Tough times for Technology/Computer Museums

[tejones777]

Museums of all types are struggling, especially since COVID-19.

When the "Computer Museum of America" in Georgia changed it's name to the "Mimms Museum of Technology and Art" I was sad. Not because they're honoring the amazing Lonnie Mimms, the founder who has done more for vintage computer enthusiasts than the next 5 runners up. But because I worry it signifies a sad reality: such an institution can't self-sustain without ongoing outside funding.

I think Lonnie hoped to set up a self-sustaining institution which would last for generations without him. But I think the name change, as worthy as Lonnie is, signifies that that it really can't be independent. It recognizes the vital link with Lonnie, as an important part of it's story and ongoing existence. I suspect their electric bill alone eats up most of their ticket proceeds.

Here in Minneapolis, the home of Univac, Control Data, and Seymour Cray, many dreamed of a computer museum. We were almost successful in the late 1970's, until Boston's "The Computer Museum" stole away support. We still have a printed-artifact-only collection (the "Charles Babbage Institute" at the University of Minnesota,) the truly amazing "Pavek Museum" (which covers early electricity, radio, television, and a tiny personal computer display.) We also have "The Bakken Museum" (covering early electricity.) Both of these are heavily supported by the founder of Medtronix, and I don't think are nearly self sustaining. We also have one tiny museum (Lawshe Memorial Museum) in South Saint Paul) which has a small collection of old Univac/Sperry computers from military and government contracts.

I've wondered how museums could be self sustaining. Some art museums in New York charge over $30 for admission, while others have done away with admission. They realize even a $10-20 admission only pays a tiny fraction of operating expenses. I'm impressed with government funded museums (Munich and Washington DC) and somehow San Diego has a whole collection of museums around Balboa Park which seem very busy and successful. I suspect they at least have property expenses subsidized by the city, or maybe have great donors.

But maybe museums aren't so important. Maybe there is a better way to preserve the stories of science, technology and innovation: Video Documentaries?

I love documentaries on the History of Science and Technology. Even low budget documentaries, such as "Solid State: Minnesota’s High-Tech History"

and "Discover Computing History at the University of Minnesota"

can sometimes tell stories well, sometimes better than a museum can.

Young people often have short attention spans, and may struggle to keep interest in a museum as they can't slowly read all the signs and labels of explanation. Videos, if well done, can keep their attention. Over-use of corny reenactments or animation can detract (remember the reboot of "COSMOS" which tried to use corny animations.) But well done narration, with minimal theatrics, can really tell the story of science and innovation.

Just my rant. I feel better letting it out. I still think a good sign of a "great city" is it's "great museums." And I hope to visit the "Computer History Museum" in a couple months, and the "System Source Computer Museum" this spring. Oh, yes, and I'll try to get to the Mimms Museum, which is still amazing.

- Thomas "not-really-so-sad" Jones.

 

[mR_Slug]

It's a shame it can't be self-sustaining. I've never been to a computer museum. Sci museum with computers displayed, yes, but it's a bit underwhelming to see a C64 in a glass case with a note beside it. Went to a TV museum once, that was basically 3 rooms with "some unplugged TVs", no guide and nothing to read about them.

I would guess there are many more laymen that come for a surface-level history, than real anoraks. So making it too esoteric is going to put off the average Joe. On the other hand making it too gimmicky and or having guides that can't answer much is probably not what most creator/funders would want. So it can't be easy to run one. And probably only an anorak CAN run one.

Often dreamed of having one, though doubt I'd have the pockets or wherewithal. What is it like running one?

 

[Zare]

I second that sentiment, behind the glass with a wikipedia description beside is not the experience I'm looking for.

On the other hand, documentaries are like museum presentation you can pause and get tomorrow back into it. I'm not sure that target audience is also enamored with documentaries. Yeah a kid will tell you he'd rather watch the documentary than go to museum because he can pause it, stare through it or just not watch it to the end.

