Associative memory on a Commodore 64
John Walker’s 1987 neural-network associative memory program in BASIC, with a recorded demonstration and original source reference.
ATX Computer Museum
Search the museum
Search exhibitions, machines, software, and catalog entries.
AI demonstrations
Historical demonstrations of associative memory and rule-based conversation.
Catalog
Search the museum’s machines, components, peripherals, and collection records.
Dr. Sbaitso
Creative Labs’ Dr. Sbaitso 2.20: a historical rule-based conversation and speech-synthesis demonstration.
Contact the museum
Send an enquiry or contribute information to ATX Computer Museum.
Continuing the Sirius Legacy
Interactive hardware-level emulation of the Sirius handheld computer and AlephOS 2.0 operating system, with technical analysis of 1-bit low-resolution display challenges.
Exhibitions
Explore six collection exhibitions: Turok development workstations, networks before the web, SGI systems, the SOL-20, Sirius, and the Spielberg Indigo.
Films and talks
Four excerpts from Amir Husain’s UT Austin and Talks at Google recordings, with source times, controls, and written notes.
Our story
The story of ATX Computer Museum in Florence, Texas: its collection, software, and visiting plans.
How Sirius Worked
Hardware architecture, tri-controller 8051 pipeline at 40 MHz, dual KS0108 LCD interface, and PCB schematics of the Sirius handheld computer.
Workstations, software, and the people who used them.
ATX Computer Museum in Florence, Central Texas. Computers, software, and records of their use. Public opening planned for February 2027.
Silicon Graphics Fuel
A later SGI desktop workstation running IRIX.
Silicon Graphics O2
A compact MIPS workstation running IRIX.
Silicon Graphics Octane
An IRIX workstation with a modular tower enclosure.
Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park Indigo
Silicon Graphics presented this Indigo Elan to Steven Spielberg during the production of Jurassic Park.
Cobalt Qube
A compact server appliance with an integrated network interface.
Apple IIgs
An Apple II system with enhanced graphics and sound.
SGI Indigo² IMPACT 10000
MIPS R10000 processor family; IMPACT graphics.
Apple iBook G3
A portable Macintosh with a translucent enclosure.
PDP-11/70 Replica Front Panel
A working replica front panel for a PDP-11/70 computer.
Atari 800XL
An Atari 8-bit home computer.
IBM Personal Computer 5150
The original IBM PC model.
Macintosh Classic II and Color Classic
Two generations of the compact Macintosh.
BeBox
A Be development workstation with two PowerPC processors and surviving BeOS source files.
Commodore CBM 8032
An integrated Commodore business computer.
NeXTcube miniature
A modern Raspberry Pi enclosure modeled on the NeXTcube.
NeXTstation
A flat desktop workstation running NeXTSTEP.
NeXTcube
A Motorola 68040 workstation running NeXTSTEP.
Sun Blade 100
A later Sun desktop workstation.
Sun SPARCclassic
A compact SPARC desktop workstation.
Apple Lisa 2/5
A graphical office computer with a mouse-driven interface.
Atari 1040ST
A 68000-based computer with an SC1224 color monitor.
Commodore 64
An 8-bit home computer with dedicated sound and graphics chips.
HP 9000 Series 200
An integrated HP technical computer.
HP 9000 Series 300
An HP technical workstation family based on Motorola processors.
HP data terminal
A keyboard and display for interacting with a host computer.
IBM POWERstation 320
An IBM RISC System/6000 workstation built around AIX.
IBM PS/2 portable
A transportable PS/2 system, recorded as P70 class.
LHC data tape souvenir
A tape souvenir associated with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Osborne 1
A transportable CP/M computer with an integrated display.
Kaypro
A Kaypro portable CP/M computer with twin floppy drives and a built-in CRT.
Apple Power Mac G4 Cube
A compact PowerPC G4 computer in Apple’s distinctive clear enclosure.
Silicon Graphics Indy
A compact MIPS workstation running IRIX.
