I was lucky enough to visit the museum at the end of 2019, just before COVID-19 hit and the museum had to shut down. Unlike the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the machines here were fully operational and you could actually get to use them - I compiled some hello world code on a NeXTcube and I still remember that fond moment. IIRC they had systems that you can SSH in and use, but seems like they've taken that down. Must be a recent thing since I remember they were operational a year or two ago.
The Mountain View museum is an expensive travesty. Another great "living" museum is the one next to Bletchley Park. You can program the Dekatron with paper tape and watch the base-10 memory cells changing as it runs.
The one next to Bletchley Park is The National Museum of Computing. It's a really great place and, IMHO, much more interesting than Bletchley Park itself.
Per the article, the parent company laid off all of the museum staff in mid-2020, so if they were working a year or two ago, they were doing so despite a lack of maintenance. Something probably broke at some point and there's no one left to fix it.
I managed to compile and run a hello world C program (it might've actually been B?) using ed on an old school Research Unix machine they had.
I also remember messing with the shell on an even older Unix machine that had an actual teletype printer terminal. And directly poking the VGA buffer on a C64 to do goofy things...
I only went once a while ago, when my family took a trip to Seattle, but that is one of my most treasured memories. It's a travesty that future generations of nerdy kids won't get that experience (and I'm sad that I likely won't get it again either).
It was the first and only time me and my brother saw a mainframe actually running. And hundreds of other early computers. Incredible place and such a shame.
