There are so many things like this. Billionaires (or even multimillionaires) could create an endowment to fund operations for museums like this until the end of time. It was already running on a smaller budget, perhaps $1M or so per year. Even a $20M endowment would probably be enough to sustain it forever. With $30M they could probably afford to expand it a bit. One wonders why Allen didn’t set up a trust to do exactly that while he was alive.

I visited the LCM multiple times, and was amazed at how everything was working and interactive. I think it would have been a natural evolution to split the space for early video game consoles as well, perhaps up through the PS1. That might have brought in more (and younger) visitors.

Once you realize that all this stuff is written by either young Gen Z copywriters or AI, everything begins to make more sense.

C

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {

printf(“Hello, world”);

return 0;

}

C++

#include <iostream>

int main() {

std::cout << “Hello, world” << std::endl;

return 0;

}

According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.

tl;dr for article and comments:

Microsoft mangled arrays and code comments with ASCII extended characters into UTF-8 encoding, which makes building many of these files impossible without a lot of extra work. This was mistakenly attributed to Git.

The timestamps for each file are also not preserved, which is debatably a valid criticism of Git (original file timestamps can technically be preserved on an archive like this, but it requires a large amount of work to line up those times and the correct commit times programmatically).

Several Microsoft employees involved in this project appeared in the comments and offered to work directly with the author to correct the character encoding issues. One Microsoft employee indicated that historical timestamps could likely not be included due to Microsoft corporate policy around personally identifiable information.

It was Compaq. Incidentally, that story was the basis for the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone…

Not following the logic here. Why does Microsoft’s choice in 32-bit OS kill Apple?

My old homepage from nearly 10 years ago was a page that looked like it was straight out of the late '90s but was entirely valid HTML5 and CSS 3. That included an applet-like rippling water reflection effect beneath a photo of my city at the time, MIDI audio, JavaScript emulating the blink tag, and right-click “image save protection.”

It was a total blast to make and people loved it, but being in the tech industry it kind of gave the wrong impression to hiring managers, so I swapped it for a much more boring page.

If you click the link…

As someone who’s also invested a considerable amount of my finite life into thoroughly understanding the inner workings of archaic technologies, the level of passion on display here is really motivating me to wrap up one of those projects and release it into the wild (for absolutely no one to use).

This is cool! I did run into a bug, though: the filter list is too tall for mobile and you can’t scroll it.

It’s also missing quite a few retro game shops in the Portland, OR area. However, it seems like arcades are pretty well covered; it’s just missing a couple in Tigard.

Right now Yelp is still more useful for finding shops in my area, but I really like the idea behind this and I’ll keep it in mind.

This looks cool, but I was surprised there was no signage anywhere.

I really like the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, but it looks like they closed during Covid and haven’t yet reopened…

Isn’t educational use the whole point of Raspberry Pi? It seems like that has way more opportunity for it with a modern architecture, ready-made robotics kits, and other maker-type applications that could get kids excited about electronics and programming.