Paul Allen's Museum of Computing closes, collection to be auctioned

A huge collection of items from Living Computers: Museum + Lab, a Seattle computer museum opened by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen in 2012, is being auctioned off. The museum, known for its interactive exhibits, has not reopened since closing during the 2020 lockdown.

Allen was instrumental in founding numerous institutions, including the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture, some of which are still open today. His company, Vulcan, also founded the Seattle Art Fair, which opens this year on July 25. Others, such as the Computer Museum, continue to exist after the inventor and philanthropist died in 2018 from complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Allen signed the Giving Pledge, introduced by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, pledging to donate the majority of his fortune to charity.

In November 2022, the auctioneer handled an Allen auction chock-full of Impressionist, modern and contemporary masterpieces by the likes of Paul Zanne, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. It was the largest single auction in history, grossing $1.5 billion. Another batch of Allen's works sold in 2023 brought in another $88.8 million.

Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Seattle, Washington, 1984. Photo by Doug Wilson/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

The sale, titled “Gen One,” focuses on first-generation technologies and their inventors and is split into three parts: two online auctions running until September 12th, “Firsts: The History of Computing” and “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future,” and a live sale starting September 10th titled “Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity.”

This series of sales is somewhat modest in terms of price, but some of the items on offer are of historical importance.

The top bid at the Pushing Boundaries auction is a signed letter written by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, which is expected to fetch $6 million. In the letter, the physicist warned the commander in chief that Germany had discovered fissile uranium that could power extremely destructive weapons.

Signed letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932. Courtesy of Christie's.

The letter, which inspired the Manhattan Project and is perhaps the most important letter of the century, exists in two identical versions, with the other one housed at the Roosevelt Presidential Library. The letter was featured in the 2023 blockbuster film “Oppenheimer.”

Also up for auction at “Pushing Boundaries” is a spacesuit that once belonged to famed astronaut Ed White, who became the first American to perform a spacewalk during the Gemini 4 mission on June 3, 1965. (Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk on March 18 of the same year.) The suit has a steep estimated bid of $120,000.

While there are no works by Chanut or Van Gogh in the sale, the “Over the Horizon” auction does feature Chesley Bonestell's “Saturn from Titan” (c. 1952), which has a high estimate of $50,000. (The same painting sold for $77,675 at Heritage Auctions in 2010.)

A celebrated artist focusing on Cold War space exploration, Bonestell's work is included in the collections of institutions such as the National Air and Space Museum, and both an asteroid and a crater on Mars are named after him. The artist's auction record is $197,000 for a 1952 Life magazine cover, “The Beginning of the World,” sold at Heritage Auctions in 2014.

1971 DEC PDP-10: KI-10 mainframe computer. Courtesy of Christie's.

Furst, meanwhile, is paying tribute to Allen's computing innovations. The hottest item is a 1971 DEC PDP-10, a computer he built himself: the KI-10 (Digital Equipment Corporation Programmed Data Processor), estimated at $50,000. The auctioneers say the computer was one of the first to support interactive, real-time computing and was essential to the development of ARPANET, the precursor to today's internet.

“Never before has the market seen such a diverse collection that tells such a beautiful story of the history of human scientific and technological ingenuity, much less one assembled by the founder of the modern computer,” said Mark Porter, chairman of Christie's Americas. “That one of the greatest innovators of our time has collected, preserved and, in dozens of cases, restored these objects, drawn inspiration from them for himself, and publicly displayed many of them is a testament to the uniqueness and importance of these objects.”

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