From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1980 to 1990 Timeline

Mead Data Central introduces the NEXIS service, providing online texts of various print publications.

Duke University graduate Students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis establish USENET, one of the first computer network communications systems. 

USENET was conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET."

The first newsgroups seem to have been established virtually at the inception of USENET.

"The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups. Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa' appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet.

" At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall," writes Horton. But at least it was possible for the Usenet community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet" (http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x10, accessed 01-16-2010).

Bell Labs develops digital cellular telephone technology, offering better sound quality, greater channel capacity and lower cost than analog.

Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist Umberto Eco publishes Il nome della rosa. 

The English translation by William Weaver appeared in 1983 under the tile of The Name of the Rose. It is an intellectual murder mystery, combining semiotics, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, set in an Italian monastery patterned after the abbey and library at Bobbio in 1327. Just a few of the appealing aspects of the plot, without a "spoiler," include an unknown treatise by Aristotle, On Laughter, a mysterious labyrinthine library, a medieval monk detective patterned after Sherlock Holmes, narration by a "sidekick" patterned after Dr. Watson, and many other features of interest to readers of this database.

This novel clearly attracted numerous contributors to the Wikipedia, and their articles both on Eco and The Name of the Rose provide such detailed and insightful analysis that it would be pointless to summarize. Instead I recommend that you follow the links for further information, and read the book if it suits your taste.

In 1983 Eco published an informative small illustrated book explaining aspects of the novel entitled Positille a Il nome della rosa. This was also translated into English by William Weaver as Postscript to the Name of the Rose, and published in 1984. I found reading Eco's Postscript very worthwhile.

Fujio Masuoka, working at Toshiba, invents flash memory.

"According to Toshiba, the name "flash" was suggested by Dr. Masuoka's colleague, Mr. Shoji Ariizumi, because the erasure process of the memory contents reminded him of a flash of a camera. Dr. Masuoka presented the invention at the IEEE 1984 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco, California" (Wikipedia article on flash memory, accessed 04-01-2009).

D. C. Wells, E. W. Greisen, and R. H. Harten develop FITS (Flexible Image Transport System,

"a digital file format used to store, transmit, and manipulate scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata.

"A major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images (80 character fixed-length strings) that carry keyword/value pairs, interleaved between data blocks. The keyword/value pairs provide information such as size, origin, coordinates, binary data format, free-form comments, history of the data, and anything else the creator desires: while many keywords are reserved for FITS use, the standard allows arbitrary use of the rest of the name-space" (Wikipedia article on FITS, accessed 03-24-2010).

Because of its special features FITS later became a very useful format for the long term preservation of digital images. It was also adopted by NASA as a standard.

The arcade video game Pac-Man is introduced in Japan.

"Originally launched in 1979 [sic], Namco's Pac-Man quickly became the most popular video game of all time. Pac-Man launched a global phenomenon, featuring the medium's biggest star character (and Mad Magazine's Man of the Year 1982). The title also gave birth to the 80's arcade culture while riding a wave of merchandising that reached Saturday Morning Cartoons, toys, pajamas and Pac-Man Fever, a beloved Top 40 record. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pac-Man must have one hell of an ego -- the format was borrowed, evolved or outright stolen by dozens of imitators, and remains a staple of arcade collections and mobile time diversions today. Though its gameplay heritage doesn't influence many games anymore, it's hard to imagine another game ever having the global impact of Pac-Man" (Video-Pro.com, The 52 Most Important Video Games of All time, No. 6. accessed 04-15-2009).

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III launches the Cable News Network (CNN). The husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchor its first newscast.

IBM hires Paul Allen and Bill Gates of Microsoft to create an operating system (OS) for their new personal computer, then under development.

Because Microsoft had no OS at the time, so they purchased a non-exclusive license to sell a CP/M clone called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products for $25,000.

Xerox introduces the 8010 Star Information System, the first commercial system to incorporate a bitmapped display, a windows-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, printer servers and e-mail.

Osborne produces the first commercially successful portable computer, the Osborne 1. It weighs twenty-three pounds, runs the CP/M operating system, and sells for $1795, with $2000 worth of software included.

