A closer look

You are likely reading this on a direct descendant of a glorified 1970s calculator. The Datapoint 2200 was designed merely as a 'dumb terminal' to connect to real computers, but its makers essentially shoved a whole CPU into the plastic keyboard case. When Intel was hired to shrink this design into a single chip, they failed to deliver on time but kept the instruction set—which ultimately mutated into the exact x86 architecture powering almost every PC for the next fifty years.