The Computer Tree

How to read it

Every dot is a machine, a processor or a system, and its ring is the period it arrived in. The inner three rings are the 1961 chart's own. Past them there is one ring per decade, and the outermost holds 2021 to 2025. Teal dots (207) were copied from the 1961 chart. Orange dots (335) were added after it. A machine sits under its main parent, the one the data names first. 80 machines have a second parent as well. Switch on Cross-links to see them, and watch the late rings, where long-running lines meet on shared processors.

The tree has eight roots. ENIAC is the 1961 chart's. The other seven start families that descend from nothing on that chart: the HP 2116A, the Datapoint 2200, the Intel 4004, ATI Radeon, the NVIDIA GeForce 256, Google's first TPU and the Sunway TaihuLight. ENIAC still reaches 458 of the 542 by some path. The longest line on the tree is the one it opens on: 26 machines from ENIAC to Fugaku, through SEAC, the SDS 940, the Xerox Alto and a run of Sun and Fujitsu SPARC machines.

What it cannot carry

The 1961 links are shaky. The source was a low-resolution scan. Most labels are legible, but many branch attachments in the dense middle are not, so 79% of the 1961 links are estimates. They are dashed. The links added since are 89% firm. Read a dashed 1950s attachment as “same region of the chart”, not as proven ancestry. The big early lines, IAS to the IBM 701, 704, 709 and 7090, and ERA to the UNIVAC 1101 and 1103, are solid.

Some 1961 hubs are inflated. LOGISTICS and RASTAC show the most children on the chart partly because unreadable twigs were attached to the nearest legible branch. Any centrality measure over the 1950s will over-rank them. IAS and the Arm Cortex-A57 are real hubs.

Past 1960 the tree follows major lineages, not every product: Soviet and Eastern Bloc machines, most Japanese mainframes, SGI and MIPS, the Amiga and Atari, and early game consoles are among the gaps. Dates are first delivery or introduction and can differ by a year from other references. Check a 1950s date or ancestry against a primary source before citing it.

The data

The dataset is a directed acyclic graph: every parent exists, there are no cycles, and no parent is dated more than a year after its child. Take it with you. The data card has the schema, the counts and how to add a decade.

The tree also stands on tinymachines.ai, in English and Japanese, drawn from this same dataset.