There are 213 hosts on ARPANET; a new host is added approximately every 20 days.

The U.S. National Science Foundation funds CSNET (the "Computer Science Network") with leadership by Larry Landweber and David J. Farber.

CSNET was a computer network linking academic Computer Science departments nationwide—an alternative to ARPANET, to which many Computer Science departments did not have the privilege of access. CSNET connected with ARPANET using TCP/IP, and ran TCP/IP over X.25, but also supported departments without sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange.

American computer game and video game designer Eddie Dombrower creates the DOM system, the first dance notation software, on an Apple II computer.

DOM allowed choreographers to use a simple system of codes to enter their work. The resulting dance movements were then performed by a figure on screen.

Russell Sipe founds Computer Gaming World as a bi-monthly publication.

Computer Gaming World was the first magazine specifically devoted to computer games. The magazine published 268 issues before being replaced with Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. This went to online-only publication on April 8, 2008.  You can download the first 100 issues of Computer Gaming World at the Computer Gaming World Museum.

The Grolier Club of New York holds an exhibition entitled Bibliography: Its History and Development "to mark the completion of The National Union Catalogue: Pre-1956 Imprints", which began publication in 1968 and is finally complete in 754 folio volumes in 1981.

In 1984 The Grolier Club published an annotated bibliography of the exhibition with the same title by Bernard Breslauer and Roland Folter. In that volume Breslauer and Folter described the NUC, as it came to be known, as "the most extensive general bibliographical compilation of all times" (no. 169, p. 213).  With respect to bibliographical compilations printed on paper the statement remains true, though NUC was superceded around 1995 by bibliographical databases such as OCLC on the Internet.

Microsoft buys all rights to 86-DOS, otherwise known as QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000 or $75,000, depending on how the cost is calculated. They rename it MS-DOS. 

"IBM PC-DOS (and the separately sold MS-DOS, which was licensed therefrom), and its predecessor, 86-DOS, were loosely inspired by CP/M (Control Program / [for] Microcomputers) from Digital Research, which was the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers. However, PC-DOS never ran on less than an 8088 (16-bit).

"When IBM introduced their first microcomputer in 1980, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM initially approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates (possibly believing that Microsoft owned CP/M due to the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, which allowed CP/M to run on an Apple II. IBM was sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, the initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down—Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license, and to change the name to 'PC DOS'. DR founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew.

"IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named "QDOS" (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981.

"Microsoft also licensed their system to multiple computer companies, who supplied MS-DOS for their own hardware, sometimes under their own names. Microsoft later required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS, for the IBM PC. Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM (under the same name that IBM insisted upon for CP/M), and threatened legal action. IBM responded by offering an agreement: they would give PC consumers a choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86, Kildall's 8086 version. Side-by-side, CP/M cost almost $200 more than PC DOS, and sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the marketed operating system for PCs and PC compatibles" (Wikipedia article on DOS, accessed 02-05-2010).

IBM introduces their open architecture personal computer (PC) based on the Intel 8088 processor.

The IBM PC ran PC-DOS, the IBM-branded version of the 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS, provided by Microsoft. The IBM PC was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the "5100" series, though its architecture was not directly descended from the IBM 5100.

On August 1, 1981 a review of the IBM PC appeared on USENET (accessed 10-16-2009).

Sony releases the first commercial electronic camera, the Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). Not a digital camera, it is actually a video camera that takes video freeze-frames.

Mitchell Kapor, previously head of development at Visicorp, and Jonathan Sachs, with backing from Ben Rosen, found Lotus Development Corporation.

Kapor, who had been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, named the company after 'The Lotus Position' or "Padmasana.''

The science fiction film Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford and directed by Ridley Scott, loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, depicts a dreary, rainy, and polluted Los Angeles in 2019. In the film genetically manufactured, bioengineered biorobots called replicants—visually indistinguishable from adult humans—are used for dangerous and degrading work in Earth's "off-world colonies."  After a minor replicant uprising, replicants are banned on Earth; and specialist police units called "blade runners" are trained to hunt down and "retire" (kill) escaped replicants on Earth.

