The QWERTY layout first appeared in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold starting in 1874 by the E. Remington and Sons gun manufacturer, which was looking to diversify after the Civil War.

Arnold Schoenberg designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard.

Watch how the Enigma machine encrypts messages and learn about its critical design flaw

Using settings selected from a series of rotors and a plugboard that let operators swap letters with any of their choosing, the machine lit up the output letter for each letter typed. While this system could generate messages requiring any of 150 quintillion potential keys, the machine's reflector never encrypted a letter as itself, providing an entry point for exploiting the system.

The first commercially successful calculating machine—the arithmometer—was patented in 1820 but not mass-produced for over three decades, likely because its inventor was focused on his insurance business.

Sequoyah single-handedly invented a writing system for the Cherokee language

Without formal education, Cherokee citizen Sequoyah spent more than a decade in the early 1800s developing an 86-character syllabary—a writing system in which each symbol represents a spoken syllable—for the Cherokee language. Within a few years, most Cherokees could read and write it.

The Model K—named for its construction on a kitchen table—was the first electromechanical digital binary adder, which used an electric circuit to provide the sum of a pair of zeroes and ones in binary.

How Scrabble got its name

Alfred Butts, a newly unemployed architect during the Great Depression, created Scrabble. But the game was named by James Brunot, who used the word to describe the most common action its players take part in: digging frantically.

Q-tips were invented in the 1920s, and originally marketed for cleaning babies.

Among the smallest mass-produced mechanical calculators in history, the Curta was designed by Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

Improve your typing speed by retyping classic literature

Why practice with nonsense letters and syllables when you can retype full books you always wanted to read, from Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to George Orwell and W.E.B. duBois. And it's free.

The Bauhaus designer who predicted the future of graphic design

László Moholy-Nagy believed that technology would eventually turn typesetting into a process that allowed fonts to be easily modified rather than manually constructed. This history from the American Institute of Graphic Arts digs into how Moholy-Nagy arrived at those prescient theories.

The world's first text message was sent on Dec. 3, 1992, when 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth sent 'Merry Christmas' from a computer terminal.

Explore an online gallery highlighting the importance of graphical user interfaces

Before the Macintosh, computers were primarily used in offices and required users to type complex commands to perform tasks. Apple followed the device with the LaserWriter printer, bringing graphic production to at-home artists and designers.

FLOW-MATIC was the first programming language resembling the English language

As part of the team working on UNIVAC—the first commercially produced electronic digital computer in the US—Grace Hopper helped develop the system that enabled nonprogrammers and businesspeople without a strong mathematics background to use the machine effectively, thereby enhancing the computer's commercial viability.

An 1844 chess match via telegraph anticipated the board game's online popularity.

Unsatisfied with the designs provided by an Apple engineer, Steve Jobs designed the original Mac calculator in about 10 minutes.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

The Antikythera mechanism: The oldest-known analog computer

A device now considered the world's oldest computer was pulled from a shipwreck more than 120 years ago. Known as the "Antikythera Mechanism," it is now believed to have allowed precise tracking of astronomical positions, and its sophistication overturned understanding of Ancient Greek capabilities.

Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper—and a territory-based sales force

In the 1830s, farmers were skeptical of new technology, so McCormick demonstrated the machine—described as a cross between a plow, a chariot, and a flying object—to prospective buyers. Long before modern sales norms existed, he divided the market into territories operated by agents who provided service on the machines, financing to expand the customer base, and product iteration based on feedback from regional agents.

The first compiler to facilitate communication with computers was developed by Grace Hopper

The A-0 program linker automatically translated mathematical symbols into machine-readable binary code. Although it took two years for computer executives to get on board with the idea, the technology was foundational to future programming languages that allowed computers to understand commands written in word-based languages.

The first tattoo gun was based on an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison.

A timeline of computer history

The earliest computers bear little resemblance to the computing devices that most people rely on today. This timeline graphic from the Computer History Museum tracks their evolution, from the early days of bulky mainframes that only experts generally used through to the personal computing revolution and on to the modern mobile era. Readers will learn important context ahead of the next major computing platform shift.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Before their historic flight, the Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, where they built the world's first successful powered aircraft.

The history and operation of SIGABA, the US counterpart of the Nazi Enigma machine

Developed by the US Army and US Navy, over 10,000 of these machines were deployed by the end of World War II to encrypt messages for the armed forces using three series of rotors. The device would continue to be used until the 1950s, while personal computers were shown to possess enough computing power to crack it by 2021.

Introduced in 1981 for $1,795, the Osborne 1 was the world's first commercially successful portable laptop, despite weighing 24.5 pounds and having no battery.

