| There was no announcement regarding the opportunity to transfer the collection to new owners. If such an announcement was made, it was done without any public disclosure. I find the claims throughout the HN comments that the LCM board was openly taking offers disingenuous at best. My personal attempts to contact the museum in 2021 about this were met with no reply. I even reached out to former staff members and a Seattle Times reporter who covered the LCM via their social media accounts, and they were equally in the dark about what was happening internally. It was only at the Christie's auction in 2024 that the true intentions of the board became clear. If you look at the 2023 IRS filings from the LCM, they donated $1.1 million to the "Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum" [1], another one of Paul's collections/museums. This museum was also closed under the same COVID circumstances and only reopened after Steuart Walton purchased the collection [2]. It is mind-boggling that the same thing did not occur for the LCM, considering the number of multi-millionaires and billionaires in the Seattle area whose fortunes were built on the backs of the computers the LCM aimed to preserve and share with the world. We will look back at this decision to abandon and sell off the LCM as a shameful disruption of Seattle's own computing culture and industry, which transformed our world. For now, the small museum at RePC (non-living, unfortunately) or the homes of personal computer collectors are all that remain in our city. RIP LCM — while you're gone for now, I will never forget the time I was able to use your Xerox Alto [3] and, to my surprise, meet one of the original engineers who crafted its software. [1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Heritage_%26_Combat_Arm... [3] https://medium.com/vulcan-inc/xerox-alto-is-rebuilt-and-reco... |