The Hamsterdome

Analytical Engine 1837

Charles Babbage · designed, never built · memory for 1,000 numbers of 40 digits

Babbage's design for a mechanical, general-purpose computer, first described in 1837. It had a "mill" to do arithmetic and a "store" for memory, could branch and loop, and was to be programmed with punched cards like the ones that controlled Jacquard looms. Ada Lovelace's notes on it include what's often called the first published program. It was never built, but from 1985 to 1991 London's Science Museum built his simpler Difference Engine No. 2 from his drawings, and it works.

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The Bombe 1940

Bletchley Park · about 7 feet wide · about a ton · around 200 built

Alan Turing designed it in 1939, building on the Polish "bomba," and Gordon Welchman improved it in 1940. Its rows of spinning drums each stood in for an Enigma rotor, searching for the day's Enigma settings so codebreakers could read German messages. The first one, "Victory," went into service in March 1940. Turing is also known for the Turing machine (1936), an imaginary machine that defines what any computer can compute.

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Zuse Z3 1941

Berlin · 22-bit floating point · about 5 Hz

Konrad Zuse's Z3, finished in Berlin on May 12, 1941, was the first working programmable computer. It calculated in binary with floating-point numbers and read its programs from punched 35mm movie film. The original was destroyed in an air raid in 1943. Zuse also designed Plankalkül, arguably the first high-level programming language.

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Colossus 1944

Bletchley Park · Mark 1: 1,600 valves · ten built by 1945

Designed by Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers to break the Lorenz cipher used by the German High Command, and regarded as the first programmable, electronic, digital computer. It read messages from a spinning loop of paper tape, and the improved Mark 2 first ran on June 1, 1944, just in time for D-Day. It was kept secret until the mid-1970s; a working rebuild runs at Bletchley Park today. (It's sometimes credited to Turing, but his machine was the Bombe.)

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Harvard Mark I 1944

51 feet long · about 9,445 pounds · 765,000 parts

Howard Aiken's room-length calculator, built by IBM and run for the U.S. Navy at Harvard. It read its instructions from punched paper tape, and a single division took about 15 seconds. Grace Hopper was one of its first programmers and wrote its manual, often called the first computer manual. One of its first jobs was a calculation for the Manhattan Project.

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ENIAC 1945

about 18,000 vacuum tubes · about 30 tons · 150 kW of power

The first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, built at the University of Pennsylvania to calculate artillery firing tables. Its panels stretched about 100 feet, and programming it meant rewiring plugboards and setting switches, which could take weeks. Its six original programmers were women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman.

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Manchester Baby 1948

University of Manchester · 32 words of memory · first ran June 21, 1948

The first computer to run a program stored in its own memory, which is how every computer has worked since. Its memory was a Williams tube: 32 words held as dots of charge on the face of a CRT, so it had a screen before screens were normal. Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn built it to prove the tube worked, and Kilburn's 17-line first program took 52 minutes to find the highest factor of 262,144.

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UNIVAC I 1951

6,103 vacuum tubes · about 1,905 operations a second · mercury delay-line memory

Built by ENIAC's inventors, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, it was the first general-purpose electronic computer made for business in the U.S. The first one went to the Census Bureau in 1951, and Grace Hopper joined the team as a programmer. In 1952, CBS used one on election night, and from a small sample of votes it predicted Eisenhower's landslide.

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Whirlwind 1951

MIT · the first real-time computer · it invented core memory

Built at MIT for a flight simulator, Whirlwind answered right away while other computers ran batches overnight. Jay Forrester's team invented magnetic-core memory for it, the main memory of nearly every computer for the next twenty years, including half of this museum. Its descendants include the SAGE air-defense system and the TX-0, whose designers went on to build the PDP-1.

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DEC PDP-1 1959

18-bit words · 4096 words of core memory · about $120,000

DEC is the Digital Equipment Corporation, and PDP stands for Programmed Data Processor. In 1959, "computer" still sounded like something too big and expensive to buy. It wasn't small, though: it took up part of a room and cost about as much as a house. Early hackers at MIT took it over, and in 1962 Steve Russell and friends wrote Spacewar! on it, one of the first video games.

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Teletype Model 33 1963

Teletype Corporation · 10 characters per second · punched paper tape

The terminal, the part of a computer you actually touched. You typed, the computer typed back at ten characters a second, and programs were punched onto paper tape. The first BASIC programs at Dartmouth were written on Teletypes, Altair BASIC shipped on its paper tape, and Unix still calls every terminal a "tty," short for Teletype.

