Timeline: The 1980s

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1980

• Mystery House, the first graphic adventure, sells in Ziploc bags by mail order. → Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line
• David Patterson proposes the RISC hypothesis at Berkeley. → RISC vs. CISC
• Dennis Klatt publishes the complete design of his formant synthesizer in JASA. → Dennis Klatt
• Hoare’s Turing lecture “The Emperor’s Old Clothes” attacks software complexity. → Tony Hoare and the Science of Programming
• IBM’s talks with Kildall over CP/M collapse; Microsoft gets the PC operating-system deal. → Gary Kildall and the OS IBM Didn’t Take
• Jerry Pournelle’s user’s-eye column begins in Byte; it is renamed Computing at Chaos Manor in 1984. → Jim Warren and Jerry Pournelle
• Mead and Conway’s Introduction to VLSI Systems makes chip design teachable. → Lynn Conway and the VLSI Revolution
• Microsoft signs the DOS deal with IBM. → Bill Gates and Microsoft
• Namco releases Pac-Man. → Toru Iwatani and Pac-Man
• Roy Trubshaw hands MUD to Richard Bartle; Essex joins the ARPANET and the game becomes reachable over the Internet. → Richard Bartle
• Seymour Papert publishes Mindstorms. → Computer Science Education: Teaching the Machine
• The CCITT adopts the Group 3 fax standard, built largely on NTT and KDD work. → The Fax Machine
• Data General announces the Eclipse MV/8000, the Eagle of The Soul of a New Machine, on 29 April. → Dead End: Short Cases

1981

• ASK goes public on NASDAQ in October; Kurtzig is the first woman to take public a technology company she founded. → Sandra Kurtzig
• CYCLADES is shut down in favour of Transpac. → Louis Pouzin and the Datagram
• Chaum publishes mix networks, the ancestor of Tor. → David Chaum and Digital Cash
• Clarke, Emerson, and (independently) Sifakis invent model checking. → Formal Methods and Model Checking
• Codd receives the Turing Award; IBM ships its first relational product. → Edgar Codd and the Relational Model
• Csuri and Robert Kanuth found Cranston/Csuri Productions in Columbus; it closes in late 1987 as SGI workstations end the minicomputer animation business. → John Whitney and Charles Csuri
• Intel ships the iAPX 432, which runs a quarter as fast as its own 80286. → Dead End: The Intel iAPX 432
• Jim Clark founds Silicon Graphics on the Geometry Engine. → Dead End: Silicon Graphics
• Logitech is founded in a Swiss farmhouse. → Switzerland’s Tech Industry: Neutrality, Precision, and the Birthplace of the Web
• Masayoshi Son founds SoftBank as a Tokyo software distributor. → Masayoshi Son and SoftBank
• The Osborne 1 creates the portable computer market at $1,795. → Dead End: Osborne
• Feynman asks in May whether a classical computer can simulate nature, proposing the quantum computer. → Quantum Computing
• Fredkin, Rolf Landauer and Tommaso Toffoli convene the Physics of Computation conference at MIT’s Endicott House, where Feynman proposes the quantum computer. → Edward Fredkin
• The IBM PC 5150 ships in August. → The IBM PC: The Open Architecture That Standardized Computing

