The Living Computer Museum opened October 2012 in Seattle, WA.  Unlike most museums that strive to preserve artifacts how they find them, usually broken and powered off, this museum keeps their machines alive.  They’re in working condition, complete with the strangely beautiful sounds of teletypes, Disk ][ drives, paper tape, and raised-floor cooling.  The museum is the vision of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.  Allen cut his teeth on PDP minicomputers, and the museum’s collection reflects this but has a growing display of personal computers.  I know little about the PDP series and vintage of machine, but I found the museum irresistibly fascinating and essential for everybody interested in computers.

I visited the museum last year shortly after its opening, and you may read my full report in Juiced.GS (Volume 17, Issue 4).  And, yes, I should’ve posted this a year ago, but I somehow left the post as a draft … in my defense, it’s only a single-bit memory error.