Historic Computers That Changed Computing

A photo gallery of the electronic computers that set the direction for everything after them, in the order they appeared: wartime codebreakers and room-sized vacuum-tube machines, the first commercial and transistor mainframes, the minicomputers that put a computer in a single lab, and the home and desktop machines of the 1970s and 1980s. Each photo shows the machine itself, mostly surviving examples, rebuilds and museum pieces. A machine earned a place by changing what computers did, who could buy one or how people used them, not by nostalgia alone. Mechanical calculators, which came before all of these, have their own list.