The PC Revolution (1975-1989)
Microsoft and Apple are both founded in 1975-76. The Altair, the Apple II, the IBM PC, the Mac. Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, WordPerfect. The PC moves from hobbyist to household within 14 years.
Part of Technology
28 moments in this segment.
- — Microsoft Founded. April 4, 1975. Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft to sell BASIC for the Altair. Within 25 years, the most valuable company in the world. Gates is 19 at the founding.
- — Altair 8800 (Popular Electronics Cover). January 1975. The MITS Altair 8800 — the first commercially-successful personal computer kit. The cover of Popular Electronics that launched the homebrew industry; Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for it and founded Microsoft within months.
- — Cray-1 Supercomputer. March 1976. Seymour Cray's Cray-1 — the most famous supercomputer of all time. Sold for $7.9M (≈$40M today); installed at Los Alamos. The shape of the modern supercomputer arms race.
- — Apple Founded. April 1, 1976. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne found Apple in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. Wayne sells his 10% stake for $800 twelve days later; it would have been worth ~$300B by 2024.
- — Apple II Released. June 10, 1977. The Apple II — the first mass-market personal computer. 6M units sold over 16 years. The platform on which VisiCalc (1979) became the first killer app.
- — ARM Architecture Born. October 1985. Acorn Computers in Cambridge designs the ARM1 — a low-power RISC processor for the BBC Micro. By 2024, ARM chips ship in 270+ billion devices; the underlying CPU architecture of every smartphone in the world.
- — VisiCalc — First Spreadsheet. October 1979. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston ship VisiCalc on the Apple II. The first killer app: businesses bought Apple IIs just to run it. Killed the punched-card era of accounting.
- — IBM PC. August 12, 1981. IBM ships the 5150 — the original IBM PC. Open architecture; clones flood the market; PC becomes the de-facto standard for business computing. IBM licenses DOS from a tiny Microsoft.
- — Sun Microsystems Founded. February 24, 1982. Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy. "The network is the computer." Dominates the engineering workstation market through the 1990s; Java ships in 1995. Bought by Oracle 2010.
- — Adobe Founded. December 1982. John Warnock and Charles Geschke leave Xerox PARC to found Adobe. PostScript ships in 1984; Illustrator in 1987; Photoshop in 1990. The graphic-design industry runs on Adobe within a decade.
- — Tron — First Computer-Animated Feature. July 9, 1982. Tron's release. 15 minutes of computer-generated imagery; first feature film to make heavy use of CGI. The Visual-Effects Academy disqualified it because computers were considered "cheating."
- — Lotus 1-2-3. January 26, 1983. Mitch Kapor's Lotus 1-2-3 — the spreadsheet that established the IBM PC platform. Outsold every other business application for the rest of the decade.
- — AOL Founded. May 24, 1985. Quantum Computer Services (renamed AOL in 1991) launches. By 2001, 30M paying subscribers. The "You've got mail" jingle defines the consumer internet onramp of the 1990s.
- — Nintendo NES Launches in NA. October 18, 1985. Nintendo Entertainment System launches in North America after the 1983 video-game crash had killed the home-console market. Sold 62M units; rebuilt the industry single-handed.
- — GNU Project Announced. September 27, 1983. Richard Stallman announces the GNU Project — a free Unix-compatible OS. The GNU GPL (1989) and the broader free-software movement that followed reshape the entire software industry; Linux (1991) completes the GNU stack.
- — Macintosh — 1984 Super Bowl Ad. January 22, 1984. The "1984" Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott aired once. Two days later: the Macintosh launch keynote. First commercial PC with a GUI + mouse to reach mainstream success.
- — Macintosh Launch Keynote. January 24, 1984. Steve Jobs unveils the Mac at the Apple shareholder meeting. The Mac speaks for itself: "Hello, I am Macintosh." Iconic launch-keynote template that Jobs would revisit for decades.
- — Amiga 1000 Launch — Andy Warhol Demo. July 23, 1985. Andy Warhol demos the Amiga 1000's graphics by drawing Debbie Harry. The strangest computer-launch event of the 1980s.
- — Commodore Amiga 1000. July 23, 1985. The Amiga — multi-tasking 32-bit OS, true colour graphics, 4-channel sampled audio. Years ahead of its time; never reached the install base its tech deserved. Commodore folds in 1994.
- — NeXT Founded. September 1985. Steve Jobs, ousted from Apple, founds NeXT. The NeXT cube's OS becomes the basis of macOS (after Apple's 1996 acquisition) and indirectly of iOS. Tim Berners-Lee writes the first web browser on a NeXT machine.
- — Microsoft Excel Released. September 1985. Microsoft Excel ships for the Macintosh — Microsoft's first GUI application. Windows version follows in 1987; by 1993 Excel has overtaken Lotus 1-2-3 as the dominant spreadsheet.
- — Windows 1.0. November 20, 1985. Microsoft ships Windows 1.0 — a GUI layered on top of MS-DOS. Slow, ugly, mocked. By Windows 3.0 (1990) it was the most-used desktop OS in the world; held that position for 30+ years.
- — Sega Genesis Launches in NA. August 14, 1989. Sega Genesis launches in North America. "Genesis does what Nintendon't." Sega briefly outsells Nintendo in the US (1991-94) — the only time before or since.
- — Game Boy Released. April 21, 1989. Nintendo Game Boy. 118M units sold. Tetris bundled with launch. The handheld-gaming category as the West understood it for two decades.
- — Apple II Launch Commercial. 1977 Apple II commercials — Steve Jobs in suit-and-tie, Steve Wozniak demoing colour graphics. The dawn of consumer computer marketing.
- — VisiCalc Demo. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston demoing VisiCalc — the killer app that made the Apple II a business machine.
- — Bill Gates on the Altair. 1975 interviews with the 19-year-old Bill Gates explaining BASIC for the Altair. The founding pitch of Microsoft.
- — Sony Walkman 1979 Commercial. The original TPS-L2 Walkman commercial. 30,000 units sold in two months in Japan; gave public space its first portable soundtrack.