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IBM System/360 1964

IBM · announced April 7, 1964 · a $5 billion gamble

IBM bet the company on a family of compatible computers, small to large, that all ran the same programs. It worked, and it set standards we still live with, like the 8-bit byte. Writing its operating system taught Fred Brooks the lessons in The Mythical Man-Month, and its descendants still run banks and airlines today.

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DEC PDP-7 1964

18-bit · 4K words of core memory · about $72,000 · about 1,100 pounds

The machine where Unix began. In 1969 Ken Thompson wrote the first version, then called Unics, in assembly language on a PDP-7, partly so he could run his game Space Travel, which showed planets moving on a graphics display. Only about 120 PDP-7s and PDP-7As were sold. One of the few survivors was restored to running condition at Living Computers in Seattle.

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DEC PDP-10 1966

36-bit words · time-sharing · sold as the DECsystem-10

The big computer whole communities shared, logging in through terminals. MIT's AI lab, Stanford and many early ARPANET sites ran PDP-10s, and early email, Lisp hacking and Zork all grew up on them. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their BASIC for the Altair on a PDP-10 at Harvard, using a program that imitated the Altair's chip, before a real one ever ran it. Living Computers in Seattle kept a restored one running that anyone could log into over the internet.

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Apollo Guidance Computer 1966

16-bit words · 2,048 words of RAM · 36,864 words of rope memory

It flew astronauts to the Moon. Designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, it was the first computer made from silicon integrated circuits, almost all of them identical NOR gates. Its programs were woven into "core rope" memory by hand, a wire through or around each tiny magnetic ring for each 1 and 0. Astronauts talked to it by typing "verb" and "noun" number codes on the keypad pictured here, the DSKY.

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Imlac PDS-1 1969

vector display · 8 to 16 KB of core memory · light pen · $9,450

The first low-cost display that could draw interactive, moving graphics. Its screen drew with glowing lines instead of pixels, and a small computer inside its desk drove it. Mazewar, the first online multiplayer computer game, was made on a pair of PDS-1s. At Xerox PARC its graphics impressed people, but its text looked so rough that Chuck Thacker went on to build the Xerox Alto. (Imlac isn't an acronym: it's the name of a poet in a Samuel Johnson novel.)

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DEC PDP-11 1970

16-bit · Digital Equipment Corporation · about 600,000 sold

One of the most popular minicomputers ever, and the home of Unix and C. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie first wrote Unix in assembly language for an older PDP-7, then moved it to the PDP-11 in 1970. Ritchie created C there between 1972 and 1973, and in 1973 Unix was rewritten in C, which let it move to other computers. The famous "hello, world" program comes from his 1978 book with Brian Kernighan.

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Cray-1 1976

80 MHz · 64-bit words · 8 MB of RAM · about 160 MFLOPS

Seymour Cray's supercomputer, and the first to make "vector" processing work, doing the same math on long lists of numbers at once. Serial number 001 went to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. The C-shaped tower kept its wires short for speed, it was cooled with Freon, and the ring of benches around the base hid the power supplies. It cost about $8 million.

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Kenbak-1 1971

8-bit · 256 bytes of memory · $750

Often called the first personal computer, including by the Computer History Museum and the museum in Bozeman. John Blankenbaker designed it in 1970, before the microprocessor existed, so its processor is built from small logic chips. You programmed it in machine code with a row of buttons and read the results off a row of lights. Only about 50 were built, and 14 are known to survive.

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Altair 8800 1975

Intel 8080 · 2 MHz · 256 bytes of RAM to start

It had no keyboard and no screen. You programmed it by flipping the switches on the front panel and read the answer off the lights. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC for it on a PDP-10, Microsoft's first product, and MITS (the company that made the Altair) hired them to keep improving it. Allen became MITS's director of software, and decades later he founded the Living Computers Museum.

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Apple I 1976

MOS 6502 · 1 MHz · 4 KB of RAM · $666.66

Steve Wozniak's first computer and Apple's first product. It came as an assembled circuit board that plugged into a TV, but you supplied your own case, keyboard and power supply, so many ended up in homemade wooden boxes. About 200 were made. The price was $666.66 because Wozniak liked repeating digits.

