[HECnet] LCM+L suspending operations

[Thomas DeBellis]

Please see below, a portion of the response from somebody who works (or 
worked) at LCM+L:

    The wild speculations of the uninformed have a potential to do great
    damage.  The Seattle Times is in that category, in my opinion.

    Sadly, the museum is closing for an extended period, as are all the
    other public facing entities in Paul Allen’s portfolio.  This is due
    entirely to the fact that they **are** public facing, in a time when
    the public is unable or unwilling to gather in large groups.  (When
    is the next time you plan on going to a movie, for example?)  It is
    not out of a desire to dismantle Paul’s legacy, or in contravention
    of his intent, or anything of the sort.

    Most especially for the collections at Living Computers and at the
    Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum, there is no plan to sell
    anything.  At LCML, we are working on a very orderly shutdown of
    everything which can safely be powered down for extended periods,
    and on a plan for how to keep power to those things which will
    otherwise die if unpowered for extended periods.  We have a lot of
    experience with bringing things up which have been left fallow for
    years; we do not want our successors in the future to have to learn
    all over again all the things we have had to learn in the past 17 years.

    We are still working on what that means for those with accounts on
    the on-line systems.  We ask that they be patient; we’ll have an
    answer for them in the coming days.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 5/31/20 3:23 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>
> I'm going to reach out to somebody I know who works there and see what 
> he might know beyond the news.  Given the "if" in the notice on the 
> web site, viz: "we will spend the months ahead reassessing if, how, 
> and when to reopen", things didn't immediately strike me as being 
> overwhelmingly hopeful.
>
> That would be a bummer if the KL and XKL machines were to go away.  In 
> some alpha versions of my FTP server, I ran what I thought would be 
> regression tests on an XKL (at the time, the 2065 was running Tops-10, 
> so this wasn't possible).  It turns out that I actually found a a 
> situation that the KLH10 micro-engine gets right but that some 
> versions of the XLK microcode get wrong.
>
> Briefly, on an XKL-1, you don't want to use any EXTEND based string or 
> numeric conversion instructions in a non-zero section as the effective 
> address calculations come out wrong and certain random parts of the 
> address space get trashed.  Took me awhile to figure that one out...  
> I don't recall whether this was fixed, but I would assume it would 
> have been.
>
> The loss of MRC's 2020's and--more importantly--the data held on them 
> and related tapes would be an extremely bitter blow.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> On 5/27/20 11:15 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
>>
>> Hello!
>> That part may be closing, but the museum,may survive intact. We just
>> don't know. Sometimes even local news does not have all of the facts.
>> -----
>> Gregg C Levinegregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
>> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 10:53 PM David Cooper<davecoo at marmotking.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> It’s not coming back.  From the local news, "This means we are winding down both Vulcan Arts + Entertainment and Vulcan Productions by the end of the year."  The museum was part of Vulcan Arts + Entertainment.  Just like the ancient Greek temples that were destroyed by farmers looking for stone to build houses and walls, the computers will be recycled for their gold.  Human nature has not changed and likely never will.  You’ve heard the phrase, “The Earth belongs to the living”.  Apparently true then and true now.
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> From:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE  <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE>  On Behalf Of Keith Halewood
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 2:40 PM
>>>> To:hecnet at Update.UU.SE
>>>> Subject: [HECnet] LCM+L suspending operations
>>>>
>>>> As some of you may have just heard, LCM+L are suspending operations “for now” due to the effects of the current crisis. We’ll discover what’ll be happening to online access to their systems shortly. It’s a sad day but hopefully not permanently so.
>>>>
>>>> Keith
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