1980 to 1990 Timeline Outline

Nexis is Introduced
(1980)

USENET: One of the First Computer Network Communications Systems
(1980)

Digital Cellular Telephone Technology is Developed
(1980)

The Name of the Rose
(1980)

Invention of Flash Memory
(Circa 1980)

The First Flight Simulator Program for a Personal Computer
(January 1980)

Pac-Man is Introduced
(May 22, 1980)

CNN is Launched
(June 1, 1980)

QDOS becomes Microsoft PC-DOS
(December 1980)

The Xerox Star: The "Office of the Future"
(1981)

There are 213 Hosts on the Arpanet
(1981)

CSNET
(1981)

The First Dance Notation Software
(1981)

The First Magazine on Computer Games
(1981)

Flexible Image Transport System (FITS)
(1981)

Discovery of Quantum Dots
(1981)

The First Commercially Successful "Portable" Computer
(April 1981)

Quick and Dirty Operating System Becomes MS-DOS
(July 1981)

The First Commercial Electronic Camera--Not Digital
(August 1981 – 1997)

IBM Introduces the IBM 5150- The IBM PC
(August 12, 1981)

Lotus Development Corporation is Founded
(1982)

Blade Runner
(1982)

U.S. Newspaper Program Microfilms Newspapers
(1982)

The First "Clamshell" Laptop?
(1982)

One of the First Films to Incorporate Computer Graphics
(1982)

IBM DB2
(1982)

TCP/IP as the Basis for ARPANET
(1982)

The First Whole Genome Shotgun Sequence
(1982)

The First Computer Virus Spread by Floppy Disk
(1982)

The First Formally Recognized Archival Description Standards in the U.S.
(1982)

The First Completely Computer-Generated (CGI) Cinematic Image Sequence in a Feature Film
(1982)

Defining a General Framework for Studying Complex Biological Systems
(1982)

The U.S. Withdraws its Antitrust Case Against IBM
(January 8, 1982)

Sun Microsystems Announces its First Workstation
(February 24, 1982)

The First IBM PC Compatible Computer
(June 1982)

William Gibson Coins the Word Cyberspace
(July 1982)

The First Cheap Home Computer
(August 1982)

Origins of the Smiley on the Internet
(September 19, 1982)

The First Scanner?
(November 1982)

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0
(November 1982)

Foundation of Adobe Systems
(December 1982)

The First Cellular Telephone Service in the United Sates
(December 16, 1982)

The "Trash" 80: The First Notebook Computer?
(1983)

Oracle Corporation
(1983)

6,000,000 Personal Computers are Sold in the U.S.
(1983)

ARPANET Splits into ARPANET and MILNET
(1983)

"Dial-a-Game": the Earliest Origins of America Online (AOL)
(1983)

Keyboarding over 350,000,000 Characters
(1983)

Early Form of Digital Rights Management
(1983)

The Declining Role of Print in Total Information Flow
(1983)

Possibly the Earliest Electronic Publication on Art
(1983)

The First Commercially Available IBM PC Compatible ROM Bios
(1983 – May 1984)

A Computer's Operating System Can be Protected by Copyright
(1983)

The First "Killer App" for the PC
(January 1983)

The Earliest Fictional Treatment of Word Processing by a Prominent Literary Author
(January 1983)

The 1970 UNESCO Convention is Implemented in U.S. Law
(January 1983)

ARPANET Requires TCP/IP
(January 1, 1983)

Microsoft Word 1.0
(September 1983)

Free Software
(September 23, 1983)

The First Commercial Analog Cellular Telephone Service
(October 13, 1983 – 1984)

Domain Name System
(November 1983)

Cyberpunk Coined
(November 1983)

On of the First Commercially Available Touchscreen Computers
(November 1983)

Coining the Term Computer Virus
(November 10, 1983)

Scalable PostScript Type Fonts
(1984)

Cyberspace
(1984)

Moderated Newsgroups
(1984)

There are Over 1000 Hosts on the Internet
(1984)

The First Desktop Publishing Program
(1984)

The Digital Domesday Project--Doomed to Early Digital Obsolescence
(1984 – 1986)

The Greatest PC Keyboard of All Time?
(1984)

2600: The Hacker Quarterly
(1984)

The First Book Written by a Computer Program
(1984)

Breakup of AT&T
(January 1, 1984)