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Apple II 1977

MOS 6502 · about 1 MHz · 4 KB of RAM to start

Designed by Steve Wozniak and sold from June 1977. Unlike most hobby computers it came in a friendly plastic case, with color graphics, sound and BASIC built in, and Apple's rainbow logo showed off that color. Expansion slots let owners add disk drives and more, the 1979 spreadsheet VisiCalc made it a business machine, and the family sold about 6 million over 16 years.

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Commodore PET 1977

MOS 6502 · 1 MHz · 4 or 8 KB of RAM

Screen, keyboard and cassette deck, all in one angular case. Commodore owned MOS Technology, the company that made the 6502, so it was a 6502 machine from the start.

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TRS-80 Model I 1977

Zilog Z80 · about 1.8 MHz · 4 KB of RAM

Sold in Radio Shack stores across the country for $600, which put computers within reach of a lot of people. Fans called it the "Trash-80."

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Commodore VIC-20 1980

MOS 6502 · about 1 MHz · 5 KB of RAM · $299.95

Commodore's low-cost color computer, and the first computer of any kind to sell a million units. It was the first computer sold at Kmart, and William Shatner starred in its ads asking "Why buy just a video game?" Its screen showed just 22 columns of text.

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Osborne 1 1981

24.5 pounds · 5-inch screen · $1,795

The first commercially successful portable computer, designed by Lee Felsenstein. It had no battery, but the keyboard closed up as a lid and it had a handle, so you could carry it like a sewing machine. It came with almost as much software as the computer was worth. When the company announced better models too early, people stopped buying this one, which is now called the "Osborne effect."

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BBC Micro 1981

MOS 6502 · 2 MHz · 16 or 32 KB of RAM

Made by Acorn, a computer company in Cambridge, England, for a BBC computer literacy project and used in schools all over the UK, alongside the BBC's television series The Computer Programme. Acorn went on to design the ARM processor, which is now inside almost every phone.

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IBM PC 5150 1981

Intel 8088 · 4.77 MHz · 16 KB of RAM to start

Built from off-the-shelf parts with a published design, so other companies could make "IBM compatible" clones. Most PCs today are its distant descendants.

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Commodore 64 1982

MOS 6510 · about 1 MHz · 64 KB of RAM

Nicknamed the "breadbin," and one of the best-selling computers ever. Musicians still compose for its SID sound chip today. If you want to try programming one, I wrote a C64 BASIC tutorial.

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ZX Spectrum 1982

Zilog Z80A · 3.5 MHz · 16 or 48 KB of RAM

Known for its rubber keys and rainbow stripe. Games loaded from cassette tapes, with the screen border flashing while they loaded.

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Xerox Alto 1973

Xerox PARC · portrait screen · three-button mouse · about 2,000 built

It had a mouse, windows, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor and Ethernet, about a decade before the Mac. Its screen was tall like a sheet of paper. Xerox never sold it widely, but in 1979 Steve Jobs and Apple's engineers got demos at PARC and took the ideas into the Lisa and the Macintosh. The emulator linked here started at the Living Computers museum.

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Apple Lisa 1983

Motorola 68000 · 5 MHz · 1 MB of RAM · $9,995

The first mass-market computer you used with windows, icons and a mouse, a year before the Mac. Apple said the name stood for "Local Integrated Software Architecture," but Steve Jobs's daughter is also named Lisa. At $9,995 it was a commercial flop, but its ideas lived on in the Macintosh. A pre-fame Kevin Costner starred in its television ad.

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Macintosh 128K 1984

Motorola 68000 · about 8 MHz · 128 KB of RAM

The machine that brought the mouse and windows-and-icons to a wide audience. It greeted you with a smiling Mac every time it booted. Apple announced it with the "1984" TV commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, which aired nationally just once: during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984.

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Amiga 500 1987

Motorola 68000 · about 7 MHz · 512 KB of RAM

Custom graphics and sound chips gave it colors and music other home computers couldn't match, and it could multitask. It was popular with game makers, musicians and the demoscene. Commodore put Buzz Aldrin in one of its ads.

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NeXT Computer 1988

25 MHz · $6,500 · a 256 MB magneto-optical drive

Built by NeXT, the company Steve Jobs started after leaving Apple, and housed in a one-foot black magnesium cube. Tim Berners-Lee used one at CERN to write the first web browser and web server, and id Software made Doom on NeXT machines. Apple agreed to buy NeXT at the end of 1996, and its software became the basis of Mac OS X.

