The Living Computer Museum was an absolute treasure, but it shows one of the major hazards in the non-profit world. I founded the MADE, a non-profit videogame museum in Oakland. Just about 100% of my time when I was the director was spent raising money and soliciting partnerships so we could keep the doors open and the lights on. I would have killed to have someone like Paul Allen as a sponsor or involved in any way: we're a very poor museum compared to most, and money heals all wounds.
However, our little museum run with volunteers and pocket change managed to be more stable long term than the well-healed and well-funded Living Computer Museum. Why? Because having a single benefactor for a non-profit is almost a death sentence. It's super risky, and as we've seen here, when that single donor goes away, it's all over.
It's super sad the LCM is in the state it is in, but for non-profits this is a cautionary tale: you cannot build a long term non-profit on the support of a single person. The world is too chaotic for that. Even a non-profit with a billionaire behind it isn't safe. It is incredibly poor planning on humanity's part to rely on the rich to preserve our shared heritage out of some obligation or moral or ethical duty. We need to preserve this stuff on the order of the Smithsonian.
You can, but there needs to be a large amount of capital allocated to a foundation, which can then fund it in perpetuity. It’s a bit surprising that didn’t happen in this case. Feels like his heirs have different ideas for how to spend his money.
From what I understand, it was actually Paul Allen's instructions that his sister (Jody Allen) to just give everything away. Unfortunately, that didn't include running the more niche museums, movie theaters, etc...forever. It seems like smaller projects are being sacrificed in favor of larger ones (like the Music Experience museum which is still open).
I totally agree, and that's how, for example, the rich Oxford and Cambridge colleges are funded. I think it might be a big ask these days, though, especially with returns on investments relatively low. Sadly.
Thank you for founding the MADE! I visited a few months ago and met someone there who has become a close friend of mine. And, it’s a great benefit to the east bay and gaming history more broadly.
Because this stuff is an important part of our cultural, artistic and scientific heritage. We do not get to decide what the future finds interesting. Therefore, we must preserve as much as we possibly can so that those in the future have the ability to pick and choose. As it stands now, a lot of human history is just pieced together from trash and rubble.
You can go to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, visit where he painted, slept, ate, taught, and stored his junk. You can see how he worked, where he worked, what the lighting was like in his house, what the door looked like then and now.
Atari, on the other hand, is just gone. We cannot see their offices (they've been reoccupied a lot), and we have very little in the way of assets generated from the creation process back then. It is currently easier for us to see how Rembrandt worked 500 years ago than it is to see how Atari employees worked 40 years ago. That's not a good state of affairs, considering how influential Atari was on the evolution of home gaming.
You've never heard of John Titor? In all seriousness while you don't have to believe in time travelers, there is a lesson to be learned there. Look what happened to the Digital Domesday Project. If preservation efforts had begun earlier it might all be online now.
I’ll answer the who: people with money, capital and time choosing on their own what to spend their money, capital and time on to the degree to which they can sustain to do so.
> It is incredibly poor planning on humanity's part to rely on the rich to preserve our shared heritage
You can swap "preserve our shared heritage" with many things and it still holds. It's incredibly poor planning to rely on the good-will of the rich for lots of things, yet here we are...
Because having a single benefactor for a non-profit is almost a death sentence.
Not necessarily, if the benefactor endows the NPO with a long-term trust rather than simply funding it. Endowment is what makes the difference between a charity and a hobby.
Paul Allen had a lot of hobbies, but he wasn't that charitable, in the sense that many of his good works seem to have died with him. There are obvious exceptions, but the LCM was sadly not one of them.
> having a single benefactor for a non-profit is almost a death sentence.
In a way, this reminds me of when Google shut down Reader.
This is also why you should only use standards, platforms and programming languages supported by a multitude of companies and organizations, and avoid those dominated by a single company.
I agree with your latter statement, but your choice of example feels weird to me… RSS was (and is) an open standard supported by an incredible number of both readers and publishers. How does it not meet your standards?
As a long term collector of old PC hardware, software and games, it's becoming pretty obvious that keeping aging hardware around has a very tangible expiration date to it. We are only able to keep this tech going because a lot of it was mass produced and we can find replacement parts, but we're already seeing massive failure in parts which render a device unusable regardless of how many blown capacitors or resistors we change.
There comes a point when the only way to keep this stuff running is either through manufacturing replacement parts (prohibitingly expensive) or through emulation. Emulation is cheap but completely unrepresentative of the original experience. For example, you can't emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex's beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.
