Reception at the Living Computer Museum, Seattle

Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, has opened the Living Computer Museum, an ambitious project dedicated to not only preserving old computers, but also restoring them to running condition, running the same software on the same media that the machines used during their normal lifetime. Housed in a warehouse district south of downtown Seattle, the museum is spartan, but the staff of the facility have dedicated their energies to fulfilling Paul's vision. On 4 April 2013, the museum held a reception that I had the good fortune to be invited to attend (see Figure 1).

Starting with the Altair and its clones such as the IMSAI, Paul Allen has assembled a large collection of personal computers from the pioneering era. There were also Apples, Ataris, Commodores, Kaypros, an Osborne 1, a Radio Shack TRS-80, a Xerox Alto, and a host of minicomputers—nearly all of them running original software. Prior to the reception, I was taken behind the scenes where I saw a stash of DEC tapes, punched cards, floppy disks in all sizes, and fan-fold computer paper. People were busy at work using soldering irons, something one does not see much anymore. They are also adept at wire-wrap. There was a modest representation of the pre-mini era, but clearly that was not the museum's focus.

Despite the numbers of personal computers, it was clear that Allen's love is for DEC machines, especially the PDP-10, on which he spent his formative years learning how to program. Several PDP-10s and related DEC computers were there and running old software. There was even a computer room with a false floor of white tiles and a noisy air-handling system (ear plugs were available). I remember those rooms, but I was never allowed to enter them. The PDP-10 is alive and well; the curators showed me a TOAD (ten on a desk), a desktop machine that runs PDP-10 code, and an even smaller PDP-10 clone that fits on a circuit board.

Almost everyone there was able to find the first personal computer that he or she had first used—for me it was an Ohio Scientific Challenger—surely one of the more obscure machines, but there it was! Among the invitees were many who not only lived through that era but who also had a hand in its creation. The three creators of Microsoft's BASIC for the Altair were there: Allen, Bill Gates, and Monte Davidoff. Also there were Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, whose video-games have caused untold lost hours of productivity among office workers ever since; John Draper, a.k.a. "Captain Crunch," who reminded Bill Gates that he, Draper, wrote the first word processor for the IBM PC; Paul Terell, owner of the Byte Shop; Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne; and Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra of VisiCalc fame.

At first I was nervous to be among such talent, but I was immediately put at ease as we all managed to find common ground discussing the details of the "Kansas City Standard," the relative merits of TOPS-10 versus Tenex, and the difficulties of porting software from a big-endian to a little-endian processor. All in all, it was a memorable evening.

The Living Computer Museum is open to the public. Visit www.livingcomputermuseum.org for full details. It may not be suitable for those who have not brushed up on their history or who have not lived through that era, but for Annals readers, it is well worth a visit.