The film, which  became a cult classic for many reasons, including its unique sets, lighting, costumes and visual effects, is considered the last great science fiction film in which the special effects were produced entirely through analog, rather than digital or computer graphics methods, using elaborate model-making, multiple exposures, etc.

Scott's original director's cut of the film was first issued as a DVD in 1999. In 2007 the so-called "Final Cut" with a great deal of supplementary material, including three previous versions of the film, and a "definitive" documentary, even longer than the original film, was issued on DVD, HD-DVD and Blue-ray. The documentary, and the collection of versions of the film, present a superb opportunity to gain insight into way that Ridley Scott creates a film.

SUN Microsystems, founded in February of this year by students at Stanford who worked on the Stanford University Network, announces its first UNIX workstation, the Sun 1.

"The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation,  was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses" (Wikipedia article on Sun Microsystems, accessed 06-12-2009).

In cooperation with the Library of Congress, The National Endowment for the Humanities begins funding the United States Newspaper Program— "a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present."

The GRiD Compass 1100, introduced by Grid Systems Corporation, is probably the first commercial computer created in a "clamshell" laptop format, and one of the first truly portable machines.

The 1100 included a magnesium clamshell case with a screen that folded flat over the keyboard, a switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and a built-in modem.

Disney's movie Tron is one of the first films to incorporate computer graphics or computer animation, partly rendered on a Cray-1 Supercomputer, which also appears in the film.

IBM introduces the IBM DB2 relational database management system for mainframe computers.

DCA (Defense Communications Agency) and ARPA establish the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and IP (Internet Protocol), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. This leads to one of the first definitions of an “internet” as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and the “Internet” as connected TCP/IP internets.

Frederick Sanger and colleagues sequence the entire genome of bacteriophage lambda using a random shotgun technique.

This was the first whole genome shotgun (WGS) sequence.

Sanger, “Nucleotide Sequence of Bacteriophage Lambda,” J. Mol. Biol. 162 (1982) 729-73.

"A program called 'Elk Cloner' is credited with being the first computer virus to appear 'in the wild'—that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created." Written by Rich Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread by floppy disk.

William Gibson coins the word "cyberspace in his story, Burning Chrome, published in Omni magazine.

"It tells the story of two hackers who hack systems for profit. The two main characters are Bobby Quine who specializes in software and Automatic Jack whose field is hardware. A third character in the story is Rikki, a girl with whom Bobby becomes infatuated and for whom he wants to hit it big. Automatic Jack acquires a piece of Russian hacking software that is very sophisticated and hard to trace. The rest of the story unfolds with Bobby deciding to break into the system of a notorious and vicious criminal called Chrome, who handles money transfers for organized crime, and Automatic Jack reluctantly agreeing to help. One line from this story — "...the street finds its own uses for things" — has become a widely-quoted aphorism for describing the sometimes unexpected uses to which users can put technologies (for example, hip-hop DJs' reinvention of the turntable, which transformed turntables from a medium of playback into one of production)."

The National Information Systems Task Force (NISTF) of the Society of American Archivists develops the first two formally recognized archival description standards in the US: NISTF Data Elements Dictionary and USMARC AMC.

After thousands of hours of testimony (testimony of over 950 witnesses, 87 in court, the remainder by deposition) and the submission of tens of thousands of exhibits, the anti-trust case U.S. v. IBM is withdrawn on the grounds that the case is "without merit."

30,000,000 pages of documents were generated in the course of this anti-trust case.

Commodore issues the Commodore 64 — "the first cheap home computer."

The Commodore 64 looked like a bulky keyboard, but included color graphics, and excelled at playing early video games. Between 1982 and 1984 30,000,000 units were sold, making it the best-selling personal computer model of this era. Roughly 10,000 commercial programs were produced for this computer.

American computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman suggests on a bulletin board that the emoticons :-) and :- ( be used to express emotion on the Internet.

♦ You can view the original message at this link: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm, accessed 5-13-2009.

IBM introduces the Scanmaster 1, a mainframe computer terminal designed to scan, transmit and store images of documents electronically.

John Warnock and Chuck Gerschke found Adobe Systems.

At Abobe Warnock developed the PostScript page description language, a simplified version of the InterPress language that he developed at Xerox PARC.