So, I still collect this stuff and enjoy it. But I have given up my ambition for hardware preservation. It will take an organization much better funded than me to keep this stuff alive in the long term. And even then, I suspect a lot of it is going to be lost to time in the coming decades.
> manufacturing replacement parts (prohibitingly expensive)
Some are more than others. PALs and ASICs can be reimplemented in CPLDs and FPGAs. At come point it becomes Theseus' computer, but, if the goal is to preserve the boat, that works. If you want to preserve the wood planks, then you need to keep it powered down in a controlled environment for future generations to apply atomic-resolution sensing eventually.
> For example, you can't emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex's beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.
Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able to do that very well with HDR displays. I already can't see pixels or jaggies on my LCDs. With proper computation, one could simulate the analog aspects of CRT tubes - its a lot for GPUs to do now, but, in a decade or so, I assume a mobile GPU would be able to do that without breaking a sweat.
Not long ago I was thinking about a CRT+deflection replacement that would take the analog signals used in CRTs (from an adapter on the neck, where the pins have a lot of variation, and the inputs to the coils), and, maybe, an extra power supply input to power the electronics, and spit out an HDMI signal on the other end.
This should be possible with modern flat panels to a point the image is hard to distinguish for all but the most extreme (think X-Y displays and Tektronix DVSTs) cases.
Curvature is an issue, but flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial.
That really depends on what you’re trying to emulate about a display. You can see artifacts from how the electron beam on a CRT paints the image by holding your hand in front of the screen fingers spread and shaking your fingers back and fort. Emulating that well might take a ~10,000fps display which I doubt anyone is ever going to produce.
Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able
to do that very well with HDR displays [...]
flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial.
Visually I think we're really close in most of the ways that matter, with advanced shaders like CRT-Royale.
However, there's an entire additional dimension missing from this discussion so far - latency. When paired with original game hardware up until the 16-bit era or so, CRTs offer close to a true zero latency experience.
It's not possible to recreate this with modern tech. When we add up everything in the stack (display, input drivers, everything) we're looking at over 100ms of lag.
We're not totally without hope. As the (ancient!) article notes, higher refresh rate displays reduce many of these latencies proportionally. And for non-action games, latency doesn't matter too much in the first place.
At come point it becomes Theseus' computer,
but, if the goal is to preserve the boat,
[CPLDs and FPGAs] work
> ...then you need to keep it powered down in a controlled environment
Mold and water damage can be mitigated with environmental controls but even then you're going to have decay issues because so many components just break down overtime. Many plastics just become brittle and disintegrate over time with or without exposure to UV. 10 year old devices have their softtouch rubber turning to a gooey sticky melting mess. Electrolytic capacitors and batteries leaking are commonly known but lesser known issues occur. The MFM Drive testing that Adrian's Digital Basement did recently comes to mind, 5 of 5 drives he tested were dead. One was a drive he'd validated a year prior and stored correctly.
I’ve never seen a Vectrex, but having seen other vector displays on old arcade machines, it’s truly mind blowing.
The warm glow of those smooth beams has no modern equivalent in consumer hardware. Despite technically being old technology, and some machines being over 4 decades old, it can still blow young minds seeing a way of rendering so different from what we accept as the norm today and how it’s in many aspects even more advanced than modern screens.
Knowing it’s something that’s gradually being lost with time is pretty sad. Previous human technology advancements would often be lost in a hole and still be recognizable for what they were centuries later when they were dug up. It’s kind of strange that the tech we make since the computer revolution basically dies along with their creators and maintainers and basically just turn into future door stoppers.
I’m not sure I follow your final conclusion… we mostly don’t use archeological artifacts do we? They are “recognizable” but so will old computers be 1000 years from now. With a good microscope you can still study the chips, etc.
If anything I expect computers from 1985 to be much better “preserved” than physical history from, say, 885, no?
Granted you have to resist the urge to use them as door stoppers and keep them in a controlled environment. But an archive is a lot cheaper/more stable than a living museum.
I love the Atari vector games! There’s an excellent video by Retro Game Mechanics Explained on how they work: https://youtu.be/smStEPSRKBs
Recently I stumbled on some Tektronix videos on YouTube. Those vector displays are even more mind blowing than Atari’s arcade games. I hope I can get to see one in person someday.
This can really be a labor of love. The volunteers at the Rhode Island Computer Museum, which is much more modestly funded than LCM, have ongoing restoration projects for rare vintage machines like the PDP-9 and PDP-12. They literally have a warehouse full of stuff like this[].