1982

• Adobe is founded to sell PostScript. → Adobe: The Creative Software Empire
• Andrew Fluegelman’s PC-Talk starts the shareware model. → Shareware and Public Domain: Software Distribution Before the Internet
• Bill Joy co-founds Sun Microsystems. → Bill Joy: The Other Sun Founder
• France rolls out Minitel, free to every telephone subscriber. → France’s Tech Industry: Minitel, State Ambition, and the Grande École Pipeline
• Fredkin and Toffoli publish “Conservative Logic”, setting out the Fredkin gate and reversible computation. → Edward Fredkin
• Goldwasser and Micali define probabilistic encryption and provable security. → Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali: Proving Cryptography Works
• Hartmut Esslinger wins Apple’s Snow White design competition and moves half of frog design to California. → Hartmut Esslinger
• Hopfield describes associative memory as energy minimization. → John Hopfield and Neural Networks
• Japan launches the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project. → Dead End: Buying a Computer Industry (Unidata, the Fifth Generation, Alvey, and ESPRIT)
• Japan launches the Fifth Generation Computer project. → Japan’s Computing Industry
• Perlis publishes “Epigrams on Programming”. → Alan Perlis and the Epigrams on Programming
• Sun Microsystems is founded around Bechtolsheim’s SUN workstation. → Andy Bechtolsheim and Sun
• The Commodore 64 launches at $595. → Jack Tramiel and Commodore
• The GRiD Compass sets the clamshell laptop shape. → The Portable Computer
• The Gaithersburg human-factors conference, precursor of CHI, is held. → Human-Computer Interaction: From Terminals to Touch
• The Pasadena Star-News becomes the first newspaper produced as full electronic pages, on a Triple-I system. → Triple-I: Information International
• The ZX Spectrum ships at £125. → The UK Computing Industry: From Bletchley to DeepMind
• Three ex-TI engineers found Compaq and clean-room the IBM PC BIOS. → Compaq and the BIOS Clean-Room
• Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto incorporate Compaq with $1.5 million from Ben Rosen’s Sevin Rosen Funds. → Rod Canion and Ben Rosen
• NEC launches the PC-9801 in October. → NEC PC-98 and Japan’s Domestic PC
• The Vectrex, the only home console with a vector display, reaches stores in November at $199. → Dead End: The Vectrex

1983

• WarGames prompts the first US federal computer-crime legislation. → Computing in Popular Culture
• 4.2BSD carries TCP/IP to the academic world. → The BSD Family: The Open-Source Unix That Survived a Lawsuit
• AARON’s turtle robot draws on the floor of the Tate in London in front of visitors. → Harold Cohen
• Acorn begins designing the ARM processor in Cambridge. → The ARM Architecture: The Chip That Runs the World
• Barto and Sutton’s actor-critic paper balances a pole. → Barto and Sutton: Learning from Reward
• Borland ships Turbo Pascal for $49.95. → Anders Hejlsberg: From Turbo Pascal to TypeScript
• Chaum’s blind signatures make anonymous digital cash possible. → David Chaum and Digital Cash
• Danny Hillis founds Thinking Machines Corporation. → Danny Hillis and the Connection Machine
• Feigenbaum’s The Fifth Generation sells Japan’s AI programme to Washington as a threat. → Edward Feigenbaum and the Expert System
• Ken Thompson receives the Turing Award with Dennis Ritchie. → Ken Thompson and Unix
• Paul Mockapetris designs the Domain Name System. → The Domain Name System: The Internet’s Phone Book
• The 414s, Milwaukee teenagers, break into Los Alamos and make the cover of Newsweek. → The 414s: The Teenagers Who Made Congress Notice Hacking
• The Bundespost launches Bildschirmtext. → Dead End: Bildschirmtext
• The Motorola DynaTAC, the first commercial handheld cellphone, goes on sale. → Motorola: The Company That Built the Cell Phone and Then Lost It
• The home-computer price war drives Texas Instruments out of the market. → The Home Computer Boom
• Voja Antonić publishes the Galaksija plans; Radio Belgrade broadcasts its software. → Yugoslavia’s Computing Industry: CER, Iskra Delta, and the Computer Broadcast on the Radio
• Wang Yongmin’s Wubi types any Chinese character in at most four keystrokes. → Wang Yongmin and the Chinese Input Wars
• ARPANET switches to TCP/IP on Flag Day, 1 January. → Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: Fathers of the Internet
• Susan Kare joins the Macintosh team in January and designs its icons and fonts. → Susan Kare and the Macintosh Icons
• Lotus 1-2-3 ships in January and earns $53 million in its first year. → Lotus 1-2-3: The IBM PC’s Killer App
• Ed Nather posts “The Story of Mel” to Usenet on 21 May. → The Story of Mel
• Nintendo launches the Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan. → Nintendo: A Century of Play
• The Orange Book, the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, is published with Roger Schell as founding deputy director of the NCSC. → Roger Schell and Steve Lipner
• Stallman announces the GNU project on Usenet on 27 September. → Richard Stallman and GNU