Apple Introduces the "Mac"
(January 24, 1984)

Michael Dell Founds "PC's Limited"
(May 3, 1984)

Perhaps the first Underground "Ezine"
(June 1984)

The First Music CDs Pressed in the United States
(September 1984)

The First Study of Ancient DNA (aDNA)
(November 15, 1984)

Cisco Systems is Founded
(December 1984)

Origins of the Human Genome Project
(December 1984 – April 1987)

Groupware
(December 7, 1984)

The Intel 386
(1985)

The Perseus Digital Library Project
(1985)

Among the Earliest Practical Digital Libraries
(1985)

Avatar in the Context of Online Representation of a User
(1985)

Nintendo's Super Mario Bros.
(1985)

The First Fully Computer-Generated Character in a Film
(1985)

WordNet Begins
(1985)

Kasparov Defeats 32 Different Chess Computers
(1985)

The CD-ROM is Introduced
(1985)

The First PostScript Type Font: "Sonata" for Musical Notation
(1985)

The First Laserprinter for a Microcomputer
(January 1985)

The GNU Manifesto
(March 1985)

The First Registered Internet Domain
(March 15, 1985)

One of the First Online Communities
(April 1, 1985)

Quantum Computer Services, Precursor of AOL, Launches an Online Bulletin-Board Service
(May 1, 1985)

Discovery of the Antarctic Ozone Hole
(May 16, 1985)

The First Widely-Used Desktop Publishing Program
(July 1985 – 1986)

The First Hand-Held Graphing Calculator
(October 1985)

The Free Software Foundation
(October 4, 1985)

Windows 1.0
(November 20, 1985)

There are Over 5000 Hosts on ARPANET
(1986)

The First Hand-Held Electronic Book, or e-Book
(1986)

The Internet Backbone is Funded
(1986)

The First Semi-Automatic DNA Sequencer
(1986)

Cyberpunk
(1986)

NSFNET Connects Five Supercomputer Centers
(1986)

Electronic Tax Filing
(1986)

Probably the Best Book History and Library Film Set in the Middle Ages
(1986)

The First Alphabetic PostScript Font
(1986)

First PC Virus Epidemic
(January 1986)

The Hacker Manifesto
(January 8, 1986)

SGML Standard is Accepted
(October 1986)

The First Map of the Functioning Structure of an Entire Brain
(November 12, 1986)

The First DNA Sequencing Machine
(1987)

Soy Ink Introduced
(1987)

The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials
(1987)

Proposals to Sequence the Human Genome
(1987)

There are Over 10,000 Hosts on the Internet
(1987)

25,000,000 PCs Have Been Sold in the U.S.
(1987)

Origins of Adobe Photoshop
(1987 – February 1990)

One of the First Successful Hypermedia Systems Before the Web
(1987)

Slow Fires
(1987)

GSM is Developed
(1987)

Critique of Computational Linguistics
(1987)

Foundation of Computational Sylistics
(1987)

The First Hypertext Fiction: "Afternoon, a story"
(1987 – 1990)

Foundation of the First Commercial ISP
(May 12, 1987)

"Toward a National Research Telecommunications Network"
(November 1987)

OCLC Acquires Publisher of the Dewey Classification System
(1988)

The First Computer-Animated Film to Win an Academy Award
(1988)

The First Operational Online Antiquarian Bookselling Site
(1988)

Boing-Boing
(1988)

The First Commercial Network-Based Groupware Program
(1988)

International Standard for Computer-to-Computer Information Retrieval
(1988)

The First Computer Games Developers Conference
(1988)

Mathematica 1.0
(1988)

Australia Issues the First Polymer Banknote ($10)
(January 1988)

Probably the Worst Library Fire in History
(February 14, 1988)

The Unicode Universal Character Set
(August 29, 1988)

The First Computer Worm to Attract Wide Attention
(November 2, 1988)

The National Center for Biotechnology Information is Founded
(November 4, 1988)

There are over 100,000 Hosts on the Internet
(1989)

The First Gateways Between Private E-Mail Carriers and the Internet
(1989)

Digital HDTV
(1989)

Invention of "Buffered Media," the Basis for Webcasting
(1989)

The First Film to Win an Academy Award for Computer Generated Images
(1989)

The First Holographic Video Display
(1989)

An Internet-Based Hypertext System
(March 1989)

The First Commercially Available Tablet Computer
(September 1989)