12 Modern Tech Devices the Smithsonian Is Saving for Posterity

Kodak actually built the first digital camera in 1975—it was the size of a shoebox, had only a 0.01 megapixel resolution and spat out black-and-white pictures. It would take another quarter of a century for digital cameras to get better, smaller and affordable enough to catch on. Among the very first that did was the Canon 5.0 megapixel Powershot, which cost $399 when it came out in 2005. When Americans began abandoning film en masse in the early years of the new millennium, this is the machine that made them do it.

You probably know the story. In 1996, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began work on a search engine they originally called BackRub. The following year, they changed the name to Google. In the early days, the pair built their own servers—30 racks of them—by hand using cheap computer parts. A few years ago, Smithsonian curators were visiting Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. (now known as the Googleplex, ) when they spotted one of the original servers. "We said, 'Do you have any more?'" Allison remembers. "They had one in New Jersey, and we got it on a long-term loan."

Twitter debuted in 2006, but it took most brands another few years to wake up to the fact that microblogging was a good marketing tool. One of Twitter's early adopters was Caroline Shin, co-founder of LA's beloved Kogi BBQ truck, who'd tweet the truck's location and frequently draw hundreds of people willing to wait in line for a kimchi quesadilla. Without quite meaning to, Shin made marketing history. This is the Blackberry she did it with.

The Smithsonian's National Numismatic Collection contains 1.6 million objects related to money. Curators added the Square Reader in March. Developed in 2009 by entrepreneur Jack Dorsey and computer science engineer Jim McKelvey, the Square Reader fits into the audio jack of any mobile device and allows any vendor to process credit cards. "Square has had a particularly significant impact on small-business owners who were once limited by their location and lack of a cash register," wrote collections manager Hillery York.

Founded in 1970, Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is famous for many innovations, including laser printing. But its most influential and enduring one was Ethernet—pioneered in 1973 and by 1985 the standard technology for linking personal computers together through a local area network. Today, Ethernet is still a ubiquitous piece of network architecture, and it all began with the prototype circuit board here. "We love to have prototypes like this," Allison said, "because it gives you a sense of what it takes to be an inventor."

Most people's experience with GPS is relatively recent and limited to either their cars or smartphones. What few of us consider is the role of GPS in the food we eat. Starting in 2000, Boone, Iowa-based Outback began manufacturing GPS systems for tractors and other farming equipment. The aftermarket technology enabled the machinery to triangulate its precise location from any two of the 24 GPS satellites in orbit, bringing precision to seed planting and fertilizer spreading. Laugh if you want, but the invention revolutionzied farming—and probably got your lunch to you that much quicker.

In terms of business history, no event of the 21st century has had as enduring an effect as the financial meltdown of 2008—which started when Lehman Brothers imploded, then AIG, and then the American banking system, in general. It was the controversial law TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) that stopped most of the dominoes from falling and, logically enough, the Smithsonian was looking for an artifact related to the law. "We sat around as curators asking, 'What is the material culture of the TARP? What does that look like?'" said Allison. Finally, he found the piece of technology at the center of everything: Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's Motorola. This was the phone that Paulson used in the White House and the one he used to put the law together with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "He was happy to give it to us," Allison said, "but they took the chip out."

All chocolate comes from Cacao trees, which also happen to be threatened by a multitude of plant diseases. Fearing the collapse of the world's favorite treat, candy giant Mars began funding research in 2008 to sequence the cacao genome, a step necessary to develop disease-resistant plants. This 454 sequencer made by Roche was used by the scientific team at Indiana University, whose Center for Genomic and Bioinfromatics conducted and completed the project in 2010.

When Apple's iPhone hit the market in 2007, it made news. But when citizen-journalism progenitor Andy Carvin used his iPhone for his real-time coverage of the Arab Spring in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, he demonstrated that iPhones could report the news, too. Via his Twitter account, Carvin is still doing this. His influence in the journalism world landed him a post with National Public Radio and, most recently, as an editor with First Look Media. Rather than exhibit an off-the-rack iPhone, the Smithsonian picked Carvin's as an example of the global influence a smartphone can have. Best of all, the artifact exudes authenticity: Carvin busted the phone himself.

This beat-up Powerbook G3 laptop looks pretty dated (Apple discontinued the model in 1998), but it also happens to be an important part of the post-9/11 narrative. Photojournalist Pete Souza, one of the first journalists to cover the fall of Kabul under the Taliban, used this laptop to file his dispatches. Now, the official White House photographer, Souza also snapped the now-famous image of President Obama and the White House brass monitoring the Bin Laden raid from the Situation Room in 2011.

Adding an Android phone was an obvious step in charting the recent history of digital technology, but, as was the case with the Smithsonian's iPhone and Blackberry, the curators didn't want just any phone. The owner of this circa-2010 smartphone was none other than Vint Cerf, one of the designers of the Web's fundamental architecture and "Father of the Internet," as he is widely known. These days, Cerf works for Google as Chief Internet Evangelist and, presumably, he has a new phone.

In 1982, Michael Bloomberg, freshly fired from his Wall Street job with Solomon Brothers, began selling a proprietary desktop terminal that would provide securities traders with real-time news and information. By 1992, there were 10,000 Bloomberg Professional service terminals running in the world of finance. Today, the number is somewhere north of 325,000. Modeled on the IBM PCs popular at the time, the Bloomberg keyboard featured yellow function keys by market—commodities, currencies, mortgage securities and so on. One of the early adopters was Bill Gross, the "Bond King" who built Pacific Investment Management into a $2 trillion fund. "Gross is famous in the bond market—a well-known and extremely successful individual," Allison said. "What things does he use to do his everyday work? This [keyboard] is the essence of that."