Timeline: The 1980s
Abstract
What happened in computing in the 1980s, year by year. 188 events from 164 articles. Each line links the article that tells the story and carries the sources; the years are taken from those articles. This is the chronological way into the encyclopedia; the thematic way is [[index|the index]].
← The 1970s · [[index|Thematic index]] · The 1990s →
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