This place is amazing, not just for the impressive array of early telephone and communications systems assembled here, but for the fact that a lot of it actually works. The volunteer staff at the Museum of Communications, formerly the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum, leads tours of the facility and can also be seen restoring and maintaining the equipment.
It may look like a charming rambler, tucked away in a Bellevue neighborhood. But there’s something a little different about this house: the world’s largest online retailer was born here. That’s right: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, originally called Cadabra, in the house’s converted garage while renting it in the mid-1990s.
For many years, Microsoft placed plaques in the sidewalk for nearly every piece of software it developed. Taken as a whole, the hundreds of markers tell the story of the company’s rise to the top of the software industry in the 1980s and 1990s. It features plaques not only for hits (MS-DOS, Windows 95) but also flops (Microsoft Bob).
It’s not exactly the Smithsonian in scale, but the customer service center at the Japanese video-game giant’s North American headquarters features a small museum of classic Nintendo consoles, games and memorabilia.
This swanky office and warehouse felt the tech boom and bust like no other property in the region, as the former home not only of HomeGrocer but also, at different points, of ShareBuilder and Craig McCaw’s Teledesic — which oversaw an upscale remodel of the interior, adding a huge mezzanine space and high-end amenities.
The birthplace of Seattle’s wireless industry, Carillon Point is an office and commercial complex with incredible views across Lake Washington. No wonder Craig McCaw chose it as the headquarters of McCaw Cellular, which later became AT&T Wireless.
Grab a latte, score a venture capital deal? You might just have that luck if you pop into the Starbucks in Seattle’s tony Madison Park neighborhood. The late Keith Grinstein of Second Avenue Partners hung out there so much that some in the venture community simply called it “Keith’s office.”
It may not look like much nowadays, but this device was a breakthrough in telecommunications in its day. The wireless telephone, on display at Seattle’s Museum Of History & Industry, was produced by inventor William Dubilier in 1910. It’s a follow-up to a similar device shown by Dubilier at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909.
This was the UW computer center, then known as Roberts Hall Annex, 40 years ago when two kids named Paul Allen and Bill Gates hung out here, honing their programming skills using punched cards on a CDC 6400 and a Burroughs 5500.
Gates and Allen used many UW computers, across the campus, but the projects ... - Read full post
This dorm was at the forefront a social media revolution. Brad Fitzpatrick was a University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering student in 1999 when he developed the pioneering LiveJournal blogging service, working primarily in this building, Mercer Hall East.
Via email recently, Fitzpatrick confirmed the location for us, saying he didn’t remember the room number, ... - Read full post
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