QBasic, 1991. Shipped with MS-DOS 5 next to the Nibbles and Gorillas games, source code included.

GEOS 2.0 for the Commodore 64, 1988. A full windowed desktop squeezed into 64 KB of RAM.

Acorn Arthur 1.2, 1987. The first desktop for the ARM powered Archimedes, renamed RISC OS one version later. Its icon bar came eight years before the Windows taskbar.

iMac G3, 1998. Bondi Blue, no floppy drive, and the first Apple product to put an i in front of its name.

Nintendo Power Glove, 1989. Only two games were ever made for it.

CICnet Gopher Workshop binder, 1992. Gopher was named after the University of Minnesota mascot, and for a year or two it was more popular than the web.

Spacewar! on the PDP-1, 1962. Written by Steve Russell and friends at MIT, and one of the first video games to spread from one computer to another.

Tamagotchi, 1997.

Doom, 1993. id released the first episode as shareware on a University of Wisconsin FTP server, which buckled under the load.

Pravetz 82, 1982. Bulgaria's Apple II clone, built in the town of Pravets, the birthplace of party leader Todor Zhivkov.

Sony Mavica MVC-FD90, 2000. It saved photos as JPEGs straight onto a 3.5 inch floppy disk that any PC could read.

Engelbart NLS Keyset, 1968. Five keys pressed in chords to type letters, with the mouse in the other hand. It sits on his Augmenting Human Intellect report.

DEC PDP-11/70, 1975. Unix and C grew up on the PDP-11 at Bell Labs.

NEC PC Engine, 1987. Games came on HuCards the size of a credit card.

Microsoft Bob beta, 1994. Codenamed Utopia. Rover the dog outlived Bob and turned up again as the search assistant in Windows XP.

IBM System/360 Model 65 Console, 1965. The 360 was the first computer family where the same software ran on the smallest model and the largest.

Famicom, 1983. Nintendo's red and white original. The controllers were hardwired, and the second one had a microphone instead of Start and Select.

Aegis Sonix, 1987. An early Amiga software synth, built on Musicraft, which Aegis bought from Commodore.

DEC PDP-8, 1965. The first commercially successful minicomputer, the machine that moved a computer out of its own room and onto a lab bench.

Dreamcast VMU, 1998. A memory card with its own screen, D-pad and minigames, slotted into the controller so the screen peeked up at you.

Visual Basic for MS-DOS, 1992. A text mode Visual Basic, the last stop in the line that began with QuickBASIC.