Catalog

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. It had a touch screen, a stylus, a wireless keyboard and a rotating knob for scrolling, and it ran a version of QNX.

The Amiga 500 of 1987 was the cost-reduced Amiga, and a widely used model. Underneath the keyboard sat a Motorola 68000 and the custom chipset, Agnus, Denise and Paula, that gave it hardware sprites, a blitter and four channels of sampled sound alongside contemporary PC sound systems.

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.

The IIe of 1983 took the Apple II design, cut the chip count, and added lower case, 80 columns and a proper keyboard. It stayed in production until 1993, a ten-year production span.

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.

The G4 Cube of 2000 suspended a full PowerPC computer inside a clear acrylic block, cooled by convection alone without a cooling fan. It cost $1,799 without a display and it sold badly enough that Apple suspended it after a year.

AT&T needed a PC to sell into the business market and did not build one. The 6300 is an Olivetti M24, badged and sold through AT&T's channels from 1984.

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.

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.

An FPGA recreation implements the original chips as logic, cycle by cycle, instead of imitating their behaviour in software. The result behaves like the hardware, including the timing quirks that games and demos depend on.

ClearCube's system split the PC in half. The user got a small port on the desk carrying video, keyboard, mouse and USB; the actual PC lived as a blade in a chassis in the machine room.

Each blade is a complete PC, and the cage holds several of them with shared power and cooling. Users reached them from a port on the desk, so hardware could be swapped or reassigned without anyone visiting an office.

The PC 10 is an 8088 machine running MS-DOS, sold mainly in Europe from the mid 1980s. Commodore had the Amiga and the PET behind it and still had to build a clone, because business buyers wanted compatibility rather than capability.

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's 1983 luggable was a full IBM PC compatible in a sewing-machine case. The hardware was the easy part. The BIOS was the problem, and Compaq solved it with a clean-room reimplementation: one team documented what IBM's BIOS did, a second team who had never seen IBM's code wrote one that behaved the same way.

Gateway sold direct from South Dakota, shipped in boxes printed like Holstein hide, and undercut the retail channel by cutting the channel out. The 4DX250 is a 486DX2 at 50 MHz from the early 1990s.

By the time Intel's Core 2 Duo arrived in 2006, the distinction this museum is built on had closed. A mid-range office PC had memory protection, real multitasking, a capable GPU and a Unix-like operating system available for it.

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.

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 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.

The 1986 Macintosh Plus fixed what the 1984 Macintosh got wrong. It had a megabyte of RAM, expandable, a proper 800K drive, and a SCSI port that let it take a hard disk and everything else the professional world already used.

The 2005 Mac mini asked people who already owned a monitor and a keyboard to buy the computer alone. It was Apple's cheapest machine and its least decorated, a flat aluminium and polycarbonate slab that hid on a shelf.

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.

Held as a reference for the systems around it. By this generation a desktop PC had multiple cores, gigabytes of memory and a graphics processor capable of real work, and the workstation had nothing left to sell that a buyer could not get from a catalogue.

The Pentium 4 was built around a long pipeline and very high clock speeds, an approach that ran into heat and stopped scaling. The retreat from it is why processors after 2005 went wide rather than fast.

The Origin line applied SGI's NUMAlink interconnect to servers rather than workstations, letting many processors share memory across a single system image. The Origin 300 is the compact rack member of that family, from around 2001.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The original Xbox of 2001 was, in hardware terms, a small PC. It ran a Pentium III derivative with an nVidia graphics processor and shipped with a hard drive as standard, which no console had done.

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.

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.

The Inspiron 7500 was large, heavy and fast, built for people who wanted one machine rather than a laptop and a desktop. It carried a 15-inch display at a time when 13 was normal.

This example is included because of its installed software. Haiku is a from-scratch open source recreation of BeOS, the operating system the BeBox was built for, and it has been under development since 2001.

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.

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.

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.

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. IBM sold them to the people who cared most about typing on them.

The IIGS could produce 4096 colours and needed a display that could show them. Apple's composite colour monitor for the machine is the piece that completes it, and without it the system is only half present.

Apple moved its professional displays to flat panels early and priced them accordingly. This is the white-bezelled generation that sat alongside the Power Mac G4, before the aluminium Cinema Displays took over.

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.

When the Macintosh II gave the Mac colour and expansion slots in 1987, it needed a colour display to go with it. The AppleColor high-resolution RGB monitor is that display, and it is what desktop publishing was actually done on.

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.

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 sold monitors across its whole range so that buyers were not dependent on a spare television. Holding them alongside the computers is the only way to show a system as its owner actually used it.

Supporting equipment keeps the collection usable. A working period CRT is increasingly hard to find and this is one.

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'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 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.

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.

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.

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's disk drives were computers in their own right. They carried their own 6502 and their own memory, ran a disk operating system on board, and talked to the PET over IEEE-488, the instrumentation bus.

Apple sold dot matrix printers for the Apple II and the early Macintosh, and they are what documents looked like before 1985.

A KVM switch is the piece of infrastructure that makes a collection like this usable. Without one, running sixteen machines means sixteen monitors and sixteen keyboards and nowhere to stand.

The 8525 was an HTC design sold by Cingular in the United States and under half a dozen other names elsewhere. It had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3G, Wi-Fi and a stylus, and it ran Windows Mobile.

Handspring was founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who had created the Palm Pilot and left after Palm was sold. The Visor ran Palm OS under licence and added the Springboard slot, a hardware expansion bay that took modules including a phone.

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.

SGI and Sun keyboards, embedded boards, spare SGI graphics cards and motherboards. Workstation peripherals used proprietary connectors and protocols, so a Sun keyboard works with Sun machines and nothing else.

Buckling spring and mechanical switch keyboards were simply what a serious computer came with. The IBM Model F on the PC 5150 in this catalogue is the best known, and Sun, SGI and DEC all shipped keyboards built to be typed on for eight hours a day.