[TUHS] Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[TUHS] Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Clem Cole]

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https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-museum-logs-off-for-good-as-paul-allen-estate-will-auction-vintage-items/

These folks hosted the UNIX 50th Celebration and had a physical PDP-7 that
was used to bring up UNIX V0 (after first getting it running on SIMH). That
later was not easy because the original PDP-7s (like the one Ken had access
to) did not have disk storage. BTL had paid DEC's Custom Special Systems
(CSS) to splice a Burrough's disk that DEC was selling using for the 15 and
later the PDP-9.   It started with splicing reverse engineering that code
to build a simulation of that disk into the simh, so we could ensure that
UNIX ran—finally, modeling that HW with a custom microprocessor-based board
with an SD card with a functional replica of a PDP-7 I/O interface on one
side obeying the device registers and operations that UNIX expected to see.

The LCM-L folks were incredibly gracious and generous. I am so sad to see
their collection go away. In particular, I hope the PDP-7s and the CDC-6500
find new homes.

Clem

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[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Aron Insinga]

I am not a lawyer, but as I've mentioned before, people building a 
collection or creating a Museum should form a non-profit organization 
(with a business plan to support it) to take ownership of it and keep it 
out of the estate, because there is no guarantee one's heirs will give a 
$#!^ about any of it other than for the gold that can be harvested from 
it.  Do it straight away because you likely won't know in advance of 
when your time is up.

And even if all you have is one or a few items (let's say, a missile 
guidance computer, or someone's unpublished notes from lectures) at 
least make sure you have a valid will to try very hard to require it to 
be sent someplace that can accept it, or that will appoint (a) 
right-thinking representative(s) to handle said item(s).

Or at least make sure you've actually succeeded in educating your family 
on the importance of said items, and places that can accept them.

As someone from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum once said to me, 
"They [TCM=>CHM] were lucky to get that, we don't have one."

But IMHO the LCM might be the biggest such failure of responsibility to 
computing history ever.

Best,

- Aron (a docent at The Computer Museum when it was at DEC in Marlborough)

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Larry McVoy]

This is almost completely unrelated but somewhat in the "write your
will/trust the right way".

My dad made me trustee of their estate.  OK, fine.   He passed first,
then my mom passed and there was a decent amount, not a lot but enough
you'd notice it.  3 kids, divided equally.  But I had made enough money
that it seemed unfair to me to take my third when my brother, a PhD from
Cornell, was busy convincing everyone that how they were going about
saving the Everglades was wrong, and he was broke.  I could just hear
my dad saying "Larry, you are fine, Chris is not".

So I gave him my third but it is a pain in the butt.  You can only
gift so much each year without a tax implication.  

The point being that none of the trust people had ever heard of, or
thought of, the idea that one of the kids would be willing to give
up their share.

Since we're mostly old folks, maybe put something in your trust that
says any kid can yield any portion to whoever they want and it is as
if you wrote that into the trust/will.  We did that with our trust 
and the lawyer had to be told 3 times.  She kept saying that's not
what happens, the kids argue about they should get more, nobody
says they should get less.  Turns out I'm the odd ball.

On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 08:56:43PM -0400, Aron Insinga wrote:
> I am not a lawyer, but as I've mentioned before, people building a
> collection or creating a Museum should form a non-profit organization (with
> a business plan to support it) to take ownership of it and keep it out of
> the estate, because there is no guarantee one's heirs will give a $#!^ about
> any of it other than for the gold that can be harvested from it.?? Do it
> straight away because you likely won't know in advance of when your time is
> up.
> 
> And even if all you have is one or a few items (let's say, a missile
> guidance computer, or someone's unpublished notes from lectures) at least
> make sure you have a valid will to try very hard to require it to be sent
> someplace that can accept it, or that will appoint (a) right-thinking
> representative(s) to handle said item(s).
> 
> Or at least make sure you've actually succeeded in educating your family on
> the importance of said items, and places that can accept them.
> 
> As someone from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum once said to me, "They
> [TCM=>CHM] were lucky to get that, we don't have one."
> 
> But IMHO the LCM might be the biggest such failure of responsibility to
> computing history ever.
> 
> Best,
> 
> - Aron (a docent at The Computer Museum when it was at DEC in Marlborough)
> 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Trust stuff, Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[John Levine]

According to Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>:
>This is almost completely unrelated but somewhat in the "write your
>will/trust the right way". ...