1984

• ASML spins out of Philips. → The Netherlands’ Tech Industry: Philips, ASML, and the Chokepoint
• Alexey Pajitnov writes Tetris on an Elektronika 60 in Moscow. → Alexey Pajitnov and Tetris
• BB84, the first quantum key-distribution protocol, is published. → Bennett and Brassard: Quantum Cryptography
• Brand says “Information wants to be free” at the first Hackers’ Conference. → Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth
• Cisco is founded. → The Networking Hardware Story: The Physical Internet
• DECtalk ships with Perfect Paul, a voice modelled on Klatt’s own. → Dennis Klatt
• Digital Productions renders The Last Starfighter on a Cray X-MP. → Gary Demos
• Douglas Lenat starts Cyc, the attempt to hand-encode common sense. → Douglas Lenat and Cyc
• HP’s ThinkJet is the first mass-market thermal inkjet. → The History of Printing
• Henk Rogers’s The Black Onyx, Japan’s first successful role-playing game, ships for the PC-8801. → Henk Rogers
• Ken Sakamura launches the TRON project. → Ken Sakamura and TRON
• Psion’s Organiser, the first handheld computer sold in volume, launches at £99. → David Potter
• Ray Ozzie founds Iris Associates with Lotus funding to rebuild PLATO Notes for PCs. → Ray Ozzie
• Sam Pitroda founds C-DOT to build rugged rural telephone exchanges for India. → Sam Pitroda and India’s Telecom Revolution
• Steven Levy’s Hackers codifies the Hacker Ethic. → The Hacker Culture: Curiosity as a Way of Life
• The AT&T breakup ends the monopoly funding model behind Bell Labs. → Bell Labs: The Idea Factory
• The Apple IIc ships as the first product in frog design’s Snow White language, which Apple uses until 1990. → Hartmut Esslinger
• The BCS receives its Royal Charter. → BCS: The Chartered Institute for IT
• The Btx hack makes the Chaos Computer Club a recognized voice on data protection. → Wau Holland: Conscience of the Chaos Computer Club
• The Chaos Computer Club’s Btx hack transfers 134,634.88 DM from a Hamburg bank. → Dead End: Bildschirmtext
• The Kurzweil K250 sampling synthesizer ships. → Ray Kurzweil
• The US Census Bureau first counts household computers: 8.2%. → How We Use Computers
• The first AP Computer Science exam is given. → Computer Science Education: Teaching the Machine
• Women’s share of computer science degrees begins its long decline. → Women in Computing: The Invisible Pioneers
• Jack Tramiel leaves Commodore in January and buys Atari. → Jack Tramiel and Commodore
• The Macintosh goes on sale on 24 January for $2,495. → The Macintosh
• Michael Dell registers PC’s Limited from a University of Texas dorm room with about $1,000. → Michael Dell
• The Civil Aeronautics Board bans reservation systems from ranking flights by carrier and requires their ordering criteria to be disclosed. → SABRE and Airline Reservation Systems

