These are not screenshots. Every machine below still boots on this platform, and every one of them can open the projects and files you have already made. Pick an era, read what was new about it, then go and use it for real. When you shut a machine down you come straight back here.
Forty years of computers look like forty years of new ideas. They are not. A handful of ideas arrive, get forgotten, and arrive again wearing different clothes.
The teletype had no display at all. Output was ink on paper, which sounds primitive until you notice what it forced: you could never erase, so you had to think before you typed. When screens arrived, text could be rewritten, and computing became something you did by trial and error instead of by planning.
In 1972 the computer was in another building and you rented minutes on it. By 1982 it was on your desk and it was entirely yours. Today your work lives on servers in another building again, and you rent minutes on them. The wheel turned all the way around.
The C64 and MS-DOS made you say what you wanted. The Mac and Amiga let you point at it. Pointing won for ordinary tasks, and every phone you have used is a descendant of that decision. But typing never died: programmers, servers and this platform's own terminal still run on typed commands, because a sentence can say things a click cannot.
| Machine | Memory | Storage |
|---|---|---|
| Teletype (1972) | 64 KB shared | Paper tape |
| Commodore 64 (1982) | 64 KB | 170 KB floppy |
| Macintosh (1991) | 8 MB | 40 MB disk |
| Windows XP (2001) | 256 MB | ~40 GB disk |
| Today | 8-32 GB | Terabytes |
A single photo from a modern phone would not fit in the entire memory of a Commodore 64 about fifty times over. And yet people wrote games, music and art on that machine that are still admired. Constraints are not the enemy of creativity.
Open the terminal on the Linux desktop and type ls. That command is from 1971. It has outlived the teletype, the Commodore, the Amiga, the black-and-white Mac and Windows XP, and it will very likely outlive whatever you are reading this on.
For teachers Computer hardware and electronics, middle school through introductory college courses
From a 1972 teletype that printed on paper to the desktop you use now. Boot each machine, open your own projects on it, and watch the same ideas get reinvented over and over.
In class: Boot machines from a 1972 teletype to a modern desktop and compare what changed.
Students need no account and nothing to install, so it works on Chromebooks and as a sub plan.
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