IRIS Indigo
An earlier SGI desktop graphics workstation.
SGI Visual Workstation 320
An Intel-based SGI system running Windows NT.
Browse the machines
Browse the photographed machines by collection group, with links to individual records.
3Com Audrey
3Com built the Audrey for a moment that never arrived: the idea that households would want a cheap, fixed-function internet terminal on the counter, separate from the family computer.
Amiga 500
The Amiga 500 of 1987 was the cost-reduced Amiga, and a widely used model.
Apple Color CRT, IIGS
The IIGS could produce 4096 colours and needed a display that could show them.
Apple Dot Matrix Printer
Apple sold dot matrix printers for the Apple II and the early Macintosh, and they are what documents looked like before 1985.
Apple G4 white flat panel display
Apple moved its professional displays to flat panels early and priced them accordingly.
Apple iBook G3 clamshell
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Apple II GS
The IIGS of 1986 kept compatibility with the Apple II library while moving to a 16-bit 65C816, adding 4096 colours and an Ensoniq wavetable chip that gave it better audio than any Macintosh of the period.
Apple IIe
The IIe of 1983 took the Apple II design, cut the chip count, and added lower case, 80 columns and a proper keyboard.
Apple iMac, white all-in-one
By the middle of the 2000s Apple had moved the iMac from translucent plastic to a white slab holding a flat panel, and then to the design where the whole computer hides behind the screen.
Apple Lisa
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Apple Monitor III
The Monitor III was Apple's 12-inch monochrome display for the Apple III, a machine whose own reputation was ruined by early reliability problems severe enough that Apple replaced the entire first production run.
Apple PowerBook G3, white
After the tangerine clamshell catalogued elsewhere here, Apple's consumer portable became a plain white polycarbonate slab: no handle, no colours, a shape that lasted through the iBook G4 and set the pattern for the plastic MacBook.
Apple RGB CRT monitor
When the Macintosh II gave the Mac colour and expansion slots in 1987, it needed a colour display to go with it.
AT&T PC 6300
AT&T needed a PC to sell into the business market and did not build one.
Atari 1040ST CRT monitor
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Atari 65XE
The 65XE of 1985 is the same 8-bit architecture as the 800XL catalogued elsewhere here, in the wedge-shaped case Atari adopted after Jack Tramiel took the company over and lined its products up with the new ST.
Atari Megafile 30 MB
The Megafile connected through the ST's DMA port and gave the machine a hard disk in a case styled to sit under the monitor with the rest of the system.
Atom mini PC ×6
Intel's Atom line put x86 into thermal envelopes that had previously belonged to embedded processors, which produced a wave of tiny fanless desktops used as thin clients, kiosks and home servers.
BeBox 133 MHz
A BeBox Dual603-133 development workstation with surviving BeOS source files.
BeBox ×6
A BeBox Dual603-133 development workstation with surviving BeOS source files.
C64, FPGA-based Commodore 64 remake
An FPGA recreation implements the original chips as logic, cycle by cycle, instead of imitating their behaviour in software.
Cingular 8525 (JasJam)
The 8525 was an HTC design sold by Cingular in the United States and under half a dozen other names elsewhere.
ClearCube iPort Clientron E830
ClearCube's system split the PC in half.
ClearCube P3 Trinity blades and cage
Each blade is a complete PC, and the cage holds several of them with shared power and cooling.
Commodore 1084 CRT monitor
The 1084 accepted composite, RGB and separate luma and chroma, which meant it could be driven properly by an Amiga, a Commodore 64 and a good deal else besides.
Commodore 1084S CRT monitor
The S revision added stereo speakers, which mattered because the Amiga had four channels of sampled audio and most monitors could only give you one.
Commodore CBM PET dual floppy system
Commodore's disk drives were computers in their own right.
Commodore CRT monitor
Commodore sold monitors across its whole range so that buyers were not dependent on a spare television.
Commodore PC 10
The PC 10 is an 8088 machine running MS-DOS, sold mainly in Europe from the mid 1980s.