1985

• Brand co-founds The WELL. → Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth
• Commodore launches the Amiga with 4,096 colors and preemptive multitasking at $1,295. → Dead End: The Amiga
• Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson prove the FLP impossibility result. → Distributed Systems: Consensus, CAP, and the Hard Problems
• Goldwasser, Micali, and Rackoff invent zero-knowledge proofs. → Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali: Proving Cryptography Works
• Grolier releases The Electronic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, 9 million words of text and no pictures. → Britannica and the CD-ROM Encyclopedias
• Intel exits the DRAM business it invented and bets on microprocessors. → Andy Grove and Intel
• Negroponte co-founds the MIT Media Lab. → Nicholas Negroponte
• Radia Perlman invents the Spanning Tree Protocol. → Radia Perlman and the Spanning Tree Protocol
• Richard Karp receives the Turing Award. → Richard Karp and the 21 Problems
• Sega releases Yu Suzuki’s Hang-On, steered by leaning on a replica motorbike and drawn with the Super Scaler sprite-scaling board. → Yu Suzuki
• Sophie Wilson designs the ARM instruction set at Acorn with a team of three. → Sophie Wilson and ARM
• Stallman publishes the GNU Manifesto and founds the Free Software Foundation. → Richard Stallman and GNU
• Steve Jobs is forced out of Apple. → Steve Jobs and Apple
• Stroustrup publishes The C++ Programming Language. → Bjarne Stroustrup and C++
• The MIT Media Lab opens in I. M. Pei’s Wiesner Building. → The MIT Media Lab
• The Nintendo Entertainment System revives the American market after the 1983 crash. → The Console Wars: How Hardware Battles Shaped Gaming
• The Sinclair C5 electric tricycle takes Sinclair Vehicles into receivership within ten months. → Clive Sinclair
• The T414 transputer ships; occam has been available since 1983. → David May
• The Toshiba T1100 makes the battery-powered PC-compatible a volume product. → The Portable Computer
• Ultima IV asks the player to embody eight virtues and names the player’s character an avatar. → Richard Garriott
• Windows 1.0 ships as a shell over MS-DOS. → The Windows Story
• Wozniak leaves Apple. → Steve Wozniak: The Engineer’s Apple
• The Atari ST ships in June at $799 with built-in MIDI ports. → The Atari ST
• The Therac-25 begins overdosing patients; six cases by January 1987. → Famous Software Disasters
• Macintosh, LaserWriter, and PageMaker (shipped in July) create desktop publishing. → The Desktop Publishing Revolution
• Excel appears on 30 September, for the Macintosh only. → The Spreadsheet Revolution
• IBM launches Token Ring at 4 Mbps on 15 October. → Dead End: Token Ring

1986

• ANSI standardizes SQL; ISO follows in 1987. → SQL: The Query Language That Outlived Everything
• Clifford Stoll’s 75-cent accounting error leads to KGB-paid hackers in Germany. → The KGB Hack: Karl Koch, Markus Hess, and the Cuckoo’s Egg
• Compaq beats IBM to the 386 with the Deskpro 386. → Compaq and the BIOS Clean-Room
• Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson prove that every NP statement has a zero-knowledge proof. → Avi Wigderson
• Hamming gives “You and Your Research”. → Richard Hamming
• Heinz Nixdorf dies on the dance floor of his own party at the first CeBIT. → Heinz Nixdorf
• Hopcroft and Tarjan share the Turing Award. → Hopcroft and Tarjan: Depth-First Search and the Linear-Time Graph
• Joe Armstrong begins Erlang at Ericsson. → Erlang and the Actor Model
• Pixar is founded with Catmull as co-founder. → Ed Catmull
• Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams publish backpropagation in Nature. → Canada’s AI Cluster: How Three Universities Produced the Deep Learning Revolution
• The BBC Domesday Project puts a nation on two laserdiscs; they are nearly unreadable within sixteen years. → Link Rot and the Digital Dark Age
• The IETF holds its first meeting. → The Open Standards Process: How the Internet Governs Itself
• Sinclair sells the computer business to Amstrad for £5 million in April. → Clive Sinclair
• Compaq’s Deskpro 386 ships seven months before IBM’s first 386 machine. → Rod Canion and Ben Rosen

1987

• Andy Grove becomes Intel CEO. → Andy Grove and Intel
• Centronics sells its printer business to GENICOM for $87 million. → Dead End: Centronics
• HyperCard ships free with every Macintosh. → Bill Atkinson and HyperCard
• John Cocke receives the Turing Award. → John Cocke and the IBM 801
• John McAfee founds the first commercial antivirus company. → John McAfee: From Antivirus Pioneer to Fugitive
• Larry Wall releases Perl. → Larry Wall and Perl
• Liskov states the substitution principle. → Barbara Liskov and Data Abstraction
• McAfee, G Data, and ESET independently ship the first antivirus scanners. → The Antivirus Industry
• Ren Zhengfei founds Huawei in Shenzhen with about $3,000. → Ren Zhengfei and Huawei: From PLA Engineer to Global Telecom Giant
• TSMC is founded; the foundry model reshapes chipmaking. → The Semiconductor Race: The Geopolitics of Silicon
• Tanenbaum releases MINIX. → Andrew Tanenbaum and MINIX
• The ISO 8859 character sets extend Latin script one region at a time. → The Globalization of Software: i18n, L10n, and the Hidden Complexity of “Hello, World”
• The expert-systems market collapses; the second AI winter begins. → Expert Systems and the First AI Winter
• Morris Chang founds TSMC on 21 February, the first pure-play foundry. → Morris Chang and TSMC: The Man Who Made Chips a Service
• Omnibus closes itself, Digital Productions and Robert Abel and Associates on the same day, 13 April. → Dead End: Omnibus Computer Graphics
• Lucasfilm Games releases Maniac Mansion, built on Ron Gilbert’s SCUMM engine and its verb-and-object interface. → LucasArts and the Point-and-Click Adventure

