Living Computers Museum + Labs, the Seattle institution created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays, will not reopen, more than four years after closing near the start of the pandemic.
Allen's estate, which has been managing and winding down his vast array of holdings since his death in 2018, confirmed to GeekWire that the 12-year-old museum is closed for good. The museum website and social media accounts were taken down Tuesday.
The estate also announced Tuesday that some key pieces from Allen's personal collection of computer artifacts, displayed over the years at Living Computers, will be auctioned by Christie's as part of a broader sale of various Allen items later this year.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday June 28 2024, @04:15PM (6 children)
Their financials look weird.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460979323 [propublica.org]
When they were open, they were both making about a quarter mil on admissions, Paul tossed in a quarter mil/yr cash, they had misc revenues from other contributions, etc, and spent somewhat less than a mil, most years. 2017 is a pretty typical year for them.
I can't figure out their real estate situation. They don't seem to have real estate as an asset and don't seem to pay rent. Obviously you can't have a HUGE facility in a hyperinflated area for free even if its somehow missing from the financials. In Seattle you're looking at $30 to $40 per sq foot per year. I can't get a straight answer online about how big the LCM is/was but the pics look "as big as a supermarket" so figure 50K sq ft, so "someone" is out about $2M/yr figuring some reasonable utilities and associated costs. It's not that someone is writing a check but "someone" could be getting a check for "a couple mil/yr" for that space and they apparently are not.
A museum is a nice idea, but their revenue stream was perhaps only a tenth what it takes to run the museum. With an endowment of $100M they could probably run semi-perpetually. The problem is Paul was tossing in about a quarter mil/year not $100M in a single endowment payment. I'm not picking on Paul (nice guy, etc) I am merely criticizing their financials.
This is definitely not a case of "just declare bankruptcy to blow away the debts and start over". There's no plausible way to run that museum sustainably, its not even remotely close. Just increase their admissions by a factor of at least ten. Or, just increase their annual donations by a factor of at least ten. Naaaah this isn't happening. If they can't get the revenue stream off memberships and entrance fees/donations, they have to minimize their fixed costs, and I just don't see that happening. Even out in a desert somewhere, just the utility costs of lights and HVAC would bankrupt them eventually.
Probably the best hope for a museum like this is agglomeration onto a bigger higher revenue museum, or govt handouts as a tourist attraction (which MIGHT be legit?) or diversification. Lets say they had a million sq feet of event space for rent with a cool museum on the top floor; that might be sustainable. However a million sq ft convention center is "like a billion bucks" so its cheaper just to financialize and get an endowment of $100M.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 28 2024, @04:27PM (1 child)
I'm hoping at least the more unique items wind up in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. They already have a Babbage Difference Engine, a Cray-1, an Apple I, and lots of other cool stuff that definitely should be preserved somewhere. It seems like this collection would be along the same lines.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Saturday June 29 2024, @05:48AM
CHM preserves things but like two machines in the entire place function. LCM had big iron running and even let you have remote accounts. When I say big iron I'm talking about an IBM 4341 http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/brochures/IBM4341Processor.pdf [bitsavers.org]
There aren't many museums around with running machines with this place being the exception https://www.mact.io/ [www.mact.io]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2024, @04:42PM (3 children)
Thanks for following the money. I've had some involvement with smaller museums and they are almost always underfunded.
A quick look suggests that Paul Allen had cancer and didn't die without warning (and time to write a good will). He must not have cared that much about this museum, because he didn't leave it an endowment sufficient to cover the costs of operation. Did he start the museum as a place to keep his personal "toy collection" and then use it as a tax write off? If so, maybe he wasn't concerned about the long term survival.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday June 28 2024, @05:21PM (2 children)
Very unlikely. Looking at the published data he just took "what they got minus what they need" and wrote a check every year to make up the difference. His net worth was about $20B and he was only donating a quarter mil per year or so. As a write off that would be a lot for me, but for him was a drop in the bucket.
It looks like the typical small business/big CEO thing that happens a zillion times a year across the country mostly to small businesses when the only guy running it or funding it dies or retires the heirs just kind of lose interest (if they ever had any at all) and shut it down.