Commodore PET
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Compaq colour Windows 98 laptop
By the late 1990s the laptop had settled into the shape it still has: colour TFT, a trackpad, a CD drive in a bay, and a battery that lasted rather less than the marketing said.
Compaq iPaq thin client
Compaq's iPaq desktop of 2000 dropped the serial, parallel and PS/2 connectors for USB alone, in a small vertical case aimed at corporate deployments and thin-client use.
Compaq Portable
Compaq's 1983 luggable was a full IBM PC compatible in a sewing-machine case.
Dell Inspiron 7500
The Inspiron 7500 was large, heavy and fast, built for people who wanted one machine rather than a laptop and a desktop.
Gateway 2000 4DX250
Gateway sold direct from South Dakota, shipped in boxes printed like Holstein hide, and undercut the retail channel by cutting the channel out.
Handspring Visor
Handspring was founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who had created the Palm Pilot and left after Palm was sold.
HP Core 2 Duo PC
By the time Intel's Core 2 Duo arrived in 2006, the distinction this museum is built on had closed.
HP Pavilion 630 Celeron
This example is included because of its installed software.
IBM PC 5150
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
IBM PCjr
The PCjr of 1984 had better graphics and sound than the IBM PC and was crippled everywhere else: a rubber chiclet keyboard that typists hated, limited memory expansion, and incompatibilities with the PC software people bought it to run.
IBM Portable
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
IBM PS/2 Tower
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
IBM ThinkPad ×8
The ThinkPad was designed around a Japanese lunch box, given a matte black case, a keyboard that engineers trusted and the TrackPoint that people either loved or ignored.
Intel NUC
Intel's Next Unit of Computing reference design put a complete PC, with modern I/O and enough performance for real work, into a chassis roughly the size of a drinks coaster.
Mac mini
The 2005 Mac mini asked people who already owned a monitor and a keyboard to buy the computer alone.
Macintosh Classic II
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Macintosh Color Classic ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Macintosh Plus
The 1986 Macintosh Plus fixed what the 1984 Macintosh got wrong.
Mechanical keyboards
Buckling spring and mechanical switch keyboards were simply what a serious computer came with.
Misc. peripherals
SGI and Sun keyboards, embedded boards, spare SGI graphics cards and motherboards.
Newcom CRT display
Supporting equipment keeps the collection usable.
NeXT CRT display ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
NeXTcube CRT display
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
NeXTstation ×3
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
NeXTstation Turbo Color
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Osborne ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Palm Tungsten E2
The Tungsten E2 of 2005 had a colour screen, Bluetooth and non-volatile memory, so a flat battery no longer meant losing everything on the device.
PC, AGP graphics class ×2
The Accelerated Graphics Port gave the graphics card a dedicated path to main memory, and with it the PC gained the one capability that had most clearly belonged to SGI.
PC, Core 2 Duo class
Held as a reference for the systems around it.
PC, Pentium 4 single-core class
The Pentium 4 was built around a long pipeline and very high clock speeds, an approach that ran into heat and stopped scaling.
Power Mac tower, blue
The blue Power Mac G4 tower in the collection.
Power Mac tower, silver
The silver Power Mac G4 tower in the collection.
SGI 1600SW flat panel ×2
The 1600SW ran 1600 by 1024 in a 16:10 widescreen shape at a time when everyone else was selling 4:3 CRTs, and it used SGI's own digital connection rather than analogue VGA.
SGI Fuel
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo² ×8
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo Elan
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo² Teal ×5
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indy ×17
Seventeen SGI Indy workstations held for restoration and a future hands-on teaching lab.
SGI Indy
A working SGI Indy and the wider Indy group preserved for the stories of IRIX, Turok, and a future teaching lab.
SGI O2 ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Octane ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Octane II
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Origin 300
The Origin line applied SGI's NUMAlink interconnect to servers rather than workstations, letting many processors share memory across a single system image.
