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Definitely! Also, what I was told is the worlds only functioning PDP-7 was a highlight... and the Parc Alto.

It's not a particularly big museum, but man, what a great collection.



Yeah, was just coming here to mention the Alto. It's hard to describe the feeling of seeing one of those in-person and running. So much came from such a small machine.

If you're in Seattle the Living Computer Museum is a must-visit.


I'm a member and have visited a few times with my 5 year old son--it's a good rainy day activity for kids. The downstairs area is beautiful space for kids to run around and tinker with robots, and it never seems to be crowded (not even on weekends).

The museum is shockingly liberal with what they let kids touch, so when I take him upstairs to the historic collection I'm always terrified that he'll break something. Fortunately a lot of that gear from the 60's was built to last and is intimidating to little kids... for example, their punch card reader is bigger than a copy machine, and volunteers hand out earplugs before running it.


They even have a functioning teletype machine! I typed in the basic Unix commands I knew (cd, ls, mkdir, etc) and they all worked just as I expected. I've been using terminals for a few years, so it was amazing to see the origins of that user interface.




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