Gavilan SC

gavilanscDesigned by Manuel Fernandez, owner and founder of the Gavilan Computer Corporation, the Gaviian SC was one of the earliest portable computers and was the first machine dubbed a “laptop”. Although most portable computers were not the ultra light and powerful machines we know of today, it was one of the first to use a flip-top design.

It sold for $400 and came with a floppy drive and MS-DOS. It ran on an Intel 8088, had a GUI, and a standard 300 baud modem. The machine was much more compact than most of it’s competition, weighing in at 9 pounds. It also had built in nickel cadmium batteries and one of the first touchpad pointing devices. The SC was light years ahead of it’s time but is a little known footnote in computer history, introducing some of the early concepts that are commonplace in today’s mobile computing world. Unfortunately for Gavilan Computer and Fernandez, it was so far ahead that there was no market for the machine and the company went out of business in 1985 after filing for Chapter 11.

Snipes

snipesSnipes is one of the first networked multiplayer games. It was created in 1983 to test the capabilities and features of the new PC-based Novell Netware network operating system developed by former members of Superset Software. It is considered the precursor to modern multiplayer games such as Doom and a multitude of others, and is the first network application ever written for a commercial personal computer.  Hurst and Powell played the world’s first network death match with Snipes. The original development group was made up of Drew Major, Dale Neibauer, Kyle Powell and later Mark Hurst. The game is credited as the original inspiration behind Netware.

The game’s objective was to control your creature inside a maze and destroy enemy snipes and their bases called hives. Each game had a different random maze, and gameplay was achieved using the keyboard.

Novell Netware

netware-logoIn 1983 Raymond Noorda of Novell picked up on work originally done by Superset Software, a group that included Drew Major, Dale Neibauer, Kyle Powell and later Mark Hurst, who were later hired to continue work on the project. They were assigned the task of creating a disk sharing system for CP/M, the dominant OS for the hardware that Novell sold. Not confident in the future of CP/M, the team instead built a file sharing system based on the relatively new IBM-PC architecture. This spawned the first commercial network application, a game called Snipes used to test and demonstrate the network’s capabilites. Snipes is considered the beginning of multiplayer network games.

The resulting network operating system became known as Netware, with the first product being Netware 68 released in 1983. Subsequently, Netware 86 arrived in 1985, followed by Netware 286 in 1986, and Netware 386 in 1989. Novell dominated the NOS market from the mid 80s to the early 90s due to Netware’s high performance. Netware was so stable, there are reports of Novell servers running for years without interruption. Later Windows NT began killing the competition, and Novell was one of the few that barely survived, thrown from it’s top spot. Today Novell still produces Netware and recently acquired SUSE Linux and is actively developing new products.

Lotus 123

lotus123aLotus 123 was a spreadsheet program created by Lotus Software, which later became part of IBM. It was THE killer app of the mid 1980s, outselling it’s competitor VisiCalc. It helped plant the IBM PC firmly in the business world. Originally written by a Harvard student, it was supposedly sold for less than $200,000. It was released on January 26th 1983, and was the leading spreadsheet for DOS-based systems for many years.
The app came with a separate program for printing, but it couldn’t be run at the same time as the spreadsheet. Lotus also had what is considered the first context sensitive help.

It was also often used as a single operating environment over DOS with the use of third party macros and add-ins. The program has also been involved in a number of interface copyright court cases in it’s illustrious history. Slow to embrace Windows since it was loyal to OS/2, Lotus was eventually knocked from the top spot by Microsoft’s own spreadsheet app Excel. Today it lives on in the Lotus SmartSuite software system.

Apple Lisa

apple-lisaThe Lisa was built by Apple Computer and development originally began in the late 1970s. It was their first attempt at designing a personal computer with a graphical user interface. First introduced in January 1983, it was the first PC with a GUI and mouse. It used a 5mhz Motorola chip, 1MB RAM and sported two 5.25 inch floppy drives. The operating system had memory management and was capable of multitasking.

The machine turned out to be a complete failure for Apple, however. The high price tag had consumers balking, who prefered the more cost effective IBM PC instead.  The $9,995 price was mostly due to the whopping 96kb of RAM the system used. At the time, it was an extravagant amount of memory. The introduction of the similar but less expensive Macintosh also wound up pre-empting the Lisa, which saw two later models before being discontinued in 1986.

MIDI

First proposed to the Audio Engineering Society by Dave Smith in 1981, with the first specification produced in 1983. Pronounced middy, an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a standard adopted by the electronic music industry for controlling devices, such as synthesizers and sound cards, that emit music. At minimum, a MIDI representation of a sound includes values for the note’s pitch, length, and volume. It can also include additional characteristics, such as attack and delay time.

The MIDI standard is supported by most synthesizers, so sounds created on one synthesizer can be played and manipulated on another synthesizer. Computers that have a MIDI interface can record sounds created by a synthesizer and then manipulate the data to produce new sounds. For example, you can change the key of a composition with a single keystroke.

A number of software programs are available for composing and editing music that conforms to the MIDI standard. They offer a variety of functions: for instance, when you play a tune on a keyboard connected to a computer, a music program can translate what you play into a written score.

Microsoft Word

wordforwinOriginally written in 1983 for the IBM PC running DOS by Richard Brodie, Word has gone on to become the most dominant word processing software on the planet both in the home and in the office. Versions for the Mac, UNIX, OS/2 , and Windows arrived in the mid 80s. It would later be integrated into Microsoft Office. The first version had a sticker price of $500 US.

Wordperfect was then the dominant word processing program at the time, and  Microsoft at first struggled to break into the market with their new offering. Although it was the first word processor that showed typeface like bold and italics on screen on the IBM PC, it was not a true WYISWYG (what you see is what you get) system and didn’t become one until Word for Mac was released in 1985. Ironically it was this version that gave the program wider appeal and popularity grew. By 1989 with the debut of Word 4.0, it was incredibly successful, edging out Wordperfect, who didn’t produce a version for Windows. Today the program still exists as a part of Office and is recognized as the leading word processor on the market.

Compaq

compaqlogoCompaq Computer Corporation was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers who left Texas Instruments and invested $1,000 each to form their own company. Sketched on a paper place mat in a Houston pie shop, the first product was a portable personal computer able to run all of the software being developed then for the IBM PC.

The founders presented their idea to Ben Rosen, president of Sevin-Rosen Partners, a high-tech venture capital firm. The venture capitalists were impressed with the idea of a portable product innovating within the emerging standard and agreed to fund the new company.  Compaq recorded first year sales of $111 million, it became the most ever in a single year by an American business. Ben Rosen continued as chairman of Compaq’s board of directors until September 2000 when Compaq CEO Michael Capellas was elected chairman of the board by unanimous vote.