Apple Macintosh
Apple Computer launched the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface, with a single $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Macintosh included many of the Lisa's features at a much more affordable price: $2,500. Apple's commercial played on the theme of George Orwell's "1984" and featured the destruction of Big Brother with the power of personal computing found in a Macintosh. Applications that came as part of the which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which demonstrated
package included MacPaint, WYSIWYG (What
IBM PC Jr.
IBM released its PC Jr. and PC-AT. The PC Jr. failed, but the PC-AT, several times faster than original PC and based on the Intel 80286 chip, claimed success with its notable increases in performance and storage capacity, all for about $4,000. It also included more RAM and accommodated high-density 1.2-megabyte 5 1/4-inch floppy disks.
1985
Amiga 1000 with Seiko Music Keyboard 1985
The Amiga 1000 is released. Commodore's Amiga 1000 sold for $1,295 dollars (without monitor) and had audio and video capabilities beyond those found in most other personal computers. It developed a very loyal following and add-on components allowed it to be upgraded easily. The inside of the case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner as well as the paw print of his dog Мitchy.
1986
Connection MachineDaniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp. moved artificial intelligence a step forward when he developed the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine. The machine used 16,000 processors and could complete several billion operations per second. Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible network that users could alter by reprogramming rather than rewiring.
The machine's system of connections and switches let processors broadcast information and requests for help to other processors in a simulation of brainlike associative recall. Using this system, the machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out among the many processors. IBM and MIPS released the first RISC-based workstations, the PC/RT and R2000-based systems. Reduced instruction set computers grew out of the observation that the simplest 20 percent of a computer's instruction set does 80 percent of the work, including most base operations such as add, load from memorv, and store in memorv.
The IBM PC-RT had 1 megabyte of RAM, a 1.2-megabyte floppy disk drive, and a 40-megabyte ha.d drive. It performed 2 million instructions per second, but other RISC-based computers worked significantly faster.
IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers. The first IBMs to include Intel's 80386 chip, the company had shipped more than 1 million units by the end of the year. IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first time.
1988
NeXT
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own company, unveiled the NeXT. The computer he created failed but was recognized as an important innovation. At abase price of $6,500, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular. The significance of the NeXT rested in its place as the first personal computer to incorporate a drive for an optical storage disk, a built-in digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented languages to simplify programming. The NeXT offered Motorola 68030 microprocessors, 8 megabytes of RAM, and a 256-megabyte read/write optical disk storage.