Sun CRT display
Sun's displays ran at resolutions and refresh rates that PC monitors of the same years could not manage, on Sun's own 13W3 connector, which is why they were sold as part of the system rather than separately.
Sun Fire V100
The V100 of 2002 put an UltraSPARC IIi and Solaris into a single rack unit at a price meant to compete with x86 servers rather than with other Unix machines.
Sun SPARCstation 10
The SPARCstation 10 of 1992 took Sun's flat desktop form and made it capable of holding more than one processor module, so a department could buy compute a piece at a time.
Tandy 100
The Model 100 of 1983 ran for weeks on four AA cells, started instantly because its software was in ROM, had a full-size keyboard and a built-in modem, and weighed under four pounds.
Tandy TRS-80
The TRS-80 Model I arrived in 1977 alongside the Apple II and the Commodore PET, and it outsold both at first because Tandy could put it in front of people in thousands of Radio Shack stores.
Toshiba Libretto 300
The Libretto line squeezed a complete x86 PC, running real Windows rather than a cut-down system, into a machine about the size of a paperback with a keyboard you could just about touch-type on.
Toshiba Satellite 1910
The Satellite line was Toshiba's volume laptop through the 1990s, and the company was for a period the largest laptop maker in the world.
TRENDnet 16-port KVM switch
A KVM switch is the piece of infrastructure that makes a collection like this usable.
ViewSonic 1600-resolution display
ViewSonic sold into the professional market at prices well below Apple and SGI, and machines like this are what most people actually put on their desks once CRTs went.
ViewSonic television
The Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bits and most home computers of that generation were designed to plug into the family television, and that is how nearly everyone used them.
ViewSonic widescreen 1600-resolution display
Within a few years of the SGI 1600SW the whole market moved to widescreen, and it stopped being a professional feature and became simply what a monitor was.
Vortex86 industrial embedded system ×3
The Vortex86 line puts an x86-compatible core into low-power embedded hardware, which matters when a factory or a piece of instrumentation depends on software nobody can port and nobody dares touch.
Xbox 360 ×2
The 360 of 2005 had a triple-core PowerPC processor and a custom ATI graphics part with unified shaders, which arrived on the console before it reached PC graphics cards.
Xbox
The original Xbox of 2001 was, in hardware terms, a small PC.
Networks Before the Web
A sourced exhibition on EduNET, UNDP’s SDNP, offline UUCP access, and Interflex in 1990s Pakistan.
Preserving the experience
Original and reconstructed software, working copies, machine condition, and the museum’s documentation approach.
Privacy and accessibility
How the museum handles form submissions and opening updates, and how to request accessible information.
Recent computer gallery
Computer photographs added to the collection intake in the last 70 minutes.
Research and contributions
Contribute firsthand recollections, technical identifications, photographs, and corrections to the museum records.
Working with SGI
SGI workstations, IRIX desktops, collection photographs, and notes on recording installed hardware and operating environments.
Serious Machines
Serious Machines by Amir Husain, AM Press 2024. Book information, contents, and publisher contact.
Sirius
The Sirius handheld, its AlephOS software, contemporary Urdu coverage, and recorded accession information.
Three-dimensional projection
An integer-coordinate projection experiment in QBASIC.
3D rotation engine
A 110-line QBASIC rotation program.
Arabian Nights
A QuickBASIC bulletin board system.
Assembly text editor
A DOS editor that writes directly to video memory.
Cricket
A two-player cricket game written in BASIC.
Distributed Learning Environment
Separate DOS programs for authoring and reading illustrated lessons.
Interflex 1.5
A graphical client for requesting and reading material over UUCP.
Lift World
A fuzzy-logic lift scheduler with simulated passengers.
MegaFONT
A typeface described by BASIC drawing instructions.
MegaMagic
A graphical DOS shell with an icon editor and memory monitor.
Perl HTTP server
A small HTTP server implemented with sockets in Perl 4.
QUERY / A.M.I.R
A command-driven database interpreter for DOS.
RipServer
A server for graphical RIPscrip terminals.