In the dark of winter, while I work to fill the hours, I troll ebay and Craigslist...looking at the $200 Macs and $400 amigas and $800 Apple ][s and $2000 complete NeXT stations, think it's another hobby that's gotten more expensive faster than I have the stomach for.
I also realize I'll get 95% of the enjoyment by just hitting the emulators at archive.org.
I gifted myself an Amiga Mini500 for xmas and once you play the games, and mess with Amiga Forever for an afternoon, and Amibian for ANOTHER afternoon...that scratch is pretty well itched.
A bit off-topic but relevant to the aging problem of tech: is there any commonly-available persistent storage medium you would use to store say, family movies for 100 years? Or is that a hopeless cause? For instance, will BluRay players be around for much longer? USB drives?
At what point are we where "Either put it in the cloud or lose it" is the law of tech?
I think it is safe to say you have to plan on moving media you care about to a different format every couple decades. From the first Edison wax cylinders, to today's latest format, the technology has changed that often, and if you care you have to follow. Sure you can keep older stuff working and some do. You can also say the same about photographs and books: most degrade after a few decades, but there if you spend $$$ you can get archival grade that will last for a century or two (many centuries if you store in a desert, but in human friendly places a century is all you should count on).
I have some archival grade CDs and DVDs that claim they will last longer. However I'm not sure if readers will exist as long as the media.
I suppose you could always laser etch your bits on gold film and store it in a secure container. There are some products out there like the M disk that claim to last up to 1,000 years, but typical consumer storage media are only expected to last a few decades under optimal conditions.
We had a conversaton about this on Ars Technica and I can't currently find it. We ran into the same findings. I don't think you can fully set and forget it....3 copies, two formats, 1 off-site
I wouldn't count on 'put it in the cloud' being the answer, for a number of reasons.
Personally, I think that the only answer to the "preserve the family stuph for a 100 years" is to migrate it all to the most reliable media available every 5-10 years (it used to be every 3-5 years). Even if there was an archival media that was 100% reliable 100 years from now, will there be something that can read it?
> Emulation is cheap but completely unrepresentative of the original experience.
Never enough, but THANK GOODNESS for emulation!
My favorite old skool computer is the IBM 704 that LISP originally ran on. This machine didn't have a visual display or anything fancy. It was the sort of thing where you'd hand in your punch cards and an operator would run your job, then give you back the program results in your mailbox or something.
When I was doing research for writing my blog posts about LISP about a year ago, it was so helpful that a turnkey SIMH environment for this machine existed, that let me run the original software and then get definite concrete answers about its behavior. There were things I was curious about, particularly its handling of the T atom (and whether that remaps to TRUE which is the true truth) that I wouldn't have been able to talk about, had the emulator not been available.
The situation is only getting worse, as bootloaders are increasingly locked-down and internal hardware pairing is a thing (hello, Apple, but even AMD has joined that game with Epyc processors getting locked to motherboards). And then there's the soldered-in hardware that can't be replaced without a lot of expense and risk. Preservation at this point is going to be VMs and emulators.
And, in all honesty, while a working PDP-11/70 would be kind of neat, by today's standards it's dreadfully underpowered in speed even as it sucks down the kWh, and requires a lot of space, while SIMH on a modern SBC would run circles around it. A museum is a better place for it than a living room.
If you read the LCM tech blog it is exactly in this 'manufacturing replacement parts' where they absolutely shone.
Of course you will end up in a ship-of-Theseus like situation, how many replacement parts does it take before it is no longer the original. But that's because these are working systems, unlike you average museum where you just get to look at stuff and the cases might as well be empty.
My surviving stuff consists of a Vectrex, an Interact with many tapes (including Microsoft Basic), and an I Robot. I always thought the Interact belongs in a museum but they all seem to have one already or don't care.
Maybe the solution to hardware failure is to keep the hardware, working or not, AND have emulation. But as you say vectors don't emulate well.
There’s this pervasive idea that computers are solid-state machines meant to work forever. But they’re full of moving parts, grease, fluids, and fans.
Only now with our fanless machines are we approaching the true idea that these machines just turn on and work. I’d bet an Apple TV has a better chance of working in 400 years than a Commodore 64.
There's also a pervasive idea solid-state means works forever. Ask anyone who collects old computers and you'll find that ain't true.
Solid state devices fail with age too, via electromigration, temperature cycling fatigue, hot carrier injection, NBTI/PBTI and a host of other causes. And it gets worse the smaller the geometries we are working with. It's huge topic of concern in the industry.
