Black Washington vs The Micro

Black Washington is the Washington State Historical Society’s ongoing initiative to commemorate the presence, contributions, and evolving impact of local Black communities. Read, watch, and listen to stories about community organizing, engaging in labor and operating business, striving for civil rights, achieving education, pursuing the arts, and overcoming adversity and racism. Explore the lives of iconic individuals, including business owners, faith leaders, politicians, journalists, dramatists, and musicians. Find cultural spaces, historic sites, and locations integral to Washington State’s Black communities. Black Washington is also an educational resource that can be used in the classroom. Click on the Educators” in the main menu to find curricula and other educational tools.

COMPLETE TIMELINE Over 27 key milestones across 7 major eras: the precursors (Micral N, Altair 8800, Microsoft), the explosion of 1976-1982 (Apple I and II, Atari 2600, VisiCalc, Commodore 64), IBM and the clone era (IBM PC, MS-DOS, Compaq, Macintosh), software and networks (Windows, PageMaker, World Wide Web, Linux, Mosaic), Internet and multimedia (Windows 95, Google, Napster, dot-com crash), the mobile and cloud era (iPod, iPhone,AWS, iPad), and finally artificial intelligence (deep learning, voice assistants, ChatGPT, Claude). MACHINE GALLERY 11 landmark machines with Wikipedia photos, date, inventor and detailed profile: Altair 8800, Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC 5150, Apple Macintosh 128K, Nintendo NES, NeXT Cube, iPhone (1st generation), Raspberry Pi, Amazon EC2, NVIDIA CUDA GPU. INTERACTIVE QUIZ 15 randomly shuffled questions to test your knowledge of personal computing history. Real-time score, answer feedback, unlimited restarts. BILINGUAL FRENCH / ENGLISH Switch instantly between both languages with a single tap.