Shooter
A targeting experiment using fuzzy rules and shot feedback.
Assembly sprite animator
A keypad-driven animator using ASCII sprite files.
Tex-Win
A desktop and editor built from DOS text-mode characters.
Software I wrote
Programs written by Amir Husain in the 1990s: networking clients, graphical shells, educational software, games, and programming tools.
Paul Allen's SOL-20
The provenance of a Processor Technology SOL-20 from Paul Allen's collection, previously displayed at Living Computers in Seattle.
Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park Indigo
The inscribed SGI Indigo Elan presented by Silicon Graphics to Steven Spielberg during the production of Jurassic Park, with its handover photograph and object record.
Tech Greats of Austin
James Truchard, Michael Dell, Richard Garriott, and Bob Metcalfe: people, ideas, and artifacts from Austin’s computing history.
Turok: the development workstations
The discovery and 2017 sale of Turok-related SGI Indy systems, their acquisition by Amir Husain, and plans for their first public display.
Visit ATX Computer Museum
ATX Computer Museum, 166 Novi Rd, Florence, Texas. Opening plans, directions, visitor enquiries, and opening updates.
3Com Audrey
3Com built the Audrey for a moment that never arrived: the idea that households would want a cheap, fixed-function internet terminal on the counter, separate from the family computer.
Amiga 500
The Amiga 500 of 1987 was the cost-reduced Amiga, and a widely used model.
Apple II GS
The IIGS of 1986 kept compatibility with the Apple II library while moving to a 16-bit 65C816, adding 4096 colours and an Ensoniq wavetable chip that gave it better audio than any Macintosh of the period.
Apple IIe
The IIe of 1983 took the Apple II design, cut the chip count, and added lower case, 80 columns and a proper keyboard.
Apple iMac, white all-in-one
By the middle of the 2000s Apple had moved the iMac from translucent plastic to a white slab holding a flat panel, and then to the design where the whole computer hides behind the screen.
Apple Macintosh G4 Cube
The G4 Cube of 2000 suspended a full PowerPC computer inside a clear acrylic block, cooled by convection alone without a cooling fan.
Apple Lisa
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
AT&T PC 6300
AT&T needed a PC to sell into the business market and did not build one.
Atari 1040ST
Atari 65XE
The 65XE of 1985 is the same 8-bit architecture as the 800XL catalogued elsewhere here, in the wedge-shaped case Atari adopted after Jack Tramiel took the company over and lined its products up with the new ST.
Atari 800XL
Atom mini PC ×6
Intel's Atom line put x86 into thermal envelopes that had previously belonged to embedded processors, which produced a wave of tiny fanless desktops used as thin clients, kiosks and home servers.
BeBox 133 MHz
A BeBox Dual603-133 development workstation with surviving BeOS source files.
BeBox ×6
A BeBox Dual603-133 development workstation with surviving BeOS source files.
C64, FPGA-based Commodore 64 remake
An FPGA recreation implements the original chips as logic, cycle by cycle, instead of imitating their behaviour in software.
ClearCube iPort Clientron E830
ClearCube's system split the PC in half.
ClearCube P3 Trinity blades and cage
Each blade is a complete PC, and the cage holds several of them with shared power and cooling.
Cobalt Qube
Commodore 64
Commodore PET
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Commodore PC 10
The PC 10 is an 8088 machine running MS-DOS, sold mainly in Europe from the mid 1980s.
Compaq iPaq thin client
Compaq's iPaq desktop of 2000 dropped the serial, parallel and PS/2 connectors for USB alone, in a small vertical case aimed at corporate deployments and thin-client use.
Compaq Portable
Compaq's 1983 luggable was a full IBM PC compatible in a sewing-machine case.
Gateway 2000 4DX250
Gateway sold direct from South Dakota, shipped in boxes printed like Holstein hide, and undercut the retail channel by cutting the channel out.
HP 9000 Series 300
HP Core 2 Duo PC
By the time Intel's Core 2 Duo arrived in 2006, the distinction this museum is built on had closed.
