Christie’s announced the items that will be auctioned in three sales from the Paul G. Allen Collection, including historic computers and artifacts from the late Microsoft co-founder’s former Living Computers Museum + Labs in Seattle.
They include an Apple-1 from the desk of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, estimated at $500,000 to $800,000, to be auctioned as part of a live sale on Sept. 10 at Christie’s Rockefeller Center in New York.
One of the sales encompasses an array of items from the heart of the shuttered museum, including mainframe computers, minicomputers, microcomputers, and artifacts from Microsoft and the history of personal computing.
Plans to auction items from Allen’s collection were made public in June along with the news that the Living Computers Museum would be shutting down for good, more than four years after closing near the start of the pandemic.
The permanent closure disappointed fans and supporters, and raised questions from people who had donated artifacts to the museum over the years.
Some Seattle-area historians held out hope that locally significant items from Living Computers Museum would remain in the region, perhaps for public display. Given the number of Microsoft-related items in the Christie’s auction, such a plan could hinge on local investors and philanthropists bidding successfully for them.
These items include early Microsoft memos, programming printouts, and a collection of Popular Electronics magazines that includes the January 1975 issue that inspired Allen and Bill Gates to start the company.
There’s a Microsoft “Green-Eyed Mouse,” a collection of historic Microsoft software packages, a MITS Altair 8800, a copy of “Computer Notes” with Gates’ famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” and a set of nine early microcomputers that Allen and Gates posed with at the museum in 2013 in a reprisal of a classic picture from 1981.
Christie’s announced details of the three sales Thursday morning, including specific items to be auctioned, and estimated prices, under the name, “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection.”
More than 150 items are expected to be auctioned across the three sales. Paul Allen’s estate says proceeds will go to charitable causes, in keeping with his wishes.
Two of the sales are online; one will be held live in New York. The online sales will be open for bidding from Aug. 23 to Sept. 12.
The online sale with many of the former Living Computers Museum items is called “Firsts: The History of Computing.”
Items in this sale include a 1971 DEC PDP-10: K1-10 (estimated at $30,000 to $50,000), the type of computer that Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used in the early days of the company.
This online sale also includes:
- A group of early Microsoft memos, circa 1978 ($1,000 to $1,500).
- Nine early Microsoft coding printouts ($7,000 to $10,000).
- A Compaq Portable 286 used by Paul Allen ($30,000 to $50,000).
- A Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics ($3,000 to $5,000).
The live sale, “Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity from the Paul G. Allen Collection,” also includes:
- An archive with letters from Lous Leakey, Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey on their work in primatology in the 1950s and 1960s, with examples of Goodall’s earliest research, pictures, casts of discoveries, and an example of chimpanzee tools collected in the wild by Goodall (estimated $40,000 to $60,000).
- A signed letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning about the scientific discovery that led to the atomic bomb (estimated $500,000 to $800,000).
- The original pitchbook for the television documentary series, “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” (estimated $10,000 to $15,000).
- An abstracted sculpture by Antony Gormley, “Quantum Cloud XI” (estimated $250,000 to $350,000).
- The original and complete set of procedures for America’s first spacewalk in June 1965 ($60,000 to $80,000).
- A four-rotor Enigma Machine from 1941 ($250,000 to $350,000).
- A first-class luncheon menu from the Titanic, from the final lunch on the day the ship struck the iceberg ($30,000 to $50,000).
- A Pac-Man Arcade game from 1980, at $2,000 to $3,000.
The second online sale is “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future,” including the painting “Saturn as Seen from Titan,” by Chelsey Bonestell; and original illustrations by Bonestell and Fred Freeman from the “Collier’s” series, “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” from 1952-1954, which helped to build public support for the Space Race.
See a full listing of items on the Christie’s website.
An exhibition of items from the “Pushing Boundaries” and “Over the Horizon” sales will be held at Christie’s New York from Sept. 5-9.
Christie’s worked previously with Allen’s estate for a November 2022 auction of 155 pieces from Allen’s art collection. It was the world’s most successful single-owner fine art auction ever, raising a record $1.62 billion.
Allen’s estate, led by his sister Jody Allen, has been divesting a variety of his projects and investments since his death in 2018, including Seattle’s Cinerama movie theater, the Everett, Wash.-based Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum, Vulcan Productions, Stratolaunch, the superyacht Octopus, and other assets.