The Federal Communications Commission authorizes American Telephone and Telegraph to build a commercial cellular telephone service in Chicago.

This was the beginning of commercial cellular service in the United States.

The TRS-80, Model 100, marketed in the U.S. by Tandy's Radio Shack, introduces the concept of a “laptop” computer.

More than 6,000,000 were sold. The introductory price was $1099.00.

Relational Software renames itself Oracle Corporation to align itself with its flagship relational database management system, Oracle version 3.

Six million personal computers are sold in the United States.

ARPANET splits into ARPANET and MILNET. MILNET, designed for unclassified U.S. Department of Defense traffic, will be integrated into the Defense Data Network that was created the previous year.

Control Video Corporation founded by William van Miester offers video games "by telephone" for Atari VCS game machine owners through a service called GameLine. Using variable speed adaptive modem technology, GameLine planned other services for the millions of game machine owners who might upgrade their units with programmable adaptors. The company nearly went bankrupt. After revamping its product line, the company changed its name to Quantum Computer Services in 1985.

In 1991 the company was renamed America Online (AOL).

Work begins on computerizing the text of the Oxford English Dictionary, defining "414,825 words backed by five million quotations, of which some two million were actually printed in the dictionary text." This required retyping the entire text into a database.

Editing an entry of the NOED using LEXX

"And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project began. More than 120 keyboarders of International Computaprint Corporation in Tampa, Florida, and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, USA, started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML. A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under a 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, led by F.W. Tompa and Gaston Gonnet; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation. Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM; the colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX, was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database."

The second edition of the OED was published on paper in 1989. 

Japanese software engineer Ryoichi Mori invents a digital products distribution system called superdistribution, incorporating one of the earliest forms of digital rights management.

Mori's  "Software Service System (SSS) took the form of a peer-to-peer-architecture with the following components:

◊"a cryptographic wrapper for digital products that cannot be removed and remains in place whenever the product is copied

◊"a digital rights management system for tracking usage of the product and assuring that any usage of the product or access to its code conforms to the terms set by the product's owner.

◊"an arrangement for secure payments from the product's users to its owner" (Wikipedia article on Superdistribution, accessed 01-03-2010).

Lotus Development Corporation releases Lotus 1-2-3. An integrated spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manger, it became the first "killer app" for the PC. In 1983 sales of 1-2-3 amounted to $54,000,000, making Lotus the largest independent software vendor in the world.

ARPANET requires that all connected machines use TCP/IP. TCP/ IP becomes the core Internet protocol and replaces NCP (Network Control Program) entirely.

Microsoft introduces Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS.

This was the first word processor to make extensive use of the computer mouse.

Richard Stallman announces the GNU free software project on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups.

The Motorola DynaTAC becomes the first mobile phone approved by the FCC in the United States.

"On Oct. 13, 1983, Bob Barnett, former president of Ameritech Mobile Communications placed the first commercial wireless call on a DynaTAC from inside a Chrysler convertible to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell who was in Germany at the time. The call, made at Soldier Field in Chicago, is considered by many as a major turning point in communications. Later Richard Frenkel, the head of system development at Bell Laboratories, said about the DynaTAC: 'It was a triumph.' " (Wikipedia article on Motorola DynaTAC, accessed 04-11-2009).

"In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed multiple, centrally controlled base stations (cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells partially overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used simultaneously for separate conversations in different cells" (Wikipedia article on Mobil phone, accessed 04-11-2009).

The Domain Name System (DNS), designed by Paul V. Mockapetris, is introduced for ARPANET.

The six original domains were .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int.

Bruce Bethke coins the word "cyberpunk" in his story with that name published in Amazing Stories.

Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-150, one of the earliest commercially available touchscreen computers.

"The screen is not a touch screen in the strict sense, but a 9" Sony CRT surrounded by infrared emitters and detectors which detect the position of any non-transparent object on the screen. In the original HP-150, these emitters & detectors were placed within small holes located in the inside of the monitor's bezel (which resulted in the bottom series of holes sometimes filling with dust and causing the touch screen to fail; until the dust was vacuumed from the holes)" (Wikipedia article on HP-150, accessed 12-30-2009).

