About This Collection

Common Tech Through The Years is a digital museum built to document the personal technologies that shaped everyday life between the 1970s and the 2010s. The collection focuses on four categories — personal computers, mobile phones, music players, and the early internet — because together they represent the infrastructure of modern daily life.

Our curatorial approach is guided by a single question: not what did this technology do, but what did it change? We are less interested in technical specifications than in cultural consequences — how a device altered behavior, restructured industries, or shifted the social meaning of communication, work, or leisure.

Each exhibit draws on primary sources from the Computer History Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and Britannica. We cite our sources because the authority of a museum exhibit rests on the credibility of its evidence. Uncited claims are opinions; cited claims are the beginning of scholarship.

This collection was built using a spec-driven development process in which every feature was defined, reviewed, and verified before implementation. The process documentation lives alongside the code in the repository. We believe that how something is made is part of what it means.