We won't be around to know, but I'd be confident enough to bet you a beer that Apple TV will be dead as a doornail in years or decades, not centuries.
Yeah. I've got quite a few old machines from various periods, but I mostly just store them or have them on static display. I'm afraid to turn most of them on. The last one I tried was a Mac IIcx and it let the smoke out pretty quickly.
If anyone nearby is reading this, please consider coming by sometime :)
(You need a reservation. Not everything works. In fact most machines don't work probably. It's not super fancy like the Living Computer Museum was. There's a lot of stuff on the floor. It'll probably move to a bigger place soon so that'll get better probably. It's not particularly cheap; there's a yearly fee (no auto-renewals) and a per-visit fee. There's probably almost nothing to do if you aren't fluent in Japanese.)
So far I fixed: ZX81, VIC-20, PET 2001, various MSX machines. (See my blog for details :p)
While we're plugging computer museums, I'll add the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, on the campus of the University of Colorado. It's no doubt a far smaller operation than most of the others mentioned here, but it has a lot of heart. Visitors are encouraged to hang out, play around with all the old computers and gadgets, peruse the floppy disk collection, and maybe find some games to play.
I looked up the address, and just want to clarify for anyone who may want to visit: the museum is in Oume City, about 1.5 hours away by train from Tokyo Station. While technically part of Tokyo Metro area, I think for most foreign tourists "Tokyo" only refers the 23 special wards[0]. So just beware it's not just a short hop away after you're done sight-seeing in e.g. Asakusa.
I’ll be in Tokyo early next month with work, and this sounds like something I’d enjoy. Is it worth going as someone who doesn’t speak much Japanese? If so, I’ll get myself there :)
Hmm, well, I think it wouldn't be easy to make a reservation without being able to read and write Japanese.
Actually TBH I don't know if the owner can speak English :c Normally, first-time visitors are given a quick tour so they can decide whether to become a supporting member or not. I'm not sure how the owner would do that. (Maybe he would ask me to translate? I'd probably do it :p)
Just added it to my list. Might be a while - I live in Ireland - but who knows… a couple years back I was prospected to join Toyota’s “city of the future” project…
Sadly it was really on the down swing after the 2019 firings. I had been going to the museum for years ever since it opened. In 2017 and 2018 they started experimenting with live events and parties, like a Blade Runner 2049 release party with actors dressed up as blade runner characters, a full bar making futuristic mixed drinks, etc.--it was awesome. There was a tech themed burlesque show with performers covered in LEDs and such. They did other fun stuff like a retro 80s party night to celebrate opening a new 70s/80s themed wing of the museum. They would host local events like the retro game meetup, mechanical keyboard meetup, etc. It was really growing and turning into a fun geeky social space.
And then in 2019 Vulcan fired everyone responsible for making it great. No more after hour parties/events. Just as things were starting to take off they ruined it, and then the pandemic hit and it was done for good.
It's a real shame and I hope someone who appreciates the museum can take control of it and rescue it from Vulcan.
Does Jody Allen secretly hate Paul? Given the literal billions they have, it seems pretty spiteful how the LCM and Cinerama were treated.
I visited the LCM in 2016 as part of a computer arch course, it was really quite special to see working systems from the over 50 years ago and get to use them.
> Does Jody Allen secretly hate Paul? Given the literal billions they have, it seems pretty spiteful how the LCM and Cinerama were treated.
She probably has her own priorities, and is shifting things to match them.
IIRC, this phenomenon somewhat well known in philanthropy: if you setup a long-lived foundation, it will it will end up reflecting the priorities of the future staff even if those bear little resemblance (or are even opposed) to those of the founder. Everyone wants to do what they want, not what some dead guy wanted, even if all the money was actually his.
I believe this has caused some people to give up on the perpetual foundation idea, and structure their fortunes to get spent on their goals by a certain deadline.
It probably would have been better for the LCM if Paul Allen had set it up as some autonomous endowed thing controlled by a board of hard-core retro-computing enthusiasts.
It was well known that she had her own priorities before Paul's death. It's unfortunate he ignored that.
> Former members of the security detail... have said in sworn depositions that Vulcan CEO Jody Allen sexually harassed bodyguards while also directing them to smuggle animal bones out of Africa and Antarctica. At least two former employees said they heard Jody Allen had smuggled ivory out of Africa in violation of U.S. and international law...
For anyone curious about this phenomenon, the Ford Foundation is a notable example. Henry Ford was notably racist and the Ford Foundation does a lot that is focused on racial diversity.