>So I gave him my third but it is a pain in the butt.  You can only
>gift so much each year without a tax implication.  

Well, in principle, but unless you expect your estate to be over $10
million, you generally don't have to pay any gift tax. (If you do
expect your estate to be over $10M, you need a real tax expert, not
advice from random mailing lists.

>The point being that none of the trust people had ever heard of, or
>thought of, the idea that one of the kids would be willing to give
>up their share.

That's surprising. Every testamentary trust I've been involved with
had language that let the heirs disclaim all or part of their share. I
thought it was boilerplate. You are quite right that it's an important
thing to include.

[TUHS] Wills. (Was: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Larry wrote:
> So I gave him my third but it is a pain in the butt.  You can only
> gift so much each year without a tax implication.  

AIUI, in the UK, a ‘deed of variation’ can alter the will's wishes as
long as all beneficiaries sign.

> any kid can yield any portion to whoever they want and it is as if you
> wrote that into the trust/will.

That's open to sibling A pressuring B to yield without C-F knowing until
too late.  Whereas if A-F have to sign then some of C-F may stand up to
the bully, knowing what A's like.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[George Michaelson]

I understand property on the mall is expensive, but the smithsonian
has adjunct/allied/associated museums not on the mall.

You would think somebody in Maynard would fund oh, I don't know.. an
old Mill structure to be repurposed as a museum? Or many in Armonk?

The Indy "this belongs in a museum" really needs a rider: A nationally
recognized, affiliated, publicly endowable museum.

Full marks to Paul Allen to keep the stuff. He did a useful thing.

-G

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[aki]

They did, in one of DEC's buildings in Marlborough, Massachusetts: The 
Digital Computer Museum dba The Computer Museum.  Later it moved to 
Boston in the same building as the Children's Museum there; space that 
was used by an automobile museum for a while.  After the End of the Age 
of Minicomputers, it moved to California and eventually became the 
Computer History Museum.  MIT Lincoln Lab took back the TX-0 and 
disassembled it to some extent so that it could be moved and put into 
storage, where it sits, in a classified facility which we mere insecure 
civilians can't access.  A few things were on display in The Science 
Museum in Boston (it inherited the Massachusetts non-profit organization 
of TCM IIUC) but I think they've been moved to CHM too.  And at least 
some of those giants have now passed away too.

And make that an actually *endowed* museum.  I've been reminded that 
Allen also created a Science Fiction Museum and a Rock & Roll Museum.  
The SF has been merged into the R&R because that's the one that will 
probably sell enough tickets to keep paying the bills and the staff.

- Aron



On 2024-06-25 20:42, George Michaelson wrote:
...
> You would think somebody in Maynard would fund oh, I don't know.. an
> old Mill structure to be repurposed as a museum? Or many in Armonk?
> 
> The Indy "this belongs in a museum" really needs a rider: A nationally
> recognized, affiliated, publicly endowable museum.
...

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Paul Guertin]

It is sad that a billionaire would create a museum but
then instruct his heirs to dismantle it upon his death,
rather than set up some kind of permanent funding
for it.

Paul Guertin

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 9:44 PM Paul Guertin <paul@guertin.net> wrote:
> It is sad that a billionaire would create a museum but
> then instruct his heirs to dismantle it upon his death,
> rather than set up some kind of permanent funding
> for it.

That's not at all what happened; please, let's not write such things
that suggest that it is.