1988

• DEC cancels PRISM/Mica; Dave Cutler moves to Microsoft. → Dave Cutler and Windows NT
• DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, is founded with Wahlster among its scientific directors. → Wolfgang Wahlster
• East Germany presents a self-developed 1-megabit memory chip to Erich Honecker. → Computing in East Germany: Robotron and the Kombinate
• Iskra Delta collapses. → Yugoslavia’s Computing Industry: CER, Iskra Delta, and the Computer Broadcast on the Radio
• Ivan Sutherland receives the Turing Award. → Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad: The First Graphical Interface
• Jarkko Oikarinen writes Internet Relay Chat in Oulu. → IRC: Internet Relay Chat and the Roots of Real-Time Messaging
• Pearl’s book makes Bayesian networks orthodoxy in AI. → Judea Pearl and the Causal Revolution
• Steve Gibson releases SpinRite, the hard-disk recovery utility that funds everything he gives away afterwards. → Steve Gibson
• SunOS 4.0 brings dynamic loading of shared libraries at runtime. → The Linker and Loader Story: The Invisible Tool That Assembles Programs
• Sutton publishes temporal-difference learning. → Barto and Sutton: Learning from Reward
• The Morris worm brings down much of the early internet. → Cybersecurity: The Invisible War
• The Morris worm ends the era of the trusting network. → The History of Hacking: From Exploration to Geopolitics
• Wolfram releases Mathematica. → Computer Algebra Systems
• The House of Lords acquits the Prestel hackers Schifreen and Gold, exposing the gap that the Computer Misuse Act 1990 closes. → Videotex: Prestel, Minitel and the Viewdata Era
• Mathematica 1.0 ships from Wolfram Research. → Stephen Wolfram
• NeXT introduces the frog-designed die-cast magnesium cube. → Hartmut Esslinger
• The Morris worm is released on 2 November and knocks out about a tenth of the internet. → Robert Tappan Morris and the First Internet Worm

1989

• BGP is first specified, the routing protocol that holds the internet together. → The Networking Hardware Story: The Physical Internet
• Berners-Lee’s CERN proposal is marked “Vague but exciting”. → Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web
• Joseph Popp distributes the first ransomware on floppy disks at an AIDS conference. → The Ransomware Epidemic: The Industrialization of Cybercrime
• Karl Koch is found burned to death in a forest. → The KGB Hack: Karl Koch, Markus Hess, and the Cuckoo’s Egg
• Lotus Notes 1.0 ships; Price Waterhouse has already ordered 10,000 copies. → Ray Ozzie
• Nintendo wins the Tetris rights in Moscow and bundles the game with the Game Boy. → Alexey Pajitnov and Tetris
• Rogers walks into Elorg in Moscow uninvited and secures Tetris’s handheld rights for Nintendo’s Game Boy. → Henk Rogers
• Stallman publishes the GNU General Public License. → The Open Source Business Model
• US trade pressure kills TRON’s desktop plans for Japanese schools. → Ken Sakamura and TRON
• Uszkoreit founds the Language Technology Lab at DFKI. → Hans Uszkoreit and German Language Technology
• William Kahan receives the Turing Award. → William Kahan and IEEE 754
• Yann LeCun’s first practical convolutional network reads handwritten digits at Bell Labs. → Yann LeCun and Convolutional Networks
• The first customer logs on to The World, the first commercial dial-up Internet provider. → The AOL Era
• Guido van Rossum starts Python over the Christmas holiday. → Guido van Rossum and Python

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