What I did observe is that people who may not have direct interest in computer archaeology looking at stuff like hackaday, "watch me send Twitter msgs from my Apple II". It's something they can relate to.
If you say to some kid, "you know computers used to have 16 colours only" he'd respond like "...ok?". Because it's not relatable. "Remaster" something he uses for that old 16 color experience and show it to him, and he might get something out of it all.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Computer museums can exist only so long as there is an active interest in maintaining them. Too often, this is the province of the originator or owner--with that person's departure, it becomes little more than old salvage gear for sale. Witness, for example, the well-funded Living Computer Museum in Seattle. After the death of Paul Allen, it became just another thing to be liquidated.

I'm really surprised that the Computer History Museum has persevered as long as it has. Eventually, however, the pool of people having first-hand experience with the old gear will be gone and then the relevance of the operation will be questionable.

A museum that is a showcase of non-operational exhibits does little to educate a younger population of its relevance. Electronic equipment requires maintenance--and that's the catch for keeping a "living" exhibit working. This is unlike, say, a museum dedicated to slide rules, where the items in the collection require little or no upkeep.

Far more important to me is preservation of documentation. This is where Al Kossow and his crew really shine with Bitsavers. With sufficient documentation, one can always reconstruct or simulate an old box of iron.

This is not to say that collectors are a doomed lot. There's an ocean of difference between keeping a collection of old gear and running a museum.

There is the aspect of "vass you dere, Shollie?". People do not intentionally live in the past and so have their senses tuned to today's world. Punching a program into thousands of cards, and waiting a day for the results of a compilation would be too foreign to someone growing up with a smartphone today to appreciate. The lack of networking alone would be a culture shock.

I believe the same thing applies to other areas of human experience. I offer music as another example. Can one really hear the music of Carlo Gesualdo with the same ears as his original audience?

 

[Unknown_K]

I haven't been to a proper museum since school. Back then they used to bus us to historical sites like Gettysburg, some colonial place I forget about, art museums, and to Washington DC to the museums and other cools thing to look at over a couple days.

Anyway, there are items so rare that you can't see them anywhere else except a museum. I couldn't be bothered to go to a low rent computer museum (somebodies' eclectic collection) and see non-working machines under glass I can get better pictures of on the internet (and see them running on YouTube) and pay for the privilege. If you want people to show up and pay to keep it open then you need a specific type of computer museum that also offers hardware upgrades and repair, software for sale, and operating machines (except for the nonfunctional prototypes on display) you can touch. You could also have workshops on the weekends showing how to fix common issues or take care of your stuff better. If there was an old PC, Amiga, Atari ST, or 68K mac museum in town that offered that stuff I would be there at least once a month just to see what was new, maybe buy some stuff, or just look around and chat with other collectors in person.

 

[Al Kossow]

Far more important to me is preservation of documentation. This is where Al Kossow and his crew really shine with Bitsavers. With sufficient documentation, one can always reconstruct or simulate an old box of iron.

As a reminder, I've worked as the software curator at CHM for almost twenty years now, and the founders have been big supporters of bitsavers for longer than that.
The big difference between CHM and other computer museums is they realized The Computer Museum failed because it didn't have an endowment and didn't have
any plan for survival beyond the lives of the founders. They've also allowed me the freedom to do deep dives into the archives. I just finished one on the University
of Wisconsin's WISC and put everything I found on line. I do that a LOT. I just finished reading the only known copies of the software for the PB-250 on line for example.

There was an "Open CHM" initiative started several years ago to digitize and put online large portions of the museum's holdings. That should go live sometime
this year, along with a much improved on-line catalog.

NO ONE else is doing that. Not System Source, not Mimms.

I may consider either of them in MY top 10 when they start doing that, like many other European institutions do that I've worked with over the years.

<end of line>

 

[Al Kossow]

If you want people to show up and pay to keep it open then you need a specific type of computer museum that also offers hardware upgrades and repair, software for sale, and operating machines (except for the nonfunctional prototypes on display) you can touch.

