[SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum

[Evan Koblentz]

I know Ian from the collectors' list based at www.classiccmp.org. A 
couple of years ago someone saw Allen's job ad, posted it, Ian applied, 
and landed it -- a dream job for a DEC enthusiast. I can introduce you 
to him if you want.

However, I was slightly miffed that the Journal ignored the public 
computer museum here in their backyard, and instead wrote about a 
private one in Seattle.

Despite what Allen calls it, this isn't a "museum," this is one man's 
private collection.


> An interesting story at
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516552161014410.ht
> ml
>
> It states that Paul Allen has commissioned a kilt-wearing grizzly graduate
> student to roam the globe tracking down rare machines of a physical size
> impractical for lesser collectors, such as a PDP-7 and IBM 70XX series
> machines. They're being restored for a personal museum. I hadn't heard of
> Ian King, but apparently he's a computing veteran working on an historical
> Ph.D. in the University of Washington Information School. The museum is
> online at http://www.pdpplanet.com/.
>
> The more machines that get preserved the better, and it certainly does more
> good for history than most billionaire hobbies. Perhaps this will evolve
> into a sustainably endowed public museum, or the machines will eventually be
> donated elsewhere.
>
> Yet when I see something like this is does make me ponder the widening
> disconnect between the growing community of scholars working on many aspects
> of the history of computing with minimal financial support and the
> comparatively huge amounts of money being spent/given by billionaires to
> support preservation with no involvement from Ph.D. historians. Maybe it's
> inevitable that the interests of the two groups would evolve in different
> directions. It's also true that academic priorities may have moved further
> than necessary from micro-level practice and materiality over the past few
> decades.
>
> This might be one of the topics for discussion at the forthcoming SIGCIS
> workshop, where I'm pleased to say that the panelists include people from
> the Smithsonian, Henry Ford Museum, Charles Babbage Institute, and Computer
> History Museum as well as academics from a variety of disciplines.
> http://www.sigcis.org/workshop11
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
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