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Gateway 2000 1992

sold by phone and mail · shipped in cow-spotted boxes

Ted Waitt started Gateway 2000 in 1985 on his family's Iowa cattle farm, selling PCs by phone and mail with no stores at all. The herd inspired the look: every Gateway arrived in a white box with Holstein cow spots. By the mid-90s it was one of the biggest PC makers in America. A 1992 Gateway was typically an Intel 486 running MS-DOS with Windows 3.1 on top, the setup that made it many families' first computer.

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IBM ThinkPad 701C 1995

IBM · TrackWrite "butterfly" keyboard · in MoMA's collection

A laptop narrower than its own keyboard: open the lid and John Karidis's TrackWrite mechanism unfolds the keyboard in two sliding halves, wider than the machine (hover to watch). Richard Sapper styled the ThinkPad line after a black bento box, and the red TrackPoint nub in the middle became its trademark. Bigger screens arrived the next year, so the butterfly keyboard was never needed again.

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iMac G3 1998

233 MHz · 32 MB of RAM · Bondi blue

Apple's first big product after Steve Jobs came back (Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, and he took over the next year). It was unveiled with "hello (again)" on its screen, a nod to the original Mac. Jony Ive's team gave it a see-through teardrop case in Bondi blue, a color taken from a piece of beach glass, and it dropped the floppy drive for USB and a CD-ROM. In 1999 the colors came: blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape and lime (hover over it or tap it to see some). The ads simply said “say hello to iMac.”

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Compaq Presario 5000 2000

Celeron to Pentium 4, or AMD Duron to Athlon · mini-tower · six faceplate colors

Compaq's budget home PC for the new millennium, with a curvy tower and removable see-through faceplates in the iMac's "jelly" spirit. The standard color was Smokey Quartz, and accent kits came in purple, green, orange, red and blue (hover over it or tap it to try them on). It shipped with Windows 98, then Me, then XP.

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Magnavox Odyssey 1972

black and white · no sound · no score · about 350,000 sold

The first home video game console, designed by a team led by Ralph Baer. It could only draw three square dots and a line, so games came with plastic overlays you stuck on the TV screen, plus dice and paper money. Its ping-pong game inspired Atari's Pong, and Atari later paid $1.5 million to settle with Magnavox. Its 1972 ad had to explain the whole idea of playing a game on your television.

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Pong 1972

Atari · coin-operated arcade game · black-and-white TV

Atari's first game. Nolan Bushnell gave it to engineer Allan Alcorn as a training exercise, based on the Magnavox Odyssey's ping-pong game, and the prototype was built from a $75 black-and-white TV in a wooden cabinet. They tested it in August 1972 at a local bar, Andy Capp's Tavern. It became the first commercially successful video game.

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Atari 2600 1977

MOS 6507 · about 1.2 MHz · 128 bytes of RAM

That's 128 bytes, not kilobytes. With no room to store a picture, games had to draw the screen one line at a time as the TV's beam swept across, which programmers called "racing the beam."

It came with Combat, and a home Space Invaders (1980) was its first must-have. Adventure (1980) hid the first famous video game Easter egg. Then came E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), made in five weeks to hit Christmas and often called one of the worst games ever. It helped cause the 1983 crash, and truckloads of unsold cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill. For years Atari's ads had asked: “have you played Atari today?”

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Intellivision 1979

Mattel · about 0.9 MHz · $299

Mattel's challenger to the Atari 2600, with better graphics and a 16-bit processor. The writer George Plimpton starred in its ads, which showed the two consoles side by side. This was the first console war, a decade before Sega vs. Nintendo. The controller had a 16-direction disc and a keypad you slid game overlays onto. About 3 million sold.

That processor has an odd pedigree: General Instrument's CP1610 was modeled on DEC's PDP-11, so the Intellivision is the only console here running something close to a minicomputer's instruction set. See it on the processor timeline.

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ColecoVision 1982

Z80A · 3.58 MHz · came with Donkey Kong

Coleco's pitch was arcade games at home, and it came bundled with Nintendo's Donkey Kong. An add-on even let it play Atari 2600 cartridges. It sold about 2 million in its first year and was winning the graphics race, but the 1983 crash ended it.

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NES 1983

Ricoh 2A03 (a 6502 core) · about 1.8 MHz · 2 KB of RAM

Launched as the Famicom in Japan in 1983, then as the NES in North America. Its processor is a 6502 with the sound hardware built onto the same chip.

