From Time Magazine, 1982: By The Millions, It Is Beeping Its Way Into Offices, Schools And Homes By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Michael Mortiz,San Francisco, J. Madeleine Nash,Chicago and Peter Stoler,New York WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME, the bright red advertisement asks in mock irritation, WHAT A PERSONAL COMPUTER CAN…
Apollo Computer unveiled the first work station, its DN100, offering more power than some minicomputers at a fraction of the price. Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems, another early entrant in the work station market, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graphics programs common in engineering.
Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1981, the Osborne-1 was the brain child of Adam Osborne, a computer columnist, writer, and engineer. It was co-developed with Lee Felsenstein, and Lee designed it. The goal was a truly integrated computer that could go wherever the user want to. The…
The first IBM PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor. The PC came equipped with 16 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 256k. The PC came with one or two 160k floppy disk drives and an optional color monitor. The price tag started at $1,565, which would be nearly…
This operating system originally began life as QDOS, created by computer company Seattle Computer Products in 1980. Microsoft would eventually purchase the system for $50k and license it to IBM. MS-DOS 1.0 was released in 1981 for IBM-PCs. The latest version is MS-DOS 6.22, released in 1994. Originally, IBM and…
In 1980, software company Sorcim introduced SuperCalc, a spreadsheet program with major improvements over VisiCalc. It was able to run on any system that supported the popular CP/M operating system. The Osborne-1 included a free copy of the financial software along with it’s bundle of programs, a big boost to…
A few years after the PET, Commodore released the VIC-20 in June, 1980. The system was the result of their efforts to build a computer that sold for less than $300. The machine was reportedly born mostly from an oversupply of parts. Aiming to compete with game consoles and intended…
In 1980, IBM and Microsoft joined forces. IBM, the venerable computer manufacturer, wanted Bill Gates and Paul Allen, founders of Microsoft, to design an operating system for its PCs. IBM decided to let Microsoft keep the rights to the MS-DOS operating system, allowing Gates and Allen to sell it to…
From Philips “History” The foundations for what was to become one of the world’s biggest electronics companies were laid in 1891 when Gerard Philips established a company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, to manufacture incandescent lamps and other electrical products. The company initially concentrated on making carbon-filament lamps and by the…
The IBM System/38 was part of the Future Systems Project at IBM, and was developed by Dr.Frank Soltis under the codename “Pacific”. It was released to the public in August, 1979 and featured one of the first relational database management systems using SQL, System R, also developed by the company….