Living Computers: Museum + Labs, Computer museum in SoDo, Seattle, United States
This museum displayed vintage computer technology and interactive exhibits, allowing visitors to operate mainframes, minicomputers, and personal computers from different decades of computing history in Seattle.
Founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2006 and opened to the public in 2012, the museum preserved early computing equipment including mainframes and microcomputers.
The collection featured computers that appeared in television series like Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire, representing important artifacts of American technological development and popular culture.
The museum shut its doors in February 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and never reopened; the Paul Allen Estate announced the permanent closure in June 2024. Christie's sold part of the collection online from 23 August to 12 September 2024 for $3,635,982, and the remainder went to the Interim Computer Museum in Tukwila, Washington, and the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Roswell, Georgia.
Visitors could remotely access and operate vintage computers through telnet connections from anywhere in the world, experiencing timesharing systems as they originally functioned decades ago.
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