Allen was a man dying of cancer. LCM+L was important to him, but he
neglected to leave explicit instructions to set up an endowment for
it; that's unfortunate, but it was an oversight: he had other
concerns. I've talked to several of the players, and no one, not once,
has suggested that he "instructed his heirs to dismantle it upon his
death."

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Paul Guertin]

Dixit Dan Cross (2024-06-25 21:46):
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 9:44 PM Paul Guertin <paul@guertin.net> wrote:
>> It is sad that a billionaire would create a museum but
>> then instruct his heirs to dismantle it upon his death,
> 
> That's not at all what happened; please, let's not write such things
> that suggest that it is.

Thank you for the correction. I read the article too quickly,
and misinterpreted the sentence

 > The closure came as the estate began to deal with a number of 
properties that no longer had a billionaire benefactor to help keep the 
doors open, and in line with what the estate says was Allen’s desire to 
sell his assets after his passing.

It is the estate's position that Allen wanted the museum's assets
to be sold, and not Allen's stated wishes.

Paul Guertin

[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Dan Cross wrote:
> Allen was a man dying of cancer. LCM+L was important to him, but he
> neglected to leave explicit instructions to set up an endowment for
> it; that's unfortunate, but it was an oversight: he had other
> concerns.

The oversight would be that it was done too late.  Such paperwork was in
progress, but it was not completed before his death.

[TUHS] Planning for the future was Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Will Senn]

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On 6/26/24 12:36 AM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Dan Cross wrote:
>> Allen was a man dying of cancer. LCM+L was important to him, but he
>> neglected to leave explicit instructions to set up an endowment for
>> it; that's unfortunate, but it was an oversight: he had other
>> concerns.
> The oversight would be that it was done too late.  Such paperwork was in
> progress, but it was not completed before his death.
There's a lesson in here somewhere.

I was always skeptical of the LCM-L's approach to curation, not that I 
had any specific reason for it other than finding it difficult to access 
some of the digital materials. However, I would hope that we would be 
more careful with how we contribute materials going forward. It's 
important that when you donate an item for posterity, that it be made 
accessible and available to that posterity... in perpetuity. This isn't 
a simple endeavor, it takes planning... as in ahead of time, beforehand, 
in advance of :). Of course that's easy to say, now, in this particular 
case. But, now that we know one way things can go awry, we should be 
more careful going forward.

Which brings me to my topic - how is TUHS set up for the future? and a 
corollary what's the deal with Bitsavers (I see mirrors including 
content on Archive.org)?

Of late, I've seen quite a few "reliable" retro sites going off the air 
and more and more, I'm relying on Archive.org's wayback machine to 
locate the materials on those sites. To my mind this is a problem in 
that Archive used to make a lot more digitial content available at 
higher resolution, without gatekeeping, but now, not so much... as in, 
practically anything is freely accessible.

Is TUHS set up in such a way as to weather the sands of time or do we 
need to do something to ensure its sustainability (similarly 
bitsavers/gunkies/beebe's bib/etc).

Will


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[TUHS] Re: Planning for the future was Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[Al Kossow]

On 6/26/24 7:30 AM, Will Senn wrote:
> what's the deal with Bitsavers (I see mirrors including 
> content on Archive.org)?

They throw things into the Wayback Machine and mangle the filenames and destroy the directory heirarchy
somewhere else. I'm disappointed that the major search engines seem to return what is at IA first. It
isn't even necessarily the most recent version of a file.

The Computer History Museum has committed to being a mirror site
http://bitsavers.computerhistory.org

The intention in some day to integrate it with the "Open CHM" project, but the infrastructure for that
is still a work in progress.

[TUHS] Re: Planning for the future

[Warren Toomey via TUHS]

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On 27/6/24 00:30, Will Senn wrote:
>
> Which brings me to my topic - how is TUHS set up for the future?
> Is TUHS set up in such a way as to weather the sands of time or do we 
> need to do something to ensure its sustainability (similarly 
> bitsavers/gunkies/beebe's bib/etc).
>
Good question. There isn't a real succession plan. We do have a handful 
of people behind the scenes (the TUHS team) who have access to the 
server and who could take over the care and feeding if required. The 
regular operations are mostly documented but, as always, could be 
improved upon.