I doubt she hates her late brother, any more than any widow who sells off or throws away her late husband's computer collection after his death (which occurs so, so often that it is probably the normal outcome after the collector's death, as opposed to an exception) hates him. It's disinterest.
Most late husbands don't leave an endowment big enough to cover a potentially perpetual upkeep for their collections either, but Allen wasn't most people, and he personally was significant in the history of computers obviously. Normally, I'm not a fan of these extremely wealthy people setting up dead hand organizations like charitable foundations to affect society after their death, but museums that preserve aspects of life from their times and information about their lives seem like a pretty good use case.
I have to imagine she doesn’t care, and 20 employees even is a chunk of change if you have some advisors looking at maximizing the dollars in whatever trust.
Of course the fact that Paul didn’t explicitly set something in stone for like 50 years despite the billions… really sucks, cuz that place was awesome
The contents of the will aren’t public but there’s been uncontested reporting that it calls for everything he owned to be liquidated.
“Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects,” a source said. “None of this is up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”
Maintaining these projects ain't cheap even for billionaires (by that I don't mean it would make them broke (or even close), but spending hundreds of thousands or even millions for something you have no interest is gonna sound expensive).
They need to be financially self-sufficient to even have a chance, IMHO. Even then it isn't a given. Just like people sometimes clean their houses even when they still have tons of space.
Seattle could afford that easy cheesy. Really this is down to the lack of a strong CEO (probably because of the way this was incubated inside of Vulcan). A strong CEO could probably throw enough benefits and special events to run a 2-3MM operation and possibly get a proper endowment from some of the very wealthy people who live within the Puget Sound region. Oh, and that money would be tax deductible and you would get invited to some great networking events.
That CEO could also pay themselves $250k without blowback either.
Allen had a net worth of something like $20 billion. That’s enough money to fund the museum for the next 5,000 years. Maintaining a project like this is NOT expensive.
Also really sad about LCM closing and just generally about the way it was handled by Vulcan etc. For computer nerds that place is heaven. There is so much to do, and its wild seeing systems you may have owned at one point - and getting to actually use them again. When I went they had a sort of 70s/80s themed basement exhibit and "highschool computer programming" room, again with almost everything functional. You could even make your own punch cards. I'm on the east coast but would fly back out to Seattle immediately if given a chance to visit again.
For people wringing their hands about profitability, I'm sure it could have been made self sustaining, or hell if they had even attempted to raise some money outside of the foundation, there's a lot of people that loved that place. It really seemed like that the powers that be just didn't care.
Unfortunately it’s inevitable that LCM is going away. For folks outside Seattle who may be unaware, Allen’s military museum was closed and exhibits sold off last year, and his Cinerama facility looks to be heading the same way.
It’s hard to believe this was the estate plan he intended. A lot of local people are pointing the finger at his sister who appears intent on erasing his legacy outside pro sports.
All of those are significant losses, too. I don’t care as much about the military museum and there’s an ongoing argument about the ethics of flying some of those old planes (wear and tear is bad), as Allen did, but the collection still mattered.
I think the only Allen project besides sports that’s going to survive is MOPOP and that’s very tourist-friendly in an excellent location.
Unfortunately it appears to be the case that this is what Allen wanted. A connected sports journalist in Portland wrote about this last year (see below link).
> “Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects,” a source said. “None of this is up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”
I was lucky enough to visit the museum at the end of 2019, just before COVID-19 hit and the museum had to shut down. Unlike the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the machines here were fully operational and you could actually get to use them - I compiled some hello world code on a NeXTcube and I still remember that fond moment. IIRC they had systems that you can SSH in and use, but seems like they've taken that down. Must be a recent thing since I remember they were operational a year or two ago.
The Mountain View museum is an expensive travesty. Another great "living" museum is the one next to Bletchley Park. You can program the Dekatron with paper tape and watch the base-10 memory cells changing as it runs.
The one next to Bletchley Park is The National Museum of Computing. It's a really great place and, IMHO, much more interesting than Bletchley Park itself.
Per the article, the parent company laid off all of the museum staff in mid-2020, so if they were working a year or two ago, they were doing so despite a lack of maintenance. Something probably broke at some point and there's no one left to fix it.
I managed to compile and run a hello world C program (it might've actually been B?) using ed on an old school Research Unix machine they had.
I also remember messing with the shell on an even older Unix machine that had an actual teletype printer terminal. And directly poking the VGA buffer on a C64 to do goofy things...
I only went once a while ago, when my family took a trip to Seattle, but that is one of my most treasured memories. It's a travesty that future generations of nerdy kids won't get that experience (and I'm sad that I likely won't get it again either).
