10 most beautiful Computers

They ended their lives as museum pieces, aquariums, couches, and even at the bottom of the sea. But these are the ones that stay with us.

ZX Spectrum

Flashes of prismatic color on Clive Sinclair's tiny ZX Spectrum mark the original from its vast army of clones.

Cray 2

A vector supercomputer designed by the legendary Seymour Cray, its distinctive cooling fountain gave it the nickname "Bubbles.

PDP-10

Designed in the 1960s, the control units for DEC's PDP series of minicomputers came in bright colors like fuscia and cornflower blue.

Antikythera Mechanism

A ruined mechanism, found strewn over the sea bed near Antikythera, took a century to puzzle out. A complex analog computer dating to about 100BC, it is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

ZX80

Sinclair Research's ZX80 brought home computing to the British public in 1980 at a low price: just £100. It had 1 kilobyte of RAM.

G4 Cube

Jon Ive's award-winning Power Macintosh G4 Cube, a predecessor to the popular Mac Mini, suffered from functional flaws and a high price. An example was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

Ingraham

Jeffrey Stephenson's Ingraham's design is based on a 1946 Stromberg Carlson model 1110H: "American black walnut shell clad to the aluminum body of a Silverstone LC06 mini-ITX case. The back panel is a piece of burl from the same stock".

CPC-464

Designed to compete with the Commodore 64, Amstrad's CPC series was popular in Europe in the late 1980s. Like the thing itself, the graphics were colorful and blocky.

Difference Engine

Charles Babbage's Difference Engine tabulates polynomial functions. It was the immediate predecessor to his Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer left incomplete at his death in 1871.

Quantum computer

D-Wave Systems of British Columbia announced a prototype quantum computer in January, 2007. It can play Sudoku.