The "assets" are nearly all publicly available. The Unix archive can be 
easily copied: see the end of 
https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=source:unix_archive

The mailing list contents can be downloaded from here as Zip files: 
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/

The actual list of people on the list isn't available, although the TUHS 
team could easily get a copy.

The "tuhs.org" domain I have registered until May 2030.

What I should probably do is to ask one of the TUHS team to volunteer to 
a) put their credit card up as a secondary for my cloud provider in case 
my card stops working and b) give them access to the cloud provider so 
they can make their card the primary one.

I did try to float the idea of a more formalised TUHS structure a while 
back but there was not much enthusiasm at the time :-)

Cheers, Warren

P.S. And I should set up a "dead man's hand" script to tell the list if 
I have been 'inactive' for a few weeks.

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[TUHS] Re: Planning for the future

[Will Senn]

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On 6/26/24 4:57 PM, Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote:
>
> Good question. There isn't a real succession plan. We do have a 
> handful of people behind the scenes (the TUHS team) who have access to 
> the server and who could take over the care and feeding if required. 
> The regular operations are mostly documented but, as always, could be 
> improved upon.
>
> The "assets" are nearly all publicly available. The Unix archive can 
> be easily copied: see the end of 
> https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=source:unix_archive
>
> The mailing list contents can be downloaded from here as Zip files: 
> https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/
>
> The actual list of people on the list isn't available, although the 
> TUHS team could easily get a copy.
>
> The "tuhs.org" domain I have registered until May 2030.
>
> What I should probably do is to ask one of the TUHS team to volunteer 
> to a) put their credit card up as a secondary for my cloud provider in 
> case my card stops working and b) give them access to the cloud 
> provider so they can make their card the primary one.
>
> I did try to float the idea of a more formalised TUHS structure a 
> while back but there was not much enthusiasm at the time :-)
>
> Cheers, Warren
>
> P.S. And I should set up a "dead man's hand" script to tell the list 
> if I have been 'inactive' for a few weeks.
>
Hi Warren,

I didn't realize it was so easily mirrored. The instructions are super 
clear and effective. This all sounds like a good approach to providing 
for continuity over the long haul, even if it's not super formal.

It's interesting the perspectives gathering here - for some, it's like a 
chat room to reminisce. For others, it's an information source. For a 
few, it's a living history. What may not be apparent to some of the 
folks who lived the history is that it is a fragile thread and those who 
experienced its genesis firsthand are a rapidly shrinking population. If 
we've seen misinformation creeping into discussions of late, it's only 
going to get much worse over the years. Particularly if we don't capture 
more of the real story and keep that alive. TUHS is a great resource for 
folks to turn to when they want to dig deeper into the origins of UNIX 
or to learn more about the motivations for early decisions that charted 
the course of it's descendants. The transition from research unix to 
commercial and open source is becoming history that fewer and fewer 
folks really know much about. All this to say, TUHS is more than a chat 
platform for reminiscing and clarifications of the record - it's a 
historical record of important conversations that should be preserved 
and protected :).

Thanks,

Will

Thanks for the details!

Will


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[TUHS] Re: Sad but not unexpected news about the LCM-L

[aki]

It's not like this was the first time he faced cancer.  It's too bad he 
didn't take the lesson from an earlier encounter and do this decades 
ago.  Now if only his family would take those wishes of his into account 
and tell the lawyers to finish the job.

On 2024-06-26 00:36, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Dan Cross wrote:
>> Allen was a man dying of cancer. LCM+L was important to him, but he
>> neglected to leave explicit instructions to set up an endowment for
>> it; that's unfortunate, but it was an oversight: he had other
>> concerns.
> 
> The oversight would be that it was done too late.  Such paperwork was 
> in
> progress, but it was not completed before his death.