At Lehigh University, Frederick Cohen demonstrates a virus-like program on a VAX11/750 system. The program is able to install itself to, or infect, other system objects.

In 1984 Cohen used the phrase "computer virus" – as suggested by his teacher Leonard Adleman – to describe the operation of such programs in terms of "infection". He defined a 'virus' as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.”

John Warnock and Chuck Geschke of Adobe Systems market the PostScript page description language, enabling scalable digital fonts and desktop publishing.

William Gibson popularizes the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer.

Gibson coined the term in his short story, Burning Chrome (1982), also noticed in this database.

Moderated newsgroups are introduced on USENET.

The number of hosts connected to the Internet exceeds 1000.

Bob Doyle introduces, the first Desktop Publishing program, MacPublisher, for the Macintosh.  

"MacPublisher introduced WYSIWYG layout for multi-column text and graphics, but it would not have been possible without graphics primitives like QuickDraw that Bill Atkinson had originally developed for the Apple Lisa computer. QuickDraw was incorporated in the PASCAL toolbox for the new Macintosh and was the basis for MacPaint." (Wikipedia article on MacPublisher).

Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC (with some funding from the European Commission's ESPRIT programme) mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England, with the multimedia  BBC Domesday Project.  It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence.

The Project  "included a new 'survey' of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and 'virtual walks'. Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally-prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.

"The project was stored on adapted laserdiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analog video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by Philips at their Eindhoven headquarters factory. Viewing the discs required an Acorn BBC Master expanded with an SCSI controller and an additional coprocessor controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially-produced laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a trackball (known at the time as a trackerball). The software for the project was written in BCPL (a precursor to C), to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might.

In 2002, there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare (and drives capable of accessing the discs even more rare). Aside from the difficulty of emulating the original code, a major issue was that the still images had been stored on the laserdisc as single-frame analogue video, which were overlaid by the computer system's graphical interface. The project had begun years before JPEG image compression and before truecolour computer video cards had become widely available.

"However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between the University of Leeds and University of Michigan) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation techniques. CAMiLEON copied the video footage from one of the extant Domesday laserdiscs. Another team, working for the UK National Archives (who hold the original Domesday Book) tracked down the original 1-inch videotape masters of the project. These were digitised and archived to Digital Betacam.

"A version of one of the discs was created that runs on a Windows PC. This version was reverse-engineered from an original Domesday Community disc and incorporates images from the videotape masters. It was initially available only via a terminal at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, Surrey but has been available since July 2004 on the web.

"The head of the Domesday Project, Mike Tibbets, has criticized the bodies to which the archive material was originally entrusted" (Wikipedia article on BBC Domesday Project, accessed 12-21-2008).

IBM introduces the model M keyboard, considered by PC World to be the "greatest keyboard of all time." (http://www.pcworld.com/article/147939/inside_the_worlds_greatest_keyboard.html) The PC World article contains a remarkable series of images showing how the keyboard was engineered and its many virtues.

Under the pen name of Emmanuel Goldstein, Eric Gordon Corley begins publication of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, 

"a quarterly American publication that specializes in publishing technical information on a variety of subjects including telephone switching systems, Internet protocols and services, as well as general news concerning the computer "underground" and left wing, and sometimes (but not recently), anarchist issues.

"The magazine's name comes from the phreaker discovery in the 1960s that the transmission of a 2600 hertz tone (which could be produced perfectly with a plastic toy whistle given away free with Cap'n Crunch cereal—discovered by friends of John Draper) over a long-distance trunk connection gained access to "operator mode" and allowed the user to explore aspects of the telephone system that were not otherwise accessible. The magazine was given its name by David Ruderman, who co-founded the magazine with his college friend and roommate, Eric Corley. It was first published in 1984, coinciding with the book of the same name and the break-up of AT&T. Ruderman ended his direct involvement with the magazine three years later.

"The magazine is published and edited by its co-founder Emmanuel Goldstein (a pen name of Eric Corley and allusion to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) . . . .

