This Nippon Electric Company, or Nippon Denki Kabushiki Gaisha, knew how to make a cool-looking, utilitarian-chic computer, and in the old days the company didn't seem to mind sticking its equipment on top of a regular green metal desk. With a solid-state design (its predecessor, the 2201, was the first NEC transistorized machine) and many standard features of the era (paper-tape entry and punch, magnetic tape storage, drum memory), the NEAC 2203 also could use the characters from either the Roman alphabet or the Japanese kana syllabary (though not the much larger set of kanji characters).

NEC, founded in 1899, was the first joint Japanese-American company in Japan. Despite the heavy toll taken on Japan's infrastructure by World War II, NEC continued its work in communication technology and entered the transistor market in 1950. It began computer research four years later, finally releasing its first computer, the NEAC 1101, in 1958.

The big eyes are the first thing we notice today, but the CDC 6600 embodied a number of technical firsts in addition to its anthropomorphic face: solid-state design, a very simple architecture, and in general just incredible speed (10 MFLOPS).

The CDC 6600 was engineered by a young Seymour Cray, a man known for the considerable talent he put into making the fastest machines around, and its speed was more a function of Cray's talent for design than of any special hardware. Cray designed computers holistically, not relying simply on lightning-fast processors but making sure the entire design was efficient. Other engineers, such as Gordon Bell, recall being struck by the 6600's elegance. Cray's idea, implemented on the 6600, of multithreaded processors working in parallel, foreshadowed the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architecture still popular today.

As the Web was being developed in the early 1990s at the nuclear research institute CERN, in Switzerland and France there was already a well-established French network of millions of users of Minitel, a system that combined terminals with a closed network that let users do many of the tasks for which we now use the Net. Buying rail tickets, checking show times, posting personal ads, chatting, and searching fro phone numbers were all made remarkably easy. Obviously, the bureaucratic France Telecom, a government agency, presaged a lot of Net entrepreneurs. Although a closed network limited a great many benefits of this early version of the Internet, it also kept some bad things at bay, like viruses.

Because the point of human interaction was simply a terminal, Minitel was fairly inexpensive to manufacture. As an effort to cut printing costs for phone books, these units were distributed free of charge, one per household, by request. That smart move quickly established the huge network of millions of users that was key to Minitel's success.

Quite a few different models of the terminal were made; this one is by Alcatel. The keyboard flipped up neatly to make a box that could sit smartly in a living room, and the design was pleasantly tactile. Not surprisingly, many assert that the existence of the Minitel slowed French adoption of the Internet, and others make the opposite claim. The network is still operational—if a little less lively that in its prime—and Internet users can download an emulator that connects to the Minitel network whether they're in Paris or Portland.

Like the Osborne 1, the Compaq Portable drew from the design of the Xerox Notetaker, featuring a protective flip-down screen that doubled as a keyboard. What made Compaq's slightly heavier unit stand out was that it was 100 percent IBM PC-compatible. This remarkable "cloning" was made possible by teams of programmers who reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). While the IBM PC used freely available parts and MS-DOS (and Microsoft was ready to sell that to anyone), the proprietary IBM BIOS was copyrighted.

Setting out to copy the IBM PC, Compaq approached making the clone as a combination engineering and legal challenge. One team analyzed the BIOS and then described to the second team (which had no contact with the BIOS) how the new system would function. The million-dollar effort worked, and the era of the IBM clone—powered by a Microsoft operating system and an Intel processor—had begun. Soon, aside from those made by Apple, nearly any personal computer would be an IBM clone, and the acronym PC came to stand for this new standard.

This interoperability had some advantages, such as reducing the need for a software bundle like the one included with the Osborne 1, as economies of scale brought down the cost of software—sometimes to nothing.