What you want is a hacker space, not a museum, and there is zero chance it will attract a general audience.
I'm also not going to get into an argument about nerd playpens here. This is the wrong crowd to have a rational discussion with on why it cannot survive.
LCM failed for the reasons I gave above, no endowment and no intent by "The Owner" to have it outlive him.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Relevance is a big thing. I was conversing this past week with a physician who received his MD in 2018. He's a very intelligent young man and doubtless gifted in his field.

Yet, talking a bit about what I do was an eye-opener. "Tapes? Do you mean like VHS tapes?" I then realized that he was too young to have had any experience of say, floppy disks. I might as well have been talking about collecting phosphorous by distilling animal urine (cf Hennig Brandt).

One big issue, I think, is that museum curators don't "hear" with the ears of young people when it comes to planning their exhibits. It's a daunting task to convey the wonder of early computing to an audience who is so far removed from yesterday.

 

[Unknown_K]

What you want is a hacker space, not a museum, and there is zero chance it will attract a general audience.
I'm also not going to get into an argument about nerd playpens here. This is the wrong crowd to have a rational discussion with on why it cannot survive.
LCM failed for the reasons I gave above, no endowment and no intent by "The Owner" to have it outlive him.

No computer museum will attract a general audience, just computer geeks and whoever they can drag with them. An endowment is just the owner paying for upkeep after he is dead, has nothing to do with attracting people to the museum.

 

[VERAULT]

It's a shame it can't be self-sustaining. I've never been to a computer museum. Sci museum with computers displayed, yes, but it's a bit underwhelming to see a C64 in a glass case with a note beside it. Went to a TV museum once, that was basically 3 rooms with "some unplugged TVs", no guide and nothing to read about them.

Guides as a whole are a thing of the past. Almost ALL the museums I have been to in the past 10 years were self guided. They either had nothing, no guide at all or some phone app which I refuse to use.

Now the one good mention was the Vintage Radio museum in Connecticut. My wife and I got a personal guided tour of the exhibits which was just the best... https://ctvisit.com/listings/vintage-radio-communications-museum-connecticut
Seeing one of the few original 1954 Color Televisions that works was pretty novel.

 

[Unknown_K]

Relevance is a big thing. I was conversing this past week with a physician who received his MD in 2018. He's a very intelligent young man and doubtless gifted in his field.

Yet, talking a bit about what I do was an eye-opener. "Tapes? Do you mean like VHS tapes?" I then realized that he was too young to have had any experience of say, floppy disks. I might as well have been talking about collecting phosphorous by distilling animal urine (cf Hennig Brandt).

One big issue, I think, is that museum curators don't "hear" with the ears of young people when it comes to planning their exhibits. It's a daunting task to convey the wonder of early computing to an audience who is so far removed from yesterday.

By the time you get an MD you are around 30 years old, so if he had one in 2018, he would have been 10 when Apple ditched the floppy drive in 1998 with the iMac so it's not like he never seen one. I never seen an 8" floppy drive when I was young (mostly because few people had a computer back then). but I seen one in the movie wargames and knew they existed.

 

[brain]

I suppose it depends on the definition of "self sustaining". I doubt most museums, computer or otherwise, bring in enough to sustain themselves. I would assume most are funded by a business as a tax writeoff or with a huge endowment that sustains the museum. Paul Allen had something in this vein, but he passed and then the museum got shuttered and sold off. Lonnie's not getting younger, and I worry the same will happen when he's gone. So, it's not even enough to be sustaining, self or otherwise, it needs to have robust permanence, to avoid the fate of the main benefactor.

I think video documentaries of machines are crucially important, regardless of the museum decisions, as even the most well kept computer will eventually quit working, and then only those videos will exist.

Jim

 

[SteveHere]

We also have one tiny museum (Lawshe Memorial Museum) in South Saint Paul) which has a small collection of old Univac/Sperry computers from military and government contracts.

Thanks for this! I'm also from Minnesota and I didn't know about this one.

I know it's a bit of a drive, but we also have the Cray Research Inc. Super Computer Collection at Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology...

Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology | Technology | 21 E Grand Ave, Chippewa Falls, WI, USA

CFMIT explores the local industrial and technological history of Chippewa Falls, WI.

www.cfmit.org

Still hoping there will be a specialized computer museum in Minnesota some day.