IBM PC 5150
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
IBM PCjr
The PCjr of 1984 had better graphics and sound than the IBM PC and was crippled everywhere else: a rubber chiclet keyboard that typists hated, limited memory expansion, and incompatibilities with the PC software people bought it to run.
IBM Portable
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
IBM PS/2 Tower
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Intel NUC
Intel's Next Unit of Computing reference design put a complete PC, with modern I/O and enough performance for real work, into a chassis roughly the size of a drinks coaster.
Kaypro
Kaypro followed Osborne into the portable market in 1982 with a machine built into a folded aluminium shell, a nine-inch screen where Osborne had five, and the same commercial idea: bundle enough software that the buyer needs nothing else.
Macintosh Classic II
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Macintosh Color Classic ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Macintosh Plus
The 1986 Macintosh Plus fixed what the 1984 Macintosh got wrong.
Mac mini
The 2005 Mac mini asked people who already owned a monitor and a keyboard to buy the computer alone.
NeXTcube
NeXTstation ×3
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
NeXTstation Turbo Color
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Osborne ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
PC, AGP graphics class ×2
The Accelerated Graphics Port gave the graphics card a dedicated path to main memory, and with it the PC gained the one capability that had most clearly belonged to SGI.
PC, Core 2 Duo class
Held as a reference for the systems around it.
PC, Pentium 4 single-core class
The Pentium 4 was built around a long pipeline and very high clock speeds, an approach that ran into heat and stopped scaling.
PDP-11/70 Replica Front Panel
Power Mac tower, blue
The blue Power Mac G4 tower in the collection.
Power Mac tower, silver
The silver Power Mac G4 tower in the collection.
SGI Fuel
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo Elan
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo Elan
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo² ×8
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indigo² Teal ×5
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Indy ×17
Seventeen SGI Indy workstations held for restoration and a future hands-on teaching lab.
SGI Indy
A working SGI Indy and the wider Indy group preserved for the stories of IRIX, Turok, and a future teaching lab.
SGI O2 ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Octane ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Octane II
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI Origin 300
The Origin line applied SGI's NUMAlink interconnect to servers rather than workstations, letting many processors share memory across a single system image.
SGI Visual Workstation 320
Sun Blade 100
Sun Fire V100
The V100 of 2002 put an UltraSPARC IIi and Solaris into a single rack unit at a price meant to compete with x86 servers rather than with other Unix machines.
Sun SPARCclassic
Sun SPARCstation 10
The SPARCstation 10 of 1992 took Sun's flat desktop form and made it capable of holding more than one processor module, so a department could buy compute a piece at a time.
Tandy 100
The Model 100 of 1983 ran for weeks on four AA cells, started instantly because its software was in ROM, had a full-size keyboard and a built-in modem, and weighed under four pounds.
Tandy TRS-80
The TRS-80 Model I arrived in 1977 alongside the Apple II and the Commodore PET, and it outsold both at first because Tandy could put it in front of people in thousands of Radio Shack stores.
Vortex86 industrial embedded system ×3
The Vortex86 line puts an x86-compatible core into low-power embedded hardware, which matters when a factory or a piece of instrumentation depends on software nobody can port and nobody dares touch.
Xbox 360 ×2
The 360 of 2005 had a triple-core PowerPC processor and a custom ATI graphics part with unified shaders, which arrived on the console before it reached PC graphics cards.
Xbox
The original Xbox of 2001 was, in hardware terms, a small PC.
Apple iBook G3 clamshell
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Apple PowerBook G3, white
After the tangerine clamshell catalogued elsewhere here, Apple's consumer portable became a plain white polycarbonate slab: no handle, no colours, a shape that lasted through the iBook G4 and set the pattern for the plastic MacBook.
Compaq colour Windows 98 laptop
By the late 1990s the laptop had settled into the shape it still has: colour TFT, a trackpad, a CD drive in a bay, and a battery that lasted rather less than the marketing said.