It arrived right after the crash and brought home games back. Super Mario Bros. (1985) made Mario a star (he debuted as "Jumpman" in the arcade game Donkey Kong), and The Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Final Fantasy all started here. Its ads promised that “now you're playing with power.” Nintendo sold almost 62 million.

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Sega Master System 1986

Sega · Z80A · 8-bit · the NES's rival

The other side of the first console war. Technically stronger than the NES, but Nintendo had most game makers locked up, so it never caught on in Japan or America. It sold well in much of Europe, and in Brazil, where Tectoy kept making them for decades, it never really went away. Sega's ads insisted “now there are no limits.”

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Sega Genesis 1988

68000 at about 7.6 MHz · 64 KB of RAM · 64 KB of video RAM

Called the Mega Drive everywhere but North America. It uses the same processor as the first Macintosh, with a Z80 to run the sound.

Sega sold it as the cooler console, with the slogan "Genesis does what Nintendon't" and a made-up feature called "blast processing." Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) became its mascot, its fight with the Super Nintendo became the "console war," and arguments over Mortal Kombat's blood led to the game ratings we still use. Sega sold about 30.75 million.

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Game Boy 1989

Sharp LR35902 · about 4 MHz · 8 KB of RAM

Four shades of green on a screen with no backlight, but the batteries lasted for ages. The screen was so dim that its own ads could barely film it being played.

Designed by Gunpei Yokoi's team, it came bundled with Tetris, which got everyone playing. Pokémon started here in 1996, inspired by creator Satoshi Tajiri's childhood bug collecting and the link cable that let you trade. With the Game Boy Color, it sold about 119 million.

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Super Nintendo 1990

Ricoh 5A22 · 3.58 MHz · Mode 7 graphics

Nintendo's 16-bit answer to the Genesis, launched with Super Mario World. Its processor is a 16-bit relative of the 6502, and its Mode 7 graphics could rotate and scale a background to fake 3D.

Its library is often called the best of any console: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger. Some cartridges carried extra chips, like the Super FX, to help draw 3D graphics. Its “Play It Loud” ads went after teenagers. Nintendo sold 49.1 million.

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PlayStation 1994

about 33.9 MHz · 2 MB of RAM · 1 MB of video RAM · CD-ROM

It grew out of a CD add-on Sony was building for the Super Nintendo, a deal that fell apart. Sony went ahead on its own.

CDs held far more than cartridges, and that won it big games: Square moved Final Fantasy VII (1997) over from Nintendo largely for the CD-ROM. With Crash Bandicoot, Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid, it became the first console to sell 100 million. Sony even filmed a man in a Crash Bandicoot suit taunting Nintendo's headquarters.

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Nintendo 64 1996

NEC VR4300 · 93.75 MHz · 4 MB of RAM (8 MB with the Expansion Pak)

A 64-bit processor, with graphics chips designed by Silicon Graphics, whose workstations were used for movie effects. It stuck with cartridges while other consoles moved to discs.

Its controller was the first with a thumbstick as standard, and four ports made it a party machine. Super Mario 64 brought Mario into 3D, and GoldenEye 007 and Ocarina of Time are still called some of the best games ever made. “Get N or get out,” said the ads. Nintendo sold about 33 million.

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Dreamcast 1998

Hitachi SH-4 · 200 MHz · 16 MB of RAM · PowerVR2 graphics

Sega's last console, and the first with a built-in modem, so you could play online in 1999. The memory card in its controller had its own small screen.

Its games were full of new ideas: Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and the online Phantasy Star Online. But sales fell short, and in 2001 Sega left the console business after about 9 million, switching to making games for other companies' machines. Its ads said only: “It's thinking.”

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PlayStation 2 2000

Sony · 294 MHz · a DVD player included · about 155 million sold

The best-selling console of all time. It arrived just as DVDs did and doubled as the cheapest DVD player around, so families bought it for movies and stayed for the games, more than 4,000 of them. Its launch finished off the Dreamcast, and Sony kept building it until 2013. For the launch ad Sony hired David Lynch, who made a strange, dreamlike minute of film.

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HP-35 1972

Hewlett-Packard · $395 · 35 keys, hence the name

The first pocket scientific calculator, and the end of the slide rule: within a few years, engineering schools had switched over completely. The story goes that Bill Hewlett insisted it fit his shirt pocket. It did trig and logarithms in reverse Polish notation: you typed the numbers first and the operation last, so 2 + 3 was "2, enter, 3, plus" and there was no equals key at all.