"The magazine offers free advertising for subscribers. Many subscribers who have been imprisoned will take out personal ads seeking new friends and penpals" (Wikipedia article on 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, accessed 01-17-2010(.

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), is officially broken up, ending a long-established monopoly on telephone service.

AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, known as "Baby Bells." AT&T, reduced in value by about 70%, continued to run all its long distance services.

Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh ("Mac"), with a graphical user interface based on the Xerox Star system.

At the age of 19 Michael Dell founds a company called "PC's Limited," building PC clones out of his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1987 the company changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation.

Three BBS SysOps --  "Grandmaster Ratte" (aka Swamp Ratte'), Franken Gibe, and Sid Vicious -- found the Cult of the Dead Cow, also known as cDc Communications, a computer hacker and DIY media organization.  They publish what may be the first underground ezine.

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner from Stanford University found Cisco Systems. named the company for San Francisco, gateway to the Pacific Rim.

In 1985, as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Health and Environmental Research Programs, Charles DeLisi and his advisors proposed, planned and defended before the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congress, the Human Genome Project. The proposal created a storm of controversy, but was included in President Ronald Reagan’s Fiscal Year 1987 budget submission to the Congress, and subsequently passed both the House and the Senate.

The beginning of the project may have occurred in a workshop known as the Alta Summit held in December 1984.

"Robert Sinsheimer, then Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), thought about sequencing the human genome as the core of a fund-raising opportunity in late 1984. He and others convened a group of eminent scientists to discuss the idea in May 1985. This workshop planted the idea, although it did not succeed in attracting money for a genome research institute on the campus of UCSC. Without knowing about the Santa Cruz workshop, Renato Dulbecco of the Salk Institute conceived of sequencing the genome as a tool to understand the genetic origins of cancer. Dulbecco, a Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist, laid out his ideas on Columbus Day, 1985, and subsequently in other public lectures and in a commentary for Science. The commentary, published in March 1986, was the first widely public exposure of the idea and gave impetus to the idea's third independent origin, by then already gathering steam.

"Charles DeLisi, who did not initially know about either the Santa Cruz workshop or Dulbecco's public lectures, conceived of a concerted effort to sequence the human genome under the aegis of the Department of Energy (DOE). DeLisi had worked on mathematical biology at the National Cancer Institute, the largest component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). How to interpret DNA sequences was one of the problems he had studied, working with the T-10 group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (a group of mathematicians and others interested in applying mathematics and computational techniques to biological questions). In 1985, DeLisi took the reins of DOE's Office of Health and Environmental Research, the program that supported most biology in the Department. The origins of DOE's biology program traced to the Manhattan Project, the World War II program that produced the first atomic bombs with its concern about how radiation caused genetic damage.

"In the fall of 1985, DeLisi was reading a draft government report on technologies to detect inherited mutations, a nagging problem in the study of children to those exposed to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, when he came up with the idea of a concerted program to sequence the human genome.9 DeLisi was positioned to translate his idea into money and staff. While his was the third public airing of the idea, it was DeLisi's conception and his station in government science administration that launched the genome project" (Robert Mullan Cook-Deegan, Origins of the Human Genome Project, accessed 05-24-2009).

In March 1986 the Department of Energy, Office of Health and Environmental Research, sponsored a workshop at Los Alamos. This was edited by M. Bitensky and published as Sequencing the Human Genome. Summary Report of the  Santa Fe Workshop, March 3-4, 1986. 

The initial report on the Human Genome Project appeared in April 1987 as:

Report on the Human Genome Initiative for the Office of Health and Environmental Research, Prepared by the Subcommittee on Human Genome of the Health and Environmental Research Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Research Office of Health and Environmental Research.

Ray Ozzie leaves Lotus Development Corporation to found Iris Associates, the purpose of which is to develop groupware, or collaborative software called "Notes."

[In 2004 nearing the 20th anniversary of the founding of Iris Associates, IBM reported that Notes had over 110 million users.]

Intel introduces the 32-bit 386 microprocessor. It featured 275,000 transistors— more than 100 times as many as the first Intel microprocessor, the 4004, developed in 1971.

