Interactive · 86 machines
The evolution of computing, 1975 → today
Every computer in the atlas on one chart. Switch between memory, clock speed and launch price in today's dollars, hover a dot for details, click it to open the machine.
Logarithmic scale: each gridline is 16× (memory) or 10× (speed, price) the one below. Dashed line: best-fit exponential trend. Generic "family PC" entries are excluded. Data: free download.
Seven eras of the personal computer
From soldering irons to silicon that runs AI, in the machines people actually owned first.
The kit era and the 1977 trinity
Personal computing began as a hobby for people who could solder. The Altair 8800 arrived as a box of parts with toggle switches and blinking lights, and a young Microsoft wrote its first product for it. Within two years the idea had grown up: in 1977 the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the TRS-80 went on sale fully assembled, ready to plug in. Memory was measured in single kilobytes and programs were loaded from cassette tape, yet these machines introduced the idea that a computer could belong to one person rather than to an institution.
The home computer boom
Prices collapsed and computers moved into living rooms, plugged into the family television. Britain had the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro, America and much of Europe had the Commodore 64, Japan, the Netherlands and Brazil had MSX, and the Eastern Bloc built its own clones. Most first computers in this era were used for games and for typing in programs printed in magazines. A whole generation of engineers, game designers and founders traces its career back to a machine like these.
The PC takes the office, then the world
IBM's Personal Computer of 1981 used off-the-shelf parts, which meant others could copy it. Compaq, Amstrad, Dell and hundreds of unnamed assemblers did exactly that, and the 'IBM compatible' running MS-DOS became the standard. Each processor generation, the 286, the 386 and the 486, roughly doubled what software could do, and Windows 3 brought a graphical desktop to machines that businesses already owned.
The graphical revolution
The Apple Macintosh put a mouse, windows and icons in front of ordinary people in 1984. A year later the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST offered colour graphics and sound that the business PC could not match, and they became the creative machines of their era for music, video and games. Many of the ideas we now take for granted, from desktop publishing to multitasking, reached the public on these computers.
The family PC and the internet
Windows 95 and the web arrived together, and the computer became a household appliance bought at a supermarket or a big-box store. Packard Bell, Compaq, Dell and eMachines sold millions of beige towers with a dial-up modem, a CD-ROM drive and a free trial of an online service. Apple's translucent iMac G3 of 1998 was designed around getting online in minutes. For many families outside the early adopter countries, this was the decade of the first computer.
Laptops, netbooks and the $100 laptop
Laptops overtook desktops, and cheap netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC showed that a small, affordable machine was enough for the web. The One Laptop per Child XO-1 and national programmes such as Uruguay's Plan Ceibal gave millions of children their first computer. In 2012 the credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi revived the spirit of the 1980s: a cheap computer designed to be programmed.
Phones, Chromebooks and Apple silicon
For much of the world the first computer is now a phone, and the first 'real' computer often a school Chromebook. Apple's M1 chip in 2020 showed that phone-style processors could outperform traditional laptops while running silent and cool, and the latest machines add dedicated hardware for running AI models locally. The memory in a typical flagship phone today is millions of times what the Altair shipped with.
Questions and answers
How fast has computer memory grown?
Across the 63 dated computers in the First Computer Atlas, standard memory doubled on average every 1.9 years between 1975 and today (a least-squares fit on a logarithmic scale). The Altair 8800 shipped with 256 bytes; the MacBook Air M1 shipped with 8 GB, about 33.6 million times more.
Is Moore's law visible in home computers?
Yes. Gordon Moore's observation concerns transistors on a chip, which doubled roughly every two years. The memory that consumer computers actually shipped with doubled about every 1.9 years in our catalogue, slightly faster than that two-year rule. Clock speed grew more slowly, doubling about every 3.1 years, and flattened after the mid-2000s when chip makers switched to more cores instead.
Why did clock speeds stop rising?
Around 2004 to 2005, higher clock speeds began to produce more heat than chips could shed. Manufacturers turned to multiple cores, larger caches and specialised units (graphics, and now AI accelerators), so clock speed alone stopped being a good measure of performance.
Did computers get cheaper?
In today's money, yes. Many early machines cost the equivalent of several thousand dollars; entry-level laptops and Chromebooks now cost a few hundred. See the full table on the computer prices page.
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