 

[Chuck(G)]

But you get my point. I don't know what impression a floppy might have on a 10 year old.

 

[Unknown_K]

A 10 year old would get their parents hand me down computer to play with so they might have used a floppy on an early 90's machine. That age is still in the period where kids absorb everything easily.

 

[VERAULT]

But you get my point. I don't know what impression a floppy might have on a 10 year old.

Depends on the year. Floppies made a serious impression on me when I was 10.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Depends on the year. Floppies made a serious impression on me when I was 10.

Picky, picky. To the conversation at hand, tossed the floppy example out, but the actual discussion revolved around 1/2" open-reel tape. How many 10 year olds in the mid 90s had ever seen a reel of it?

 

[DougM]

But you get my point. I don't know what impression a floppy might have on a 10 year old.

I think this is the root of the problem. Computers are just boxes. Unless you grew up with them and they are in your history they mean nothing. That's why people go to such extremes to jazz up computers with blinkenlights in movies or, like in Dr. Who, make them mechatronic somehow.

But on a more meta level I think that museums are losing their appeal in general because there's so much stuff in modern society that to go someplace just to look at old stuff seems redundant.

But maybe that just makes me a curmudgeon soon to be relegated to a museum myself

 

[Eudimorphodon]

How many 10 year olds in the mid 90s had ever seen a reel of it?

I doubt many 10 year olds in the mid 70's had ever seen a reel of it in real life either. (There was plenty of it spinning in the background in TV shows and movies, I suppose.)

One big issue, I think, is that museum curators don't "hear" with the ears of young people when it comes to planning their exhibits. It's a daunting task to convey the wonder of early computing to an audience who is so far removed from yesterday.

FWIW, when I was a kid the technology that I tended to find the most fascinating was the stuff that I *didn't* have any direct experience with. I mean, what's the point of taking a kid to a museum if they already have everything in it at home? If you grew up anytime after the early 1960's probably the only place you'd ever seen a wringer washing machine or a cat's whisker crystal radio in action was in a movie or a cartoon so, yeah, I used to find stuff like that pretty neat, so I'm pretty confident that with the right presentation you're not going to have too much trouble convincing a kid that's never actually laid hands on paper tapes or used a teletypewriter to take an interest. I mean, front panels are great, who doesn't like blinkenlights? Comic book writers into the 2000's were still drawing the Batcomputer like it was something made by UNIVAC because big things covered with lights and switches are just inherently awesome.

That said, I do kind of feel like there might be something of an "end of history" effect you're going to run into if you're trying to curate a personal computer museum. I can speak from first-hand experience with my own kids, they're pretty fascinated by whirring disk drives and funky case designs, and if the computer in question has video games with chunky graphics that makes it a really easy sell because plenty of *modern* games are still using intentionally retro lo-fi graphic and sound design which sets up a *perfect* hook for reeling them in. ("Oh, so this is the original thing my new game is trying to look like? Cool!") But... I dunno, once you start getting to computers with GUIs and mice you might start losing them. My kids think the Apple II and the Tandy 1000 are pretty neat and will play games on them for hours, but their reaction to MacPaint on an original Macintosh was immediately "where's the color" and sustained disinterest. And... honestly, this supports my previous point: if the thing you're trying to display in your museum is just an objectively cruddier version of a modern thing it's going to be a lot more boring than things that might objectively be even cruddier but are at least different from what they're familiar with. Novelty can count for a lot.

 

[djg]

I used to find stuff like that pretty neat, so I'm pretty confident that with the right presentation you're not going to have too much trouble convincing a kid that's never actually laid hands on paper tapes or used a teletypewriter to take an interest.

Not a problem with younger kids. Hears a line waiting to punch some text in block letters on paper tape using teletype. In non computing things I'm involved in also they seem to like trying lots of things. When they get older they get more selective on what they will try though ones interested more likely to want to really understand what is going on vs just play with it.
https://www.pdp8online.com/shows/rsd23/pics/20230423_161056.shtml?small