It was the first and only time me and my brother saw a mainframe actually running. And hundreds of other early computers. Incredible place and such a shame.
Readit News
However, our little museum run with volunteers and pocket change managed to be more stable long term than the well-healed and well-funded Living Computer Museum. Why? Because having a single benefactor for a non-profit is almost a death sentence. It's super risky, and as we've seen here, when that single donor goes away, it's all over.
It's super sad the LCM is in the state it is in, but for non-profits this is a cautionary tale: you cannot build a long term non-profit on the support of a single person. The world is too chaotic for that. Even a non-profit with a billionaire behind it isn't safe. It is incredibly poor planning on humanity's part to rely on the rich to preserve our shared heritage out of some obligation or moral or ethical duty. We need to preserve this stuff on the order of the Smithsonian.
You can go to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, visit where he painted, slept, ate, taught, and stored his junk. You can see how he worked, where he worked, what the lighting was like in his house, what the door looked like then and now.
Atari, on the other hand, is just gone. We cannot see their offices (they've been reoccupied a lot), and we have very little in the way of assets generated from the creation process back then. It is currently easier for us to see how Rembrandt worked 500 years ago than it is to see how Atari employees worked 40 years ago. That's not a good state of affairs, considering how influential Atari was on the evolution of home gaming.
You can swap "preserve our shared heritage" with many things and it still holds. It's incredibly poor planning to rely on the good-will of the rich for lots of things, yet here we are...
In the Netherlands they have recently opened a giant storage complex with all the art that the country has acquired over the last 200 years.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/over-ons/wat-we-doen/ccnl
Not necessarily, if the benefactor endows the NPO with a long-term trust rather than simply funding it. Endowment is what makes the difference between a charity and a hobby.
Paul Allen had a lot of hobbies, but he wasn't that charitable, in the sense that many of his good works seem to have died with him. There are obvious exceptions, but the LCM was sadly not one of them.
In a way, this reminds me of when Google shut down Reader.
This is also why you should only use standards, platforms and programming languages supported by a multitude of companies and organizations, and avoid those dominated by a single company.
There comes a point when the only way to keep this stuff running is either through manufacturing replacement parts (prohibitingly expensive) or through emulation. Emulation is cheap but completely unrepresentative of the original experience. For example, you can't emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex's beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.
So, I still collect this stuff and enjoy it. But I have given up my ambition for hardware preservation. It will take an organization much better funded than me to keep this stuff alive in the long term. And even then, I suspect a lot of it is going to be lost to time in the coming decades.
Some are more than others. PALs and ASICs can be reimplemented in CPLDs and FPGAs. At come point it becomes Theseus' computer, but, if the goal is to preserve the boat, that works. If you want to preserve the wood planks, then you need to keep it powered down in a controlled environment for future generations to apply atomic-resolution sensing eventually.
> For example, you can't emulate different displays properly. As anyone who enjoyed the Vectrex's beautiful vector graphics will agree, you simply cannot emulate this on a modern display. The bright phosphorus coating with the smooth analog beam is not reproducible on something like LCD.
Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able to do that very well with HDR displays. I already can't see pixels or jaggies on my LCDs. With proper computation, one could simulate the analog aspects of CRT tubes - its a lot for GPUs to do now, but, in a decade or so, I assume a mobile GPU would be able to do that without breaking a sweat.
Not long ago I was thinking about a CRT+deflection replacement that would take the analog signals used in CRTs (from an adapter on the neck, where the pins have a lot of variation, and the inputs to the coils), and, maybe, an extra power supply input to power the electronics, and spit out an HDMI signal on the other end.
This should be possible with modern flat panels to a point the image is hard to distinguish for all but the most extreme (think X-Y displays and Tektronix DVSTs) cases.
Curvature is an issue, but flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial.
However, there's an entire additional dimension missing from this discussion so far - latency. When paired with original game hardware up until the 16-bit era or so, CRTs offer close to a true zero latency experience.
It's not possible to recreate this with modern tech. When we add up everything in the stack (display, input drivers, everything) we're looking at over 100ms of lag.
http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...
We're not totally without hope. As the (ancient!) article notes, higher refresh rate displays reduce many of these latencies proportionally. And for non-action games, latency doesn't matter too much in the first place.
