This summer my fourteen year old son’s schedule for the first month off school has been no schedule at all. When I get home each day I ask him whether he has done his job, “are you bored?” I come home to find notebooks with diagrams of fencing strategy, a Google document with detailed instructions on how to optimize play in Hearts of Iron IV, and a smattering of my own books pulled from the shelves and spread on the bed. I smile because I am happy that he has achieved the goal. He has found boredom.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, the Living Computer Museum in Seattle closed its doors. Just two years earlier its benefactor, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, had passed away. And this June of 2024, the estate of Paul Allen announced that the Living Computer Museum was closing doors forever and much of the museum’s collection sold at auction.
This permanent closing has made me profoundly sad.
The Living Computer Museum was multiple floors of computing history. The lowest exhibit floor felt like a traditional museum, with different exhibits of computer technology, an old Cray 1, a VR exhibit, etc, but with more interactive exhibits than one would normally associate with a museum (modular robots you could assemble to exhibit strange behaviors). This floor also included a retro arcade and a mock up of a living room circa 1980 with a console hook up to an old tv. But the top floor was the gem, and really the place I mourn.
On the top floor of the Living Computer Museum was a huge collection of computers spanning nearly the entire history of computers from mainframes to modern PCs, and these were actually plugged in and working and available to use. You could just sit down, for example, at a legendary Xerox Alto, and just start playing around with it. Here is my son, playing Karateka on an Apple IIc
Back when I was a physicist, one of the benefits of the occupation was the crazy crackpot letters or emails you would get explaining why physics as we know it was all wrong. THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE IS WRONG! They would shout at you, these retired doctors and engineers (always those professions), and it was sometimes fun to see the level of speculative craziness that one could achieve when ego dominates self reflection.
My friend Michael Nielsen once gave me one of the crackpot correspondences he had received—as the author of a blockbuster quantum computing textbook he must have received numerous such crackspondences—and one of the phrases on the postcard he gave me has always stuck with me. The phrase was “Dewey-eyed pastoralism” and the author was using it as a negative screed. The pastoralism the author was railing about was not animal husbandry, but the pastoralism of literature and art, a form in which the old country life is idolized. And the Dewey here was most certainly the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, and used here as a negative adjective, Dewey was and is a fine enemy for the religious, his pragmatism was a real pain in the butt for wishful thinkers.
When I think back on my childhood, I always remember this phrase because I worry that I see it through “Dewey-eye pastoralism”. I grew up rural in the 1980s and was an unabashed computer geek. There was no internet, and, to the best of my knowledge there weren’t even any local BBSs in my small town. To be not just interested in, but trying to do things like build artificial life (I reversed engineered Langton’s loops from a few pictures on the back of a book), on your computer, in small town America, at that time made you incredibly strange and odd. But it was a unique experience in my life, and the more I think about it the more I remember how much I was given the opportunity to wander and explore all on my own, and what an incredible gift this has been.
I read all the computer books in the local library (maybe 15 of them in total), and when we would go an hour away to the nearest big bookstore I would stand in the computer section and try to memorize the Apple Mac computer manuals (even though I owned an Apple IIGS, some of the library structures were close enough). A major discovery was the entire backlog of Scientific American’s and the Mathematical Recreations and Computer Recreations column. Twice I got to go away to the University of Oregon to Computer Camp where they had toaster Macs, and I saw one of them catch on fire (years later I would get a chat on LinkedIn from someone inquiring if I went to that camp, it turns out he had stayed in computers and helped founded one of the major internet real estate platforms.) When I think back on this I remember how important it was that I could just sit and goof around with the computer. I remember how obsessed I was with graphics and every machine I encountered for years (including my calculator) I would write the Mandelbrot set as a test of its speed and color capabilities. As I said, it’s hard not to think back on these days with some major doses of pastoralism.
The Living Computer Museum was the closest thing I’ve found where I could relive my childhood experience. I’m glad I got to share the experience of what it was like to be a 1985 computer nerd with my family and friends. But I’m also sad, because I don’t think we have enough places where you can just sit around and goof off with these simple machines. Today’s computers are beasts, immensely capable, but that capability makes them constant distraction machines. There is something about the minimalism of those old computers that, in my head, makes me think I can more easily commune with them. And it was also a place to connect to the society as it existed before everyone wanted to be a tech nerd, money flowed from the internet pipes, and we sit through endless hype cycles of breathless FOMO. So today I mourn for my favorite museum, curse a little at Paul Allen for not setting the museum up for the future, and wonder what is going on today for which my son will look back on it with a little bit of Dewey-eyed pastoralism.