Five decades of personal computing fit into one scroll. This interactive computer timeline drops you at 1977 and walks you forward, machine by machine, to a glowing neural core in 2026. Eight stations, eight low-poly models, eight moods of light. No photographs, no 3D scans, and no downloads. Every model is built from boxes, cylinders and spheres, the same way the first home computer build logs described racking up parts by hand.
The Eight Stations
- 1977 — The TRS-80. The beige box that sold computing to main-street America, green screen glowing. Read the full story in What Was the Tandy TRS-80?
- 1981 — The IBM 5150. Then came the machine that defined what a PC is, powered by the chip lineage explained in What Was the Intel 8086?
- 1984 — The original Macintosh. The screen that made the mouse the argument.
- 1993 — The beige tower. The 486 era, the era that ran the first games worth installing.
- 1998 — The translucent iMac. Computing finally admitted it lived in a living room.
- 2007 — The phone. A data center in every pocket, and a keyboard in almost none.
- 2015 — The rack. The honest answer to where the cloud always was: someone else’s server room.
- 2026 — The neural core. The machine learning era, drawn the way it feels from the inside.
Every Era Gets Its Own Light
The hall stays dark. Because the fog carries color, the room itself tells you where you are. First, at 1977, the room glows amber and green, like phosphor in a dim shop. By 1993 the light has gone office-fluorescent cool. Next, the 2007 station arrives in clean blue. Finally, the core itself burns warm and alive. You never read a caption telling you which decade you entered. Instead your eyes work it out from the color, the way you already do in a museum.
Building the Interactive Computer Timeline, Piece by Piece
Building this interactive computer timeline started with one question per station: what is the single silhouette that says this machine? The TRS-80 is cassette deck plus boxy monitor. The 5150 is the beige wedge with the badge. Nothing needs more than a dozen primitives, and restraint turns out to be the whole art. After that, the scene runs one camera, one fog and one travel animation through all eight dioramas. So the timeline moves like a single continuous hall rather than eight slides. In practice, that continuity is what makes the scroll feel like travel instead of paging.
The same single-file rule holds here. The whole page is one HTML file, engine included, so it runs offline. If you want the behind-the-scenes of that packaging trick, the CRT boot sequence post breaks down its shader stack, and the solar system tour reuses this exact travel mechanic at a grander scale.
Try It Yourself
Scroll to travel, or drag to slide along the hall. Then use the arrow keys to step station by station, while the year dots at the bottom jump straight to any decade. Stop at any machine, orbit it, and read the card. The whole journey takes under a minute, and it ends at the machine we are still inside.
Where to Go Next
The 2026 station is a metaphor, so here is the literal version: a real local AI server, documented from the bare box up in Building Your Own Local AI Server, Part 1. The rack at station seven is where that story physically lives.