An exhibit about two words

hello, world

A short history of the first thing programmers say, in seven desks.

For more than fifty years, the first program anyone writes in a new language has printed the same two words. Here's where they came from and where they went, one desk at a time.

Every desk is set up the way an ordinary one looked that year. Step inside any of them to look around, and tap anything on it to find out what it is.

01Bell Labs · Murray Hill, New Jersey

1972: It started with B

The first known hello, world was stored in three pieces, because a word of memory only held four characters.

main( ) {
    extrn a, b, c;
    putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}

a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

B, 1972

A line drawing of a steel office desk from 1972 with a teletype terminal printing on a roll of paper, a curl of paper tape, a rotary desk phone, a typed memo, a notepad and a mug.

Step inside the 1972 desk

02Bell Labs · Murray Hill, New Jersey

1978: The book that made it a habit

Kernighan and Ritchie opened The C Programming Language with hello, world, and nearly every programming book since has copied them.

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

C, 1978

A line drawing of a 1978 office desk with a video terminal showing hello, world, the white C Programming Language book with its blue C, a stack of fanfold printout, an eight-inch floppy disk and a desk lamp.

Step inside the 1978 desk

03A bedroom, almost anywhere

1982: Everyone's first program

Home computers switched on straight into BASIC. Two lines, and the screen said hello until someone stopped it.

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

BASIC, 1982

A line drawing of a 1982 wooden desk with a TV showing HELLO WORLD over and over, a home computer keyboard, a cassette recorder, a magazine open to a type-in listing, a joystick and a can of soda.

Step inside the 1982 desk

04CERN · Geneva, Switzerland

1991: Hello, web

The first web page went up in August 1991. It explained, in plain words, what the web was.

<TITLE>The World Wide Web project</TITLE>
<H1>World Wide Web</H1>
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area
hypermedia information retrieval
initiative aiming to give universal
access to a large universe of documents.

HTML, 1991 (shortened)

A line drawing of a 1991 desk at CERN with a black NeXT cube wearing a handwritten red label, a black monitor showing the first web page, a black keyboard and mouse, a printed proposal and a mug.

Step inside the 1991 desk

05A home office, on dial-up

1995: Hello from the browser

JavaScript was written in about ten days, and one of the first things everyone made it do was pop up a box that said hello.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
  alert("Hello, World!");
</SCRIPT>

JavaScript, 1995

A line drawing of a 1995 home desk with a beige tower computer, a big CRT monitor showing a Hello, World! alert box with a sticky note on its corner, a beige keyboard, a ball mouse on a pad, a modem and a CD case.

Step inside the 1995 desk

06A coffee shop, on the Wi-Fi

2008: Hello, pocket

Phones opened up to outside apps, and a whole new crowd of programmers said hello from a screen in their pocket.

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];
    label.text = @"Hello, World!";
    NSLog(@"Hello, World!");
}

Objective-C, 2008

A line drawing of a slim 2008 table with an open laptop showing Hello, World! code, a smartphone running a one-label app, a paper coffee cup with a sleeve and an open sketchbook of phone screens.

Step inside the 2008 desk

07Mark's desk · the voice note for Episode 1

2026: Hello, agents

Mark recorded a voice note asking for a hello world website about the history of hello world. You are looking at it.

"I want you to just make a Hello World
 test website. Publish it from
 beginning to end."

English, 2026

A line drawing of a 2026 desk with a laptop running an AI agent in a terminal, a phone showing a 2:31 voice recording, a potted plant, a sticky note and a mug.

Step inside the 2026 desk