The inner shells are not smaller. They are farther.
Drag to turn, scroll or pinch to zoom. Move the time slider: each year becomes the outer shell in turn, and earlier years sink inward. Click a name to see where it came from and what came from it.
Each shell is the Earth in one year. The present is the outer shell, and every earlier year is nested inside it. A machine appears on the shell of the year it first ran, at the place it ran, and a radial line carries it outward to the present. A link runs from the design it was copied from, curving inward through time and across the globe to where the copy was built.
The storyboard named it in 2007–08: “Computer graphing of computer spread is ideal. Each computer was local to a position in spacetime and the design (genotype) spread through clear lines of transmission.” The IAS design is a clean case. Its reports were circulated deliberately, and its copies are dated, placed and documented.
Links drawn in grey and names in italic are inference, not record. BESM appears on some lists of IAS-family machines but was an independent Soviet design, so it is shown and flagged rather than left out. Keeping inference visibly distinct from record is the first rule of the instrument.
{"meta":{"title","tStart","tEnd","description"}, "nodes":[{"id","label","lat","lng","t","place","note","inferred"}], "links":[{"from","to","inferred"}]}. Any lineage with places and dates can be loaded the same way: species, manuscripts, editions, software forks.