The Cray-2 vector supercomputer was released in 1985 and was the successor to the Cray XMP by Cray Research. At the time of its release it was the fastest computer in the world, bumping the XMP off the top spot. It was capable of 1.9 GFLOPS. The first Cray-2 had…
On March 15th, 1985 Symbolic Computers registered the first .com domain, symbolic.com, becoming the first company in history to register a top-level domain. It still exists to this day and is used as the personal blog of Aron Meystedt, owner of xf.com, which acquired the domain in August of 2009….
The Commodore Amiga 1000 was the successor to the best selling Commodore 64. It was built around a three coprocessor architecture that gave it unparalleled abilities in 3D animation, sound, and video, making it revolutionary compared to it’s rivals like the IBM PC. It was composed of a main video…
AOL began in 1985, originally founded as Quantum Computer Services. It officially became America Online in 1989. Four years later, in 1993, AOL had only 500,000 members. It provided access to the Internet, and, in addition, offered access to its own online information and services, which were specifically tailored to…
ATI (Array Technologies Incorporated) was founded in 1985 in Markham, Ontario, Canada by three men from Hong Kong. It started out manufacturing integrated graphics chips for companies like IBM. By 1987 it was producing it’s own graphics cards, the EGA and VGA Wonder brands, and on it’s way to the…
Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ in 1983 while working at Bell Labs, improving on the original C language. An extension to C, it is a descendent of the language B developed by Ken Thompson for the Unix operating system, and unlike C it is an object oriented language.
CDs and DVDs are everywhere these days. Whether they are used to hold music, data or computer software, they have become the standard medium for distributing large quantities of information in a reliable package. Compact discs are so easy and cheap to produce that America Online sent out millions of…
Released in 1985 by Microsoft, this was their first attempt at implementing a graphical user interface that could multitask on a personal computer. Microsoft sent kits to industry executives and press containing a cryptic squeegee and washcloth along with an invitation to the unveiling of their new software. Regarded mostly…
A family of operating systems for personal computers originally released in 1985 with version 1.0 from Microsoft. Windows dominates the personal computer world, running, by some estimates, on 90 percent of all personal computers. The remaining 10 percent are mostly Macintosh computers. Like the Macintosh operating environment, Windows provides a…