Well, for some parts of the boat.Mold and water damage can be mitigated with environmental controls but even then you're going to have decay issues because so many components just break down overtime. Many plastics just become brittle and disintegrate over time with or without exposure to UV. 10 year old devices have their softtouch rubber turning to a gooey sticky melting mess. Electrolytic capacitors and batteries leaking are commonly known but lesser known issues occur. The MFM Drive testing that Adrian's Digital Basement did recently comes to mind, 5 of 5 drives he tested were dead. One was a drive he'd validated a year prior and stored correctly.
The warm glow of those smooth beams has no modern equivalent in consumer hardware. Despite technically being old technology, and some machines being over 4 decades old, it can still blow young minds seeing a way of rendering so different from what we accept as the norm today and how it’s in many aspects even more advanced than modern screens.
Knowing it’s something that’s gradually being lost with time is pretty sad. Previous human technology advancements would often be lost in a hole and still be recognizable for what they were centuries later when they were dug up. It’s kind of strange that the tech we make since the computer revolution basically dies along with their creators and maintainers and basically just turn into future door stoppers.
If anything I expect computers from 1985 to be much better “preserved” than physical history from, say, 885, no?
Granted you have to resist the urge to use them as door stoppers and keep them in a controlled environment. But an archive is a lot cheaper/more stable than a living museum.
Recently I stumbled on some Tektronix videos on YouTube. Those vector displays are even more mind blowing than Atari’s arcade games. I hope I can get to see one in person someday.
[
] https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-galleryI also realize I'll get 95% of the enjoyment by just hitting the emulators at archive.org.
I gifted myself an Amiga Mini500 for xmas and once you play the games, and mess with Amiga Forever for an afternoon, and Amibian for ANOTHER afternoon...that scratch is pretty well itched.
At what point are we where "Either put it in the cloud or lose it" is the law of tech?
I have some archival grade CDs and DVDs that claim they will last longer. However I'm not sure if readers will exist as long as the media.
https://www.mdisc.com/
And plan to copy to new media every 8-10 years.
Personally, I think that the only answer to the "preserve the family stuph for a 100 years" is to migrate it all to the most reliable media available every 5-10 years (it used to be every 3-5 years). Even if there was an archival media that was 100% reliable 100 years from now, will there be something that can read it?
Never enough, but THANK GOODNESS for emulation!
My favorite old skool computer is the IBM 704 that LISP originally ran on. This machine didn't have a visual display or anything fancy. It was the sort of thing where you'd hand in your punch cards and an operator would run your job, then give you back the program results in your mailbox or something.
When I was doing research for writing my blog posts about LISP about a year ago, it was so helpful that a turnkey SIMH environment for this machine existed, that let me run the original software and then get definite concrete answers about its behavior. There were things I was curious about, particularly its handling of the T atom (and whether that remaps to TRUE which is the true truth) that I wouldn't have been able to talk about, had the emulator not been available.
Asteroids is probably the most famous example. Look at the "ultra bright" bullets and the glowy trail they leave.
https://youtu.be/w60sfReTsRA?t=247
And, in all honesty, while a working PDP-11/70 would be kind of neat, by today's standards it's dreadfully underpowered in speed even as it sucks down the kWh, and requires a lot of space, while SIMH on a modern SBC would run circles around it. A museum is a better place for it than a living room.
For example, even a child could manufacture this with $10 worth of tools and parts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10#/media/File:KA10_mod_en...
Keeping machines from the 00s running is going to be a hell of a lot harder than keeping machines from the 70s running
Of course you will end up in a ship-of-Theseus like situation, how many replacement parts does it take before it is no longer the original. But that's because these are working systems, unlike you average museum where you just get to look at stuff and the cases might as well be empty.
My surviving stuff consists of a Vectrex, an Interact with many tapes (including Microsoft Basic), and an I Robot. I always thought the Interact belongs in a museum but they all seem to have one already or don't care.
Maybe the solution to hardware failure is to keep the hardware, working or not, AND have emulation. But as you say vectors don't emulate well.
Only now with our fanless machines are we approaching the true idea that these machines just turn on and work. I’d bet an Apple TV has a better chance of working in 400 years than a Commodore 64.
Solid state devices fail with age too, via electromigration, temperature cycling fatigue, hot carrier injection, NBTI/PBTI and a host of other causes. And it gets worse the smaller the geometries we are working with. It's huge topic of concern in the industry.
We won't be around to know, but I'd be confident enough to bet you a beer that Apple TV will be dead as a doornail in years or decades, not centuries.
Something like run it in a well cooled and humidity controlled, nobel gas filled enclosure.
