Common Tech
Overview

Timeline

A chronological record of key moments in personal technology from 1975 to 2007.

  1. 1975

    Altair 8800 kit released by MITS

  2. 1977

    Apple II launched — first mass-market personal computer

  3. 1979

    Sony Walkman TPS-L2 introduces portable music

  4. 1981

    IBM PC 5150 establishes open-architecture standard

  5. 1983

    Motorola DynaTAC 8000X — first commercial handheld cell phone

  6. 1984

    Sony Discman brings CD audio to portable listeners

  7. 1991

    World Wide Web becomes publicly available

  8. 1993

    Mosaic browser makes the web visual; AOL begins CD campaign

  9. 1998

    Diamond Rio PMP300 launches; Google Search founded

  10. 2000

    Nokia 3310 reaches 126 million users worldwide

  11. 2001

    Apple iPod introduces 1,000 songs in your pocket

  12. 2004

    Broadband internet surpasses dial-up in U.S. households

  13. 2007

    Apple iPhone redefines the mobile phone as a computer

Explore

Enter an Exhibit

Exhibit 01

Personal Computers

1970s – 1990s

From hobbyist kits assembled in garages to the machine on every office desk and in every home — the personal computer is the foundation on which the digital age was built.

Enter Exhibit →Exhibit 02

Mobile Phones

1983 – 2007

From a 1.75-pound brick that cost nearly $4,000 to a glass rectangle carrying the internet in your pocket — the mobile phone compressed four decades of communication history into a single device.

Enter Exhibit →Exhibit 03

Music Players

1979 – 2004

From the cassette tape in a yellow plastic case to a thousand songs in a white rectangle — portable music players transformed how people inhabit public space.

Enter Exhibit →Exhibit 04

The Early Internet

1991 – 2004

From a single website published by a physicist at CERN to a medium used by hundreds of millions — the early internet transformed how information moved, how communities formed, and how commerce worked.

Enter Exhibit →