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Apple Newton MessagePad 1993

Apple · released August 2, 1993 · $699

One of the first PDAs: Apple CEO John Sculley coined “personal digital assistant” for it. You wrote on the screen with a stylus and it turned handwriting into text, though not reliably: Doonesbury made fun of it for a week, and on The Simpsons it turned “Beat up Martin” into “Eat up Martha.”

Its ARM processor came from Acorn, the company behind the BBC Micro, with Apple's investment. Steve Jobs canceled the Newton when he returned in 1998.

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Palm Pilot 1996

Palm Computing · March 1996 · Motorola 68328 at 16 MHz · 128 KB (Pilot 1000) or 512 KB (Pilot 5000)

Before Palm built it, co-founder Jeff Hawkins carried a block of wood the size of the Pilot in his pocket for a week. Instead of trying to read ordinary handwriting like the Newton, it used Graffiti, a simple alphabet where each letter is a single stroke.

It was cheap and easy to use, and it sold well enough to start a market for handheld computers where the Newton had struggled.

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BlackBerry 850 1999

Research In Motion · Waterloo, Ontario · released January 19, 1999 · an email pager

The first device with the BlackBerry name was a two-way pager for email, with a tiny thumb keyboard. BlackBerry pioneered push notifications, where new messages arrive on their own, and made the QWERTY keyboard a mobile standard.

The first BlackBerry phone, the 5810, came out in 2002. By 2005 they were so popular and so addictive that people called them “CrackBerries,” and President Obama was known for depending on his.

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Nokia 3310 2000

Nokia · 84×48 monochrome screen · about 126 million sold

Nokia's hit of 2000, with a week of standby battery, snap-on covers in every color, and Snake II (playing on its screen here). You could compose your own ringtones note by note. About 126 million were sold, and it lives on as a joke about phones that survive any drop.

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iPod 2001

Apple · October 23, 2001 · 5 GB · 1,000 songs in your pocket

Apple's first pocket-sized hit, built in under a year around a 1.8-inch hard drive nobody else had a use for yet. Five gigabytes held about a thousand songs, and FireWire filled it in minutes when rivals took hours. Its scroll wheel physically spun under your thumb, and at the reveal Steve Jobs's whole pitch was pulling one out of his jeans pocket. It carried Apple from the iMac era to the iPhone that replaced it. Its first ad was a man dancing around his room to the Propellerheads.

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iPhone 2007

Apple · released June 29, 2007 · 412 MHz · $499 (4 GB)

It wasn't the first smartphone (IBM's Simon, from 1994, is often called that), but it changed what a phone looked like. Steve Jobs introduced it as three devices in one, “a widescreen iPod with touch controls,” “a revolutionary mobile phone” and “a breakthrough Internet communicator,” and it dropped the physical keyboard for a multi-touch screen you used with your fingers.

Apps came the next year, with the App Store in 2008. They were written in Objective-C, and later in Swift.

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T-Mobile G1 2008

HTC Dream, made by HTC for T-Mobile · October 2008 · Qualcomm MSM7201A at 528 MHz · 192 MB of RAM · $179 with a contract

The first phone to run Android, the Linux-based system from Andy Rubin's startup, which Google bought in 2005. It had a touchscreen, a trackball, and a keyboard that slid out from under the screen.

Android apps were written in Java, and since 2019 Google has preferred Kotlin. Today Android is the most widely used operating system in the world.

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Unix V6 1975

Bell Labs · released May 1975 · also called Sixth Edition Unix

The first version of Unix to spread widely outside Bell Labs, running on the PDP-11. John Lions wrote a famous commentary on its source code, UC Berkeley's add-ons for it grew into BSD, and its kernel holds the most famous comment in software: “You are not expected to understand this.”

To try it, log in as ken or dmr (the password is the name), then follow my field guide.

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Windows 95 1995

Microsoft · released August 24, 1995 · 8 MB of RAM recommended

It introduced the Start button, the taskbar and the Start menu, which are still around today. Its launch ad used the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up," and it sold a million copies in its first four days. Its startup sound, "The Microsoft Sound," was composed by the musician Brian Eno. Microsoft asked for a piece just 3¼ seconds long, and he made 84 of them before picking one.

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Mac OS 8.1 1998

Apple · released January 19, 1998

Mac OS 8 brought the gray, 3D-looking "Platinum" style, built from pieces of Copland, a next-generation system Apple had abandoned. Version 8.1 added the HFS+ file system, and it was the last Mac OS that could still run on the older 68k Macs.

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