The Perseus Digital Library Project begins at Tufts University. Though the project is ostensibly about Greek and Roman literature and culture, it will evolve into an exploration of the ways that digital collections can enhance scholarship with new research tools that take libraries and scholarship beyond the physical book.

"Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world.

"Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.

"We collect texts, images, datasets and other primary materials. We assemble and carefully structure encyclopedias, maps, grammars, dictionaries and other reference works. At present, 1.1 million manually created and 30 million automatically generated links connect the 100 million words and 75,000 images in the core Perseus collections. 850,000 reference articles provide background on 450,000 people, places, organizations, dictionary definitions, grammatical functions and other topics."

An IBM team begins scanning the papers related to Columbus' discovery of the new world at El Archivo General de Indias de Sevillia (AGI).

"To coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landfall in the West Indies, the AGI project was to capture 10% of the collection estimated to consist of 86,000,000 pages. By 1992, it had indeed collected about 9,000,000 digital image pages onto optical disks, together with a set of finding aids." This iwas among the "earliest practical digital libraries."

The Sanskrit word "avatar" is used to denote the computer representation of a user as the name for the player character in the computer role-playing game, Avatar IV, Quest of the Avatar.

Richard Stallman publishes the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobbs' Journal of Software Tools.This was an outgrowth of the GNU Project, the goal of which was to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free."

Nintendo introduces the Nintendo Entertainment System, and 8-bit game console. It  was accompanied by Super Mario Bros., the best-selling video game of all time. [As of 2008, 40,000,000 copies were sold.]

The film Young Sherlock Holmes, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Chris Columbus, includes the first fully computer-generated character, a knight composed of elements from a stained glass window.

"The effect was created by Lucasfilm's John Lasseter (now executive vice-president at Pixar Animation Studios) before Pixar was sold the next year. Lasseter would go on to create Toy Story 10 years later" (Wikipedia article on Young Sherlock Holmes, accessed 03-13-2009).

Psychologist and cognitive scientist George A. Miller and team begin development of WordNet, a lexical database for the English language.

WordNet "groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications" (Wikipedia article on WordNet). You can browse Wordnet at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/.

WordNet has been used for a number of different purposes in information systems, including word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, automatic text classification, automatic text summarization, and even automatic crossword puzzle generation.

"In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.  

"It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess" (Gary Kasparov, "The Chess Master and the Computer," The New York Review of Books 57 February 11, 2010.

Apple introduces the LaserWriter laser printer. It cost $6,995. The Mac's ability to run PageMaker for "desktop publishing" in association with Apple's LaserWriter printer caused sales of the Mac to take off.

Symbolics.com becomes the first registered domain on the Internet.

Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant found The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, one of the first online communities. It later became  known as The WELL, and connected to the Internet in 1992.

Quantum Computer Services launches an online bulletin-board service, Quantum Link (Q-Link), for users of Commodore-64 and 128 personal computers. The company renamed itself America Online (AOL) in 1991.

Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus Corporation, introduces PageMaker, the first widely-used WYZIWIG page layout program for personal computers. Initially it ran exclusively on the Apple MacIntosh, but a PC version followed in 1986, running under Windows 1.0. To assist in marketing the software Brainerd coined the term “desktop publishing.” Aldus Corporation was purchased by Adobe Systems in 1994.

Richard Stallman founds the Free Software Foundation to support the free software movement.

Microsoft introduces Windows 1.0 for the PC.

Windows 1.0 was a graphical user interface (GUI) multi-tasking operating environment extension of MS-DOS rather than a completely new operating system.

The number of hosts on the ARPANET/Internet exceeds five thousand.

Franklin Computer Corporation introduces Spelling Ace, an electronic spelling corrector. This may be considered the first handheld electronic book or e-book (eBook).

The National Science Foundation approves funding for the Internet backbone.

Leroy Hood and Lloyd Smith from the California Institute of Technology develop the first semi-automatic DNA sequencer working with a laser that recognizes fluorescing DNA markers.

