Seattle: Living Computer Museum not just for geeks

But Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has just opened the Living Computer Museum, with displays of old machines — all in working order — along with a geeky wish list of items he'd like to add, just in case anybody out there has an old tape drive or super-computer sitting around.

Visitors who stop by the nondescript building in an industrial section of Seattle south of the baseball stadium are likely to see technicians in white lab coats working on the machines. But this place is not just for nerds and techies. Since the museum's Oct. 25 opening, many visitors have been families, and their questions have not been the expected queries concerning technical specs of machines, but rather where did the curators find these artifacts and what were they used for.

And items here are not behind glass with "Do Not Touch" signs. This is a place where you're welcome to pull up a chair and relive the days when you played Congo Bongo on a Commodore 64 instead of doing homework.

Visitors of a certain age are also almost guaranteed to see the first personal computer they ever touched — Radio Shack TRS-80 or an early Apple, perhaps— but the centerpieces of the collection are the bigger, older, flashier machines.

One of the oldest examples is a PDP-7 made by Digital Equipment Corporation. It's the size of an office cubicle and was designed in the mid-1960s to do just one operation in a physics lab at the University of Oregon. The curators believe it is the only working model of this machine in the world.

The machine has a fraction of the computing power of a modern cell phone and is a lot more expensive to maintain.

Displays throughout the small museum explain how much computers have evolved in the past 50 years and feature some amusing old photographs, including one shot of Allen sitting at a keyboard with a young Bill Gates looking over his shoulder.