A virtual museum of computer science
Hello Museum
A virtual museum showcasing major milestones in the history of Computer Science
Walk the galleries in 3D. Step up to an exhibit and open its portal to do the thing the milestone was about.
- Exhibits
- 77
- Galleries
- 9
- Working portals
- 13
On display now
13 exhibits with working portals
Each one opens an interactive portal you can try for yourself, in the museum or right here.
- A11936
Turing's universal machine
Alan Turing, 1936: a tape, a head and a table of rules can carry out any computation. This machine adds 1 to a binary number. Step it and watch the carry ripple left.
Logic, Theory & CryptographyOpen in museum - B21945
ENIAC
The first general-purpose electronic digital computer, completed in 1945 and unveiled in February 1946. Every glowing dot in this portal stands for 50 of its vacuum tubes. Some just burned out: find them and swap them.
Hardware & ArchitectureOpen in museum - B31947/54
The transistor
Bell Labs built the first transistor in 1947 from germanium, and Morris Tanenbaum made the first silicon one there in 1954. A switch with no filament to burn out. Flip the base and watch current flow.
Hardware & ArchitectureOpen in museum - B112015
Tensor Processing Unit
AI accelerators are built around matrix multiply. A systolic array pulses data through a grid of multiply-accumulate cells, so every value is reused without another trip to memory.
Hardware & ArchitectureOpen in museum - C11945
Patch-cable programming
ENIAC’s first programmers, including Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings and Frances Bilas, set up each problem by rewiring cables and switches. Changing the program meant changing the machine.
Software, Languages & SystemsOpen in museum - C31957
FORTRAN & LISP
FORTRAN let engineers write formulas instead of machine code; IBM shipped its compiler in 1957. One line of code was one 80-column card, and a program was a deck. Pick a statement and punch it.
Software, Languages & SystemsOpen in museum - C102013+
Bundle Tower: React & Next.js
React, Next.js and the Python data stack made software composable, and pages heavier. Each square in this portal is one kilobyte.
Software, Languages & SystemsOpen in museum - D61991
NeXT + dial-up
The web was written on a NeXT computer at CERN, and most people first reached it through a dial-up modem. Race the first web page against a 2025 median home page over a 14.4 kbit/s line.
Networks & the WebOpen in museum - D71991
HTML & HTTP
About 18 elements and one method, GET. Flip the article into 1991 mode: the styling, scripts and images vanish, and the meaning stays.
Networks & the WebOpen in museum - E31968
Engelbart's demo
The mouse, the window, the link and live shared editing, all on one 1968 stage.
Interaction & Personal ComputingOpen in museum - F21956
Dartmouth Workshop
Summer 1956: the workshop whose 1955 proposal coined “artificial intelligence.” Meet the four proposers, then run the Logic Theorist on Principia Mathematica.
Artificial IntelligenceOpen in museum - F71997
Deep Blue
ChipTest (1985) and Deep Thought (1988) grew into IBM’s Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Their strength was raw search. Drag the depth and watch the game tree explode.
Artificial IntelligenceOpen in museum - F102017
The Transformer
“Attention Is All You Need” (2017) introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind today’s Large Language Models. Every token decides how much to look at every other token. Click a word to see where it looks.
Artificial IntelligenceOpen in museum
Explore the building
One atrium, 9 galleries
77 exhibit positions laid out from the Prologue in the atrium to the Future Lab. Solid markers are built and open now. Click any marker to read its exhibit page.
Open the full floor plan