Clue, the murder-mystery board game, was designed during World War II air raids.

The Macintosh popularized GUI and mouse navigation for personal computing

A graphical user interface that utilized windows, icons, and pull-down menus, rather than text-based commands, contributed to the device's success after its January 1984 launch. Its original sound system—capable of playing four voices—was developed after non-technical staff suggested the machine should play music.

The US jobs projected to shrink the fastest over the next decade include typists and word processors.

Designed in 1937 by Harvard graduate student Howard H. Aiken, the 'Harvard Calculator' was used by the US Navy to solve advanced physics problems.

In 1822, French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

Ray Bradbury wrote 'Fahrenheit 451,' his landmark dystopian novel, on a rented typewriter in the basement of a UCLA library.

Henry Ford pioneered the first moving assembly line, building on earlier iterations of the manufacturing method

Although cars existed before the Model T, manufacturing them required a group of highly specialized mechanics. The Model T was so affordable in large part because of the moving assembly line, which cut down the total manufacturing time of the car and replaced specialized workers with general laborers who performed repetitive tasks.

The printing press spread novels widely

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 changed how writing was reproduced. It allowed multiple manuscripts to be copied via movable type rather than by hand, making more literature more widely available. Over time, that change caused literacy rates to rise, creating a market for even more literature.

Watch someone drive a Model T Ford, which feels like driving 'a tractor with the soul of a sewing machine'—and learn how to operate one.

As technology evolved, so did Wall Street

Before the telephone was invented in the mid 1800s, people had to trade stocks in person. But once office telephones and computers became commonplace, banks and other financial institutions didn't necessarily need to have their headquarters near exchanges like Wall Street's New York Stock Exchange.

The treadmill was invented as a machine for prison labor

William Cubitt invented the machine in the early 1800s, imagining prisoners, usually two at a time, would use it to grind grain or pump water.

One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in the 1640s by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.

QR codes were developed in Japan in 1994 to fix bar code limitations

These codes store more data than traditional barcodes—up to 1,850 uppercase characters—and can be quickly scanned from any angle thanks to visual indicators like green squares and zebra-striped lines communicating orientation.

See a timeline of early flights, patent approvals and the birth of the Wright Company

The brothers’ most intense period of creativity and progress came between 1901 and 1910, when their work at Kitty Hawk culminated in the first powered flight. The pair, however, were not the most business-savvy, and they struggled to take financial advantage of their pioneering work in the field.

Slide rules—ruler-sized mechanical calculators with a component that slides out to show relationships between numbers—were used by engineers at NASA during the Apollo missions.

Before transistors, which regulate the flow of electricity, vacuum tubes—glass tubes containing no gas that resemble light bulbs—served as the electronic switches in computers.

The world's first chatbot, ELIZA, was developed in the 1960s as a technical demonstration exploring human-computer communication, with one of its scripts allowing it to emulate a psychotherapist.

All computers are defined by their ability to input, store, process, and output data

From wooden machines to wearable tech, computers have changed a lot in appearance, but they all still perform the same essential tasks. Early computers were made of wood and metal—some were so big that they filled entire rooms just to solve simple math problems.

Thomas Jefferson delivered his 1801 State of the Union address in writing

In 1801, President Jefferson ended in-person State of the Union addresses, feeling they were too monarchial, and sent written messages instead—a practice that lasted until 1913. His first message was written and sent via his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, who later led the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Why millions of telegrams are still sent every year

Telegrams enabled much faster communication across distances when they were invented in the 1800s, but they became generally obsolete after emails and cell phones were widely adopted. So why are 17 million still sent every year? A combination of factors: the legal requirement to send paper documents far and fast, the resistance to updating processes, and nostalgia. Explore more with this video.

Personal computers became more common in the late 1970s, making working from home more viable

As the internet and email became more popular in the 1990s, more infrastructure that would eventually support remote work was created. But the practice was still relatively uncommon until the COVID-19 pandemic, when white-collar workers first took to working from home en masse.

Once called 'aces,' quarks are fundamental pieces of matter that combine to create over 100 known composite particles, including the proton and neutron.

Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Studio featured his earliest innovations in animation

Before he founded his iconic film company, Walt Disney was a young animator in Kansas City, Missouri. After scoring a contract to create animated newsreels for local movie theaters, Disney formed Laugh-O-Gram Studio, where he created innovative animated shorts that set the path for his later work.

The Wrights’ patent battles delayed the development of aviation technology in the US

By the time World War I began in 1914, the US was lagging behind European powers in aviation. This stemmed primarily from wars over patents between the Wrights and competitor Glenn Curtiss. The pair argued their 1906 patent covered all mechanisms enabling lateral flight.