
Fun fact. The first Tron movie’s graphic scenes were done on a DEC 10.
Actually a Foonly F1, which was a PDP-10 clone.
I started my career on the Decsystem-10 , COBOL , Fortran in school and then managed these systems at digital (the KL10 variant) back in 1980. Soon after the Vax systems came on the scene. Great times!
You should go to the Computer Museum of America in Georgia. They have a ton of Cray supercomputers, an OG Pixar computer, and an Apple I.
Where in GA is it located and do the computers work?
@@ikonix360 it’s in Roswell. Unfortunately the computers aren’t operational right now, but it’s still developing so maybe in the future?
@@chanmanderson That's only about 2 hours from me.
Would be nice if they had the money and space to buy some of these computers.
@@ikonix360 who knows…that might actually happen. I def recommend following them on social media and staying tuned
@@chanmanderson Will do
Xerox Sigma 9 - this and the IBM 1130 at GCRI gave me the intro to computing that made it a lifelong experience - great memories and thanks for sharing.
Me too! I started with Dartmouth BASIC on the Sigma 7-9, and then straight to assembly with Meta-Symbol. No one told me I couldn't.
So sad. I feel for the volunteers and staff.
Cray Supercomputers have a special place in my heart. Mainly because of Jurassic Park. In the book, Hammond buys Cray computers to sequence the dinosaur DNA. Something about that small detail of the book always fascinated me.
At 13:20 is a Processor Technology Sol-20 with what looks like a pair of NorthStar Floppy drives. Very hard to tell, but depending on where it was sold, I could have set that one up for someone. When I was working at the Bellevue Byte Shop, we set up quite a few Sol-20’s in this configuration.
Also, sold a Centronics parallel printer cable for $75.00, it was an active cable to solve the issue with the Sol-20’s hand shaking problem. (Dirty little secret, the active part was just a 7400-chip set up as a J-K flipflop. Most of its cost was the labor to make this custom cable.)
Late 70’s.
I have an IMSAI with PT boards. What I really need is a ROM board with the OS. I booted using the Cutter tape and I'm 90% sure it won't load after all these years. If you have one or in idea where I could get one I would be very greatful!
@@rickclapp6560
The only ROM board I have is a Processor Technology ALS-8 firmware board and I wish to keep it. It’s part of the ‘let's share’ problem I am trying to create. The share between the ALS-8 and the NorthStar floppy drive controller.
Look up the FLEX64K RAM/EEPROM board. That may help you. You should be able to load anything on it.
I was hoping to see a Tandem NonStop system. I worked at a newspaper and that was our mainframe after a Harris editorial system. We ultimately donated out NonStop to a museum such as this but I don’t remember which one. I’m 72 and I DID hear you the first time! 😀
Spectacular. Thank you for gathering all this wonderful tech. I've volunteered at our local computer club since 1992 and fascinated by it all since my teens. Love this 💙🌻💙
Dave I was on Sigma 9 design team and wrote all the diagnostics software with another engineer. Btw it could have up to 4 processors in a master slave configuration. All access to up 16 mb I think. I miss the blinking light control panel as well. Sigh. Best to you and thanks for the vid.
Sadly, I’ve learned that the things that are important to you will *not* be important to your children (or your siblings) after you die.
I have to agree with a lot of folks here that it is a shame and great loss that this place closed. It was one of the few museums that I really have always wanted to visit.
That CRAY supercomputer is a real showoff - leather seats, you have GOT to be kidding! Lol
The ymp at my university was flaming pink and located in a large but empty flat black room with a track light and an SGI terminal (128MB of RAM!!!). Despite the spartan presentation, I think the artistic budget was half the price tag. The Cray 1 at Los Alamo not so much. That looked like a rusted junk heap from Star Wars.
The seats and side panels were actually just covered in vinyl, not leather, but you could get any color you wanted.
The Cray-2 did not have built-in seats. I didn't see a Cray-1 in the video.
Awesome video. I still have my commodore 128 with 1571 drive, as well as the hole punch used to double side all my disks.
I was there for VCF Pacific North West 2019, it was amazing. Wouldn't have believed a year later it would be gone. Hopefully some of those artifacts went the national computer museum in Atlanta, they have a lot of floor space. Thanks for sharing it with everyone here.
Wow, I watched your shop talk vid before this one, haters gonna hate, but seeing these beautiful machines, yeah it sucks a museum won't preserve them, but dedicated enthusiasts like yourself is just as good. To most of us they are worth nothing, but when cared for and with knowledge on their history and how to run them, that's priceless.
I'm someone that does find it hard to want to use old technology, but my love for the Commodore Amiga (and indeed the Commodore 64 and Vic 20) is something I will never lose, so I respect and admire the nerd levels for this old tech, and preserving it.
I guess I am one of the few (but also many) that really appreciate the stunning images from this video of our computing history, again I have to ask, how the hell are these machines so immaculate in condition? They're from an age where everyone smoked cigarettes, and yet they look like they just popped off the factory line, how is this possible? Not to mention 40 odd years of dust build-up.
I still have 2 Amiga 500's in the loft, and one of them I believe still works. It is my dream to have enough space to set it up on a Sony Trintron 32 inch TV I still have (that weighs an absolute ton!).
It's strange hearing you say Paul Allen, I now understand who he was, but being a film buff moreover than a computer nerd, Paul Allen was an intrinsic player in the film 'American Psycho', I've not researched it, but I hope his name was used in tribute.
I do find it a shame that Bill Gates would not contribute to keep this a museum, but despite what people think, I believe he is trying to use his immense wealth to make more positive impact on the world than preserving outdated technology. The desire from successful people like yourself to preserve these remnants of history is very much appreciated. Thank you.
Lucky to have had the opportunity to visit. Couldnt comprehend the amount of effort that likely went into getting all those systems up and running. Sadly, didn’t see Oregon Trail 😢
There were a few Oregon Trails kicking around in there! I tried to play them all! 🙂
This is a bit heartbreaking. I went there a couple times with my dad and I had a field day each time. At that time, I'd only seen pictures of mainframes in computer books I read, but actually being able to seen one in person and the space that they took up was just incredible. I still have a couple of hats and I think a mousepad from when I visited.