If anyone nearby is reading this, please consider coming by sometime :)
(You need a reservation. Not everything works. In fact most machines don't work probably. It's not super fancy like the Living Computer Museum was. There's a lot of stuff on the floor. It'll probably move to a bigger place soon so that'll get better probably. It's not particularly cheap; there's a yearly fee (no auto-renewals) and a per-visit fee. There's probably almost nothing to do if you aren't fluent in Japanese.)
So far I fixed: ZX81, VIC-20, PET 2001, various MSX machines. (See my blog for details :p)
Nice place, I like it. A favourite of mine is the wall sized CPU, The Megaprocessor. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43063/The-Megaproces...
They will have a Made in Japan season this spring! : ) http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/70465/Made-in-Japan-S...
https://www.mediaarchaeologylab.com/
https://enter.ch/?lang=en
I looked up the address, and just want to clarify for anyone who may want to visit: the museum is in Oume City, about 1.5 hours away by train from Tokyo Station. While technically part of Tokyo Metro area, I think for most foreign tourists "Tokyo" only refers the 23 special wards[0]. So just beware it's not just a short hop away after you're done sight-seeing in e.g. Asakusa.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo
https://www.themade.org/
Seriously though, I love that the wider Japanese internet has remained so simple (and thus usable!) after so many years.
Actually TBH I don't know if the owner can speak English :c Normally, first-time visitors are given a quick tour so they can decide whether to become a supporting member or not. I'm not sure how the owner would do that. (Maybe he would ask me to translate? I'd probably do it :p)
And then in 2019 Vulcan fired everyone responsible for making it great. No more after hour parties/events. Just as things were starting to take off they ruined it, and then the pandemic hit and it was done for good.
It's a real shame and I hope someone who appreciates the museum can take control of it and rescue it from Vulcan.
I visited the LCM in 2016 as part of a computer arch course, it was really quite special to see working systems from the over 50 years ago and get to use them.
She probably has her own priorities, and is shifting things to match them.
IIRC, this phenomenon somewhat well known in philanthropy: if you setup a long-lived foundation, it will it will end up reflecting the priorities of the future staff even if those bear little resemblance (or are even opposed) to those of the founder. Everyone wants to do what they want, not what some dead guy wanted, even if all the money was actually his.
I believe this has caused some people to give up on the perpetual foundation idea, and structure their fortunes to get spent on their goals by a certain deadline.
It probably would have been better for the LCM if Paul Allen had set it up as some autonomous endowed thing controlled by a board of hard-core retro-computing enthusiasts.
> Former members of the security detail... have said in sworn depositions that Vulcan CEO Jody Allen sexually harassed bodyguards while also directing them to smuggle animal bones out of Africa and Antarctica. At least two former employees said they heard Jody Allen had smuggled ivory out of Africa in violation of U.S. and international law...
https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/Seahawks-owner...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Foundation
I doubt she hates her late brother, any more than any widow who sells off or throws away her late husband's computer collection after his death (which occurs so, so often that it is probably the normal outcome after the collector's death, as opposed to an exception) hates him. It's disinterest.
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Of course the fact that Paul didn’t explicitly set something in stone for like 50 years despite the billions… really sucks, cuz that place was awesome
“Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects,” a source said. “None of this is up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”
https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-no-wiggle-room-nfls-se...
They need to be financially self-sufficient to even have a chance, IMHO. Even then it isn't a given. Just like people sometimes clean their houses even when they still have tons of space.
That CEO could also pay themselves $250k without blowback either.
For people wringing their hands about profitability, I'm sure it could have been made self sustaining, or hell if they had even attempted to raise some money outside of the foundation, there's a lot of people that loved that place. It really seemed like that the powers that be just didn't care.
It’s hard to believe this was the estate plan he intended. A lot of local people are pointing the finger at his sister who appears intent on erasing his legacy outside pro sports.
I think the only Allen project besides sports that’s going to survive is MOPOP and that’s very tourist-friendly in an excellent location.
Unfortunately it appears to be the case that this is what Allen wanted. A connected sports journalist in Portland wrote about this last year (see below link).
> “Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects,” a source said. “None of this is up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”
https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-no-wiggle-room-nfls-se...
https://www.tnmoc.org/
I also remember messing with the shell on an even older Unix machine that had an actual teletype printer terminal. And directly poking the VGA buffer on a C64 to do goofy things...
I only went once a while ago, when my family took a trip to Seattle, but that is one of my most treasured memories. It's a travesty that future generations of nerdy kids won't get that experience (and I'm sad that I likely won't get it again either).
ssh menu@tty.livingcomputers.org