Another cool place to visit is the RE-PC on 6th street in Seattle, where they have a small retro computer museum. Years ago I got to watch the old guy who ran the place boot the PDP-8 there by toggling the boot code from (his) memory using the switches on the front.

There's also a re-pc in tukwilia near sea-tac with a small museum section. The unaffiliated recycled PC store in Tacoma has a bit of a museum section too, although a lot less inventory.

I still miss weird stuff in sunnyvale, but this will have to do.

This place was shut down by Paul Allen's sister after he died, in case anyone was wondering.

Yeah pretty sad story, can't have cost that much to keep this going. Greed is sad.

Also in seattle - https://sdf.org/?tour/museum/index - SMJ giving tours himself at times. Most equipment functional, some even still continuously connected to the internet (at least through SDF's bubble). Been four to five computer generations since I've visited it tho..

Neat.

Reminds me a bit of the community tool libraries. And maybe could serve a similar purpose.

Like if you find some old media that you'd like to read. Or want to use an old device with a rare connector.

I have such a bitter sweet relationship with retro computers. By that I mean the actual hardware itself, it is really cool to keep these things going but more and more the maintenance on these is a losing batter or it becomes a ship of theseus scenario in which so much is replaced the original is almost gone.

A few years back, I saw that a lot of my retro stuff was beginning to fail simply due to aging components. I donated what I could to those that could do something with it but it was kind of sad to see that non of this is going to be with us for a long time.

It is crazy in video games seeing stuff like PlayStation 1/2, Gamecube and Xbox DVD's are now starting to suffer from disc rot. It is looking like emulation or FPGA recreations by be the long path ahead if you want to experience as it was.