Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

Appendix II 537• An industry pundit introduced the term vaporware to referto much-hyped but never-released software, such as a productcalled Ovation for ibm PCs.• IBM tried to market the PC Jr., a less-expensive PC for homeand school users. It failed to gain a foothold in the market.• More successfully, IBM offered the PC XT, the first personalcomputer that had a built-in hard drive.• Radio Shack introduced the Model 100, the first practicalnotebook computer.• Apple introduced the Lisa, a $10,000 computer with agraphical user interface. Its high price and slow performancemade it a flop, but its ideas would be more successfullyimplemented the following year in the Macintosh.• John Sculley became president of Apple Computer, beginninga bitter struggle with Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.• Richard Stallman began the GNU (GNU’s not UNIX) projectto create a version of UNIX that would not be subject toAT&T licensing.• The movie War Games portrayed teenage hackers takingcontrol of nuclear missile facilities.1984• A classic Super Bowl commercial introduced the AppleMacintosh, the computer “for the rest of us.” Based largelyon Alan Kay’s earlier work at Xerox PARC, the “Mac” usedmenus, icons, and a mouse instead of the cryptic text commandsrequired by MS-DOS.• Meanwhile, IBM introduced a more powerful personal computer,the PC/AT with the Intel 80286 chip.• Steve Jobs leaves Apple Computer to found a company calledNeXT.• Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was featured on a Time magazinecover.• The domain name system began. It allows Internet usersto connect to remote machines by name without having tospecify an exact network path.• British institutions develop JANET, the Joint AcademicNetwork.• Science fiction writer William Gibson coined the wordcyberspace in his novel Neuromancer. It began a new SFgenre called cyberpunk, featuring a harsh, violent, immersivehigh-tech world.1985• Desktop publishing was fueled by several developmentsincluding John Warnock’s PostScript page description languageand the Aldus PageMaker page layout program. TheMacintosh’s graphical interface gave it the early lead in thisapplication.• Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released, using many of thesame features as the Macintosh, although not nearly aswell.• There was increasing effort to unify the two versions ofunix (AT&T and BSD), with guidelines including the SystemV Interface Standard and POSIX.• Commodore introduces the Amiga, a machine with a sophisticatedoperating system and powerful color graphics. Themachine had many die-hard fans but ultimately could notsurvive in the marketplace.• ibm marketed the IBM 3090, a large, powerful mainframethat cost $9.3 million.• The Cray 2 supercomputer broke the 1-billion-instructions-a-secondbarrier.• A conferencing system called the Whole Earth ‘LectronicLink (WELL) was founded. Its earliest users are largelydrawn from Grateful Dead fans and assorted techies.1986• The National Science Foundation funded NSFNET, whichprovides high-speed Internet connections to link universitiesand research institutions.• Borland released a PROLOG compiler, making the artificialintelligence language accessible to PC users. A PCversion of Smalltalk also appeared from another company.• Apple beefed up the relatively anemic Macintosh with theMacintosh Plus, which has more memory.1987• Bjarne Stroustrup’s C++ language offered object-orientedprogramming in a form that was palatable to the legions ofC programmers. The language would surpass its predecessorin the coming decade.• Sun marked its first workstation based on RISC (reducedinstruction set computing) technology.• Apple sold its one millionth Macintosh. Apple also broughtout a new line of Macs (the Macintosh SE and Macintosh II)that, unlike the original Macs, were expandable by pluggingin cards.• Apple also introduced Hypercard, a simple hypertextauthoring system that became popular with educators.• ibm introduced a new line of personal computers called thePS/2. It featured a more efficient BUS called the Microchanneland some other innovations, but it sold only modestly.Most of the industry continued to further develop standardsbased upon the IBM PC AT.• The Thinking Machines Corporation’s Connection Machineintroduced massive parallel processing. It contained 64,000microprocessors that could collectively perform 2 billioninstructions per second.1988•Robert Morris Jr.’s “worm” accidentally ran out of control onthe Internet, bringing concerns about computer crimeand security to public attention. The Computer EmergencyResponse Team (CERT) was formed in response.Wolfram’s Mathematica program was a milestone in mathematicalcomputing, allowing users to not merely calculatebut also to solve symbolic equations automatically.Cray introduced the Cray Y-MP supercomputer. It couldprocess 2 billion operations per second.ibm announced a new midrange mainframe, the AS/400.Sandia National Laboratory began to build a massively parallel“hypercomputer” that would have 1,024 processorsworking in tandem.••••