The financial landscape for something like this is weird; the cost to keep something running on a shoestring budget if your real estate and inventory are either free or donated is extremely low; the cost of an endowment to FULLY fund without donations in perpetuity is extremely large. Paul generally tossed in a fraction of a million bucks annually to balance the budget HOWEVER to run the museum independently in perpetuity would require a single donation of far over a thousand times that. I'm still kind of mystified how the real estate worked. "Someone" was out a couple million dollars per year because of this museum in opportunity cost. The museum certainly was not paying market rent and the docs claim the non-profit did not own the museum.
There's nothing wrong with having a hobby or interest where you'll only spend X and refuse to spend 1000 times X. This is just a very public example of running the LCM year to year was in his small change budget but funding in perpetuity would be a very major financial operation even for him.
To computer people, like here, he's the guy who funded the LCM and he didn't really do anything else. However, this was a pretty small project to him, figure a yacht costs 10%/yr in upkeep so he was dropping about $20M/yr on his his yacht that cost $200M to buy. It sold for more than $200M after he died. I suppose yacht-people only care about his yacht and don't even know he personally funded a computer museum in Seattle.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2024, @06:37PM
> Did he start the museum as a place to keep his personal "toy collection"
The people restoring the computers he wanted to play with convinced him
to open some of it to the public. As a computing museum, it was an odd
collection, only the stuff he was personally interested in, personal computers
and mainframes that could be used for timesharing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 29 2024, @04:01AM
> ... and refuse to spend 1000 times X
Where did you get that 1000 factor? Some sort of conservative investment should return about 4%/year, so for an annual return of $1M it takes roughly $25 million. Even with the real estate cost that you estimate, perhaps a $75 million endowment would be enough for a good long while? $75M is "only" 300x of Allen's annual contribution of $0.25M/year.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday June 28 2024, @04:40PM (6 children)
This sounds like Allen messed up his testament or that the estate got greedy. He should have some kind of thrust with his Microsoft billions setup for these things, one would think. Perhaps Bill can do something good, I doubt he would even notice the rounding error on the accounts that it would take to keep it going. That is if it's actually worthwhile. Have anyone here been to the Museum? Was it interesting etc? Otherwise if it was just a vanity project or tax-deductible project then I guess it might mean less to him or the estate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday June 28 2024, @05:41PM
Possibly, but it also sort of surprises me that with so many tech millionaires in the region that there's not enough collective interest to keep the museum going. I guess that just goes to show that allowing a bunch of carpetbaggers to move to an area, extract all the resources, and then helicopter out when they got there's isn't a sustainable practice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2024, @06:10PM
Vulcan (ie. Paul) owns the property. His collection was there a LONG time before LCM was established.
It was his playpen. He owned everything and never went through the effort of donating any of it to
the non-profit before he died.
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Friday June 28 2024, @07:03PM (2 children)
The discussion of this same article on hacker news had a few posters claiming (no evidence of how the knew what they were claiming) that his will stipulated that his assets be sold off and the proceeds donated to charity, and that the will had no explicit stipulation for the museum itself.
If we assume that this claim about his will is correct, then lacking that explicit stipulation about the museum, the estate has no other choice but to follow the will's directive and "sell off" the museum (and everything else not explicitly directed otherwise by the will) and donate the proceeds to charities. Even if the estate wanted to preserve the museum forever they could not, if the will in fact stipulated "sell off assets and donate" and did not single out the museum for any special treatment.
If Mr Allen had wanted the museum to operate into the future after his death, he would have needed to explicitly stipulate in the will to convert it into some form of 'charity' org., and then donate a sizable chunk of his other "sold off" assets' proceeds to the new "charity org" that is to operate the museum. He was certainly worth enough that he could have done this in his will had he wanted and still had plenty of billions going to other charities as well. So unless the estate is in breach of the will's wishes, they are simply doing what his will directs, sad as it may be to everyone else watching the museum go away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2024, @08:58PM (1 child)
> If Mr Allen had wanted the museum to operate into the future after his death, he would have needed to explicitly stipulate in the will to convert it into some form of 'charity' org
LCM was a 501(c)(3) but all of the computers there were on loan with the execption of any donated to LCM.
It isn't clear what will happen to anything donated.
There are 999 forms through 2023 and even the cash was cleaned out of it and was sent to his air musuem
which was then sold to a Wal-Mart heir
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Saturday June 29 2024, @05:53AM
There were a ton of machines donated and I know that for a fact. The previous owner of these machines is seriously pissed because he figured they would be safe in a museum operated by a multi billionaire.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Saturday June 29 2024, @05:40PM
Been there. Fascinating.