Sections

The six rooms

Thirty pieces, arranged by the environment and the era rather than by the idea. Each room opens on its own page; the archive lists every piece in one place.

A row of CRT terminals in a dimly lit 1980s computer room, screens showing green-phosphor text, with a developer visible at the nearest station

Room 1

Green Screens

The first rooms where editor, compiler and debugger shared one window — Smalltalk-80, Emacs, vi, and the machines they ran on.

4 pieces

The Turbo Pascal 3.0 blue editor running on a CRT monitor, circa 1985, showing white text on the characteristic cobalt-blue background with the menu bar at the top

Room 2

The Blue Box

Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and the Borland decade — forty-nine dollars and the compiler that stayed resident in RAM.

5 pieces

A Delphi 2 form designer with a TDBGrid component being positioned on a form, showing the component palette at the top and the Object Inspector panel to the right

Room 3

Form Designers

When the form became the program — Visual Basic's toolbox, Delphi's component palette, and what the visual designer changed about who could build software.

4 pieces

A debugger paused at a breakpoint in an early 1990s IDE, showing the highlighted line, a watch window with variable values, and the call stack panel beside it

Room 4

The Inventions

Ideas that had to be named before they could be built — syntax highlighting, the breakpoint, IntelliSense, refactoring, the Language Server Protocol.

7 pieces

An adult developer's hands on a mechanical keyboard at night, the face partially lit by the blue-white glow of a large monitor showing source code

Room 5

The Builders

The people behind the tools — Hejlsberg, Stallman, Joy, Moolenaar, Kay, Ingalls, Gamma, Fowler, Beck, Dmitriev.

5 pieces

A stack of Borland product boxes — Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Delphi — photographed against a dark surface showing the period packaging design

Room 6

On the Shelf

The later environments and the institutions behind them — Eclipse Foundation, JetBrains, GitHub and Atom, Visual Studio Code, JupyterLab, the licences they shipped under.

5 pieces

Everything in one list