Seattle’s Living Computers Museum logs off for good as Paul Allen estate will auction vintage items
Living Computers Museum + Labs on First Avenue South in Seattle. The nonprofit closed in 2020 just before the pandemic and never reopened. (GeekWire Photo
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Seattle’s Living Computers Museum logs off for good as Paul Allen estate will auction vintage items
BY KURT SCHLOSSER on June 25, 2024 at 6:00 am
Living Computers Museum + Labs on First Avenue South in Seattle. The nonprofit closed in 2020 just before the pandemic and never reopened. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
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.
RELATED: Fans upset by closure of Living Computers question why Seattle museum couldn’t be saved
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.
Paul Allen. (Allen Family Foundation Photo)
The estate says, in keeping with Allen’s wishes, proceeds from the sale of any items will go to charitable causes. Allen’s sister Jody Allen is the executor of his estate and for several years has been selling pieces of it, ranging from Seattle’s Cinerama movie theater, the Everett, Wash.-based Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum, Vulcan Productions, Stratolaunch, the superyacht Octopus, and more.
The estate previously teamed up with Christie’s for a November 2022 auction of 155 masterpieces from Allen’s extensive art collection. It was the world’s most successful single-owner fine art auction ever, raising a record $1.62 billion.
The new auction, titled “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection,” is billed as “a celebration of first-generation technologies and the pioneering minds behind them.”
The event will feature more than 150 items in three separate auctions, including “Firsts: The History of Computing,” an online sale closing Sept. 12. This auction pays homage to Allen’s role shaping the modern computing landscape. A highlight of the sale is a computer that Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.
Christie’s said details about other computers and related items from Allen’s collection will be shared this summer.
The other two auctions of Allen property include “Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity,” a live auction on Sept. 10 that will feature items intended to tell the story of scientific and technological achievements spanning centuries. The top item is a 1939 signed letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt credited as the impetus behind the establishment of the Manhattan Project. It’s estimated to fetch $4 million to $6 million.
(Click to enlarge) A 1939 letter from Albert Einstein informing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the Germans have discovered a fissionable form of uranium that could be used to fuel a devastating weapon. The letter is credited as the impetus behind the establishment of the Manhattan Project and ultimately the detonation of the first nuclear weapon six years later. (Christie’s Images LTD 2024)
The third auction is “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future,” an online auction closing Sept. 12, showcasing art devoted to interplanetary travel. A sale highlight is Chelsey Bonestell’s “Saturn as Seen from Titan,” circa 1952, and estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.
Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement that the market has never seen such a diverse collection “that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity — much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing.”
“It is a testament to the uniqueness and importance of these objects that one of the greatest innovators of our day collected, preserved, and in dozens of cases, restored them, while both drawing his own inspiration from them and sharing many of them publicly,” Porter said.
The permanent closure of Living Computers brings an end to another chapter in the extensive and often-celebrated legacy of Allen in his hometown. While the facility served as a place to showcase yet another of his unique collections — much like the Museum of Pop Culture has done for his music and science-fiction items — it also provided historical context, educational opportunities, and immersive experiences around tech.
Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, called Living Computers a very important resource in the city that went beyond just sharing the story of the tech industry over the years, or celebrating the legacy of Microsoft and leaders like Allen and Gates.
He said he hopes some of the pieces from Allen’s collection remain in the Seattle area.
“There is interest in our community for preserving and exploring and sharing that history, because it was transformational to our community over so many decades, and continues to be,” Garfield said. “Preserving the history of that and making it available in our community is something that is important, and it was incredibly valuable that Mr. Allen was able to do that with the Living Computers Museum. Hopefully some of that heritage and that storytelling and that opportunity to really appreciate that history will remain within our community as well.”
Core building blocks of technology
A DEC PDP-10: KI-1, 1971, being offered in “Firsts: The History of Computing”, from the Paul G. Allen collection at Christie’s. (Christie’s Images LTD 2024)
Seattle-based tech vet Devang Thakkar is the global head of Christie’s Ventures, a venture fund launched in 2022 by the 258-year-old art auction house.
Thakkar, who previously spoke to GeekWire about his Christie’s role in 2022, spent 12 years at Microsoft working on everything from Windows to Teams. He called himself “the resident expert” at Christie’s when it comes to technology, and he’s been working closely with the business and auction teams on objects in the sale and what the narrative of the event will look like.
“I come from a technology background, so for me those objects are a history of my own life in some ways,” said Thakkar, who first visited Living Computers in 2016. He remembered seeing a map of computer operating systems on a museum wall, pinpointing Microsoft programs that he helped code.
Thakkar called the mainframe PDP-10 that Allen and Gates worked on at Computer Center Corporation in Seattle’s University District “very important.” He said Allen dedicated his personal time to working on the machine in the early days of the museum.
“He fully connected with it, he could talk about this computer,” Thakkar said of Allen. “He could see the pieces of the puzzle because he built BASIC on it.”
Allen tweeted about a similar machine in September 2018, just a month before his death, calling it “the workhorse machine for us Lakeside kids and the first 3 years of Microsoft,” in a reference to the school he and Gates attended.
While it may seem like Allen was a singular entity when it came to the interest and financial resources he had for acquiring such machinery, Thakkar expects the objects in the auction to have a broad appeal because of how they’ve served as the core building blocks of technology that we all use today.
“The reason that you and I can sit on an iPhone and take this call and record this is all because of that PDP-10, like, 50 years ago,” Thakkar said. “I personally would love to have all of them. Of course, my wife is not going to let me have them.”
Presale exhibitions of select auction highlights will launch in New York beginning in July. The exhibition will be on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center Sept. 5-9.
