Explore an online gallery highlighting the importance of graphical user interfaces

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.

Mac settings have evolved from minimalism to chaotic clutter

The 1984 Mac control panel featured wordless icons, sliders, and desktop pattern editors, highlighting early experimentation in graphical user interface design. This software charm and personality gradually disappeared as Apple enforced visual and functional consistency over time.

Apple started out in a garage in 1976

Shifting the focus of personal computing from businesses to everyday consumers, Apple found early success with the Apple II, which sold 6 million units, and the Macintosh, which featured a user-friendly graphical interface.

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.

Explore a breakdown of 18 influential Apple products

The launch of the MacBook Air in 2008 popularized the ultrabook category of laptops, while the iPad (2010) made large-screen mobile devices a technological norm. The iPhoneX (2017) introduced the notch, which has become a staple at the top of many smartphone displays.

Where did artful screen savers go? A history

Early on in the personal computer days, users and engineers realized screens could be damaged if the same image—of a button, a logo, or a navigation bar—stays static for too long. To preserve the screen, developers deployed screen savers—automatic reductions in the light intensity, or regularly changing patterns on the screen. These artful screen savers had a heyday in the 1990s, but have since lost popularity to the simple black screen. Read the history here.

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.

See the original websites for companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple

Explore archived images of homepages on websites dating all the way back to 1991.

Lessons learned from Steve Jobs

From predicting our screen-filled future in 1983 to slashing Apple's product line in 1997, Steve Jobs believed in focus, simplicity, and the fusion of technology and art. His philosophies still influence how products are built and marketed today.

Explore a visual history of the Windows operating system

Named after the windows that separate different applications, the operating system’s first version came preinstalled with Calculator, Paint, and Reversi. There was no Windows 9 to avoid compatibility issues with legacy code searching for Windows 95 and 98 files via a “windows9” query.

Apple's first logo was a portrait of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree

Before the minimalist image of an apple with a bite taken out of it, Apple's logo depicted the fruit dangling above the physicist, likely a nod to the anecdote about his epiphany regarding gravity.

Office Assistants, including Clippy, were digitally edited with Macintosh computers

The animated characters served as intelligent user interfaces for Microsoft Office and were sketched by hand before being scanned. Clippy was selected as the default assistant after social psychologists at Stanford University identified it as the most trustworthy, likable, and humorous character based on public testing.

The iPad drawings of a Pop Art legend

David Hockney gained popularity in the 1960s as a major figure in British Pop Art, but since then he's continued innovating, particularly through his use of an unlikely medium: the Apple iPad. This video essay explains why Hockney began drawing on the iPad in the late 2000s and analyzes his major iPad works, including the Yosemite Suite.

Mosaic is credited for making the World Wide Web accessible to everyday people—not just scientists—for the first time

Mosaic was a web browser that allowed people to more easily access webpages on the World Wide Web. But unlike previous browsers, Mosaic was a graphical browser, which means it displayed images alongside text. This helped turn the web from a place for scientists into a cultural location that captured people's attention.

A virtual art gallery in the mode of 'Doom'

One of the earliest video games to use 3D interfaces, 1993's "Doom" was a first-person shooter set on the moons of Mars which ended in hell. It became one of the most critically and commercially successful games of all time. Now, you can wander virtually in an art gallery in the mode of the game, sipping wine and perusing pixelated versions of classic works of art.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Explore a gallery of DALL-E creations

OpenAI's text-to-image generator can create content in a wide range of image styles based on simple prompts. Its utility has also given rise to an organic, passionate user base who employ the tool both for fun and for professional purposes.

Mid-century modern graphic designers like Milton Glaser and Eric Carle found success with children's books

Glaser was famous for creating the "I Heart NY" logo, the DC Comics logo, and an iconic Bob Dylan poster for CBS Records, but he naturally transitioned to illustrating children's books like "The Smallest Elephant in the World" and "If Apples had Teeth." Carle, author of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?," began his career in advertising. Scholars say mid-century modern's preference for clean lines and bold colors was a natural fit for kids' books.

The hardware powering AI was originally designed for video game graphics processing

Graphics processing units are specialized computer chips that can process multiple data streams in parallel, including pixel colors for a display. Such processing is required to find connections across text data and generate outputs quickly.

Get lost in these historical libraries

The internet has changed a lot about how we learn, explore new ideas, and conduct research, particularly when it comes to the spaces we learn in. While few of us would trade our smartphones for a walk in a historical library, a walk through some of the beautifully designed cathedrals of learning could remind us to put them down sometimes. Explore 10 of the world's magnificent libraries with this quick video survey.

Andy Warhol’s famous works employed a 'machine-like' technique

Warhol’s silk-screen printing style—rough, noticeably imperfect, and painterly—was the result of a refined technique in service of a grainy tabloid aesthetic.

Explore a collection of media depicting major milestones from the life of Grace Hopper

The gallery features Hopper's meeting with President Ronald Reagan, her attendance at the groundbreaking of the Grace Murray Hopper Service Center—a Naval data processing facility—and her Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony.

The story of two female programmers running the simulations behind chaos theory's discovery

Margaret Hamilton and Ellen Fetter worked on MIT's 800-pound Royal McBee LGP-30 computer, which was fed binary code on paper tape to perform computations. Among the computations performed were those involving equations describing the motion of gas in a circulating fluid for Edward Lorenz, widely considered the father of chaos theory.

The software for wikis—user-editable websites—was launched in 1995

Computer programmer Ward Cunningham created the WikiWikiWeb online application based on an offline system that helped track how ideas moved through his company. The application enabled users to collaborate and edit website content through a web browser, as well as link pages without requiring a structured navigation scheme.

Nineteenth-century, hand-drawn infographics on US slavery and race

In the second half of the 19th century, researchers studying the behavior of the millions of emancipated Americans after the Civil War used "information graphics" to cut through the noise of racially charged debate. In this collection from Stanford, you can see century-old, stunningly hand-drawn data visualizations showing racial demographics, the effects of emancipation on cotton prices, and more.

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.

Laser technology powers communication, medical and manufacturing tools

Lasers are used when scanning groceries, printing documents or undergoing cosmetic procedures to enhance efficiency, precision and accuracy. Missile defense, targeting and optical communication systems have made using laser technology habitual in the military.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Dorothy's famous entrance into Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz' relied on analog tricks, including a body double and sepia-toned paint, as much as it did on technology

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

Tattoos remain visible on your skin thanks to immune cells called macrophages

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

See how fireworks are made and learn how metals like magnesium and copper are responsible for different colors.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Objects can be 3D printed with light by projecting 2D computerized tomography (CT) scans onto rotating cylinders of resin, which solidify upon exposure.

Telehealth demand for GLP-1s for weight loss is booming as consumers seek easier access.