and Paul Allen at an event honoring computer pioneers at the museum in April 2013 LCM+L (originally known as Living Computer Museum, and before that, PDPplanet.com) was founded by
Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen, on January 9, 2006. Through PDPplanet, users were able to
Telnet into vintage devices and experience timesharing computing on equipment from
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and
XKL. Users around the world could request a login through the LCM+L website and telnet into systems from XKL, DEC,
IBM,
Xerox Sigma,
AT&T, and
CDC. The museum opened to the public on October 25, 2012, and guests could visit in person to interact with the collection of
mainframes,
minicomputers,
microcomputers and
peripherals the museum had on display. Various and changing exhibits in the museum showed how much computers and technology had changed over the last 50 years and were changing still. In 2013,
Seattle Weekly voted the museum the "Best Geeky Museum" because it highlighted "an essential part of Seattle binary history - the founding of
Microsoft and its role in establishing Seattle as a tech-driven industry". On November 18, 2016, the institution changed its name to Living Computers: Museum + Labs to reflect its enlarged goals of igniting curiosity through direct touch experiences with contemporary technologies as well as vintage computers. The museum closed in February 2020 and did not reopen afterward due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2024, The Paul Allen Estate announced that the museum would be permanently closed. Some of the museum's collection, most of which was owned by the Estate and not the museum itself, was auctioned off by
Christie's. The auction was held online from 23 August to 12 September 2024 and raised $3,635,982 as part of the
Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection auction series. The rest of the collection was split between
The Interim Computer Museum in
Tukwila, Washington and the
Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in
Roswell, Georgia. ==Collections and exhibits==