Dell Inspiron 7500
The Inspiron 7500 was large, heavy and fast, built for people who wanted one machine rather than a laptop and a desktop.
HP Pavilion 630 Celeron
This example is included because of its installed software.
Toshiba Libretto 300
The Libretto line squeezed a complete x86 PC, running real Windows rather than a cut-down system, into a machine about the size of a paperback with a keyboard you could just about touch-type on.
Toshiba Satellite 1910
The Satellite line was Toshiba's volume laptop through the 1990s, and the company was for a period the largest laptop maker in the world.
Toshiba Satellite 1910
The Satellite line was Toshiba's volume laptop through the 1990s, and the company was for a period the largest laptop maker in the world.
IBM ThinkPad ×8
The ThinkPad was designed around a Japanese lunch box, given a matte black case, a keyboard that engineers trusted and the TrackPoint that people either loved or ignored.
Apple Color CRT, IIGS
The IIGS could produce 4096 colours and needed a display that could show them.
Apple G4 white flat panel display
Apple moved its professional displays to flat panels early and priced them accordingly.
Apple Monitor III
The Monitor III was Apple's 12-inch monochrome display for the Apple III, a machine whose own reputation was ruined by early reliability problems severe enough that Apple replaced the entire first production run.
Apple RGB CRT monitor
When the Macintosh II gave the Mac colour and expansion slots in 1987, it needed a colour display to go with it.
Atari 1040ST CRT monitor
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
Commodore 1084 CRT monitor
The 1084 accepted composite, RGB and separate luma and chroma, which meant it could be driven properly by an Amiga, a Commodore 64 and a good deal else besides.
Commodore 1084S CRT monitor
The S revision added stereo speakers, which mattered because the Amiga had four channels of sampled audio and most monitors could only give you one.
Commodore CRT monitor
Commodore sold monitors across its whole range so that buyers were not dependent on a spare television.
Newcom CRT display
Supporting equipment keeps the collection usable.
NeXT CRT display ×2
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
NeXTcube CRT display
A collection object that helps tell the wider history of personal and technical computing.
SGI 1600SW flat panel ×2
The 1600SW ran 1600 by 1024 in a 16:10 widescreen shape at a time when everyone else was selling 4:3 CRTs, and it used SGI's own digital connection rather than analogue VGA.
Sun CRT display
Sun's displays ran at resolutions and refresh rates that PC monitors of the same years could not manage, on Sun's own 13W3 connector, which is why they were sold as part of the system rather than separately.
ViewSonic 1600-resolution display
ViewSonic sold into the professional market at prices well below Apple and SGI, and machines like this are what most people actually put on their desks once CRTs went.
ViewSonic widescreen 1600-resolution display
Within a few years of the SGI 1600SW the whole market moved to widescreen, and it stopped being a professional feature and became simply what a monitor was.
ViewSonic television
The Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bits and most home computers of that generation were designed to plug into the family television, and that is how nearly everyone used them.
Atari Megafile 30 MB
The Megafile connected through the ST's DMA port and gave the machine a hard disk in a case styled to sit under the monitor with the rest of the system.
Commodore CBM PET dual floppy system
Commodore's disk drives were computers in their own right.
Apple Dot Matrix Printer
Apple sold dot matrix printers for the Apple II and the early Macintosh, and they are what documents looked like before 1985.
TRENDnet 16-port KVM switch
A KVM switch is the piece of infrastructure that makes a collection like this usable.
Cingular 8525 (JasJam)
The 8525 was an HTC design sold by Cingular in the United States and under half a dozen other names elsewhere.
Handspring Visor
Handspring was founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who had created the Palm Pilot and left after Palm was sold.
Palm Tungsten E2
The Tungsten E2 of 2005 had a colour screen, Bluetooth and non-volatile memory, so a flat battery no longer meant losing everything on the device.
Misc. peripherals
SGI and Sun keyboards, embedded boards, spare SGI graphics cards and motherboards.
Mechanical keyboards
Buckling spring and mechanical switch keyboards were simply what a serious computer came with.