"A biologist at the California Institute of Technology and a founder of API [Applied Biosystems, Inc.], Hood improved the existing Sanger method of enzymatic sequencing, which was becoming the laboratory standard. In this method, DNA to be sequenced is cut apart, and a single strand serves as a template for the synthesis of complementary strands. The nucleotides used to build these strands are randomly mixed with a radioactively labeled and modified nucleotide that terminates the synthesis. Fragments of all different lengths result. The resulting array, sent through a separation gel, reveals the order of the bases. Transferred to film, an "autoradiograph" provides a readable sequence from raw data. This data could be transferred to a computer by a human reader.

"In automating the process, Hood modified both the chemistry and the data-gathering processes. In the sequencing reaction itself, he sought to replace the use of radioactive labels, which were unstable, posed a health hazard, and required separate gels for each of the four DNA bases.

" • In place of radioisotopes, Hood developed chemistry that used fluorescent dyes of different colors—one for each of the four DNA bases. This system of "color-coding" eliminated the need to run several reactions in overlapping gels.

"The fluorescent labels were also aspects of the larger system that revolutionized the end stage of the process—the way in which sequence data was gathered. Hood integrated laser and computer technology, eliminating the tedious process of information-gathering by hand.

" • As the fragments of DNA percolated through the gel, a laser beam stimulated the fluorescent labels, causing them to glow. The light they emitted was picked up by a lens and photomultiplier, and transmitted as digital information directly into a computer" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 1989, accessed 05-25-2009).

The magazine High Frontiers renames itself Reality Hackers to better reflect its drug culture and computer themes. It changed its name to Mondo 2000 in 1989. In this form it influenced the development of cyberpunk culture until its closure in 1998.

The National Science Foundation Network connects five new supercomputer centers and allows access to these centers at no cost. The centers, which the NSF funded in 1985, were: the John von Neumann Center at Princeton, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

NSFNET used a TCP/IP-based protocol compatible with ARPANET, as a backbone to which regional and academic networks would connect. It experienced exponential growth in its network traffic.  As a result of a November 1987 NSF award to a consortium of universities in Michigan, the original 56- kbit/s links was upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s by July 1988 and again to 45 Mbit/s in 1991.

"The NSFNET was the principal Internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, bridging between the rather restrictive US DoD creation of the Internet, and its broad commercialization in the mid-1990s. Basically, the NSFNET opened up the Internet to the world. Some critical Internet technologies, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are a direct result of that period in Internet history. BGP was specifically created to allow the NSFNET backbone to differentiate routes learned via multiple paths from originally the Arpanet, but also from the regional networks. This then turned the Internet into a meshed infrastructure, backing away from the single-core architecture which the Arpanet had been using before."

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standard is published.

The IRS begins electronic tax filing (e-filing) to lower operating costs and paper usage, using the processing system developed in 1969 by the IRS,

The Name of the Rose, a German-French-Italian film made in English based on the novel by Umberto Eco, was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, and starred Sean Connery and Christian Slater. Though the film enjoyed good sales in Europe, it was a financial flop in the U.S where interest in medieval culture is highly limited. In my opinion this film is an excellent adaptation of the novel even though the inevitable simplication of the story line was necessary. It may be the best book history and library film set in the Middle Ages. It was later issued on DVD with a fascinating commentary by the director.

For additional notes see the database entry for the novel dated 1980.

The Brain boot sector virus (aka Pakistani flu) is released. Brain is considered the first IBM PC compatible virus, and the program responsible for the first IBM PC compatible virus epidemic. Also known as Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, the virus was created in Lahore, Pakistan by 19 year old Pakistani programmer, Basit Farooq Alvi, and his brother, Amjad Farooq Alvi.

©Brain (the industry standard name being Brain) is the first  IBM PC compatible computer virus for MS-DOS, and the program responsible for the first IBM PC compatible virus epidemic.

"It infected the boot sector of storage media formatted with the DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. The virus is also known as Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, Brain-A and UIUC. Businessweek magazine at the time called the virus the Pakistani flu" (Wikipedia article on Brain (computer virus, accessed 01-18-2010).

After his arrest, Loyd Blankenship, under his "handle" or pseudonym "The Mentor," publishes The Conscience of a Hacker, also known as The Hacker Manifesto, in the underground hacker ezine  Phrack, Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10.

The Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879:1986 SGML) is accepted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

SGML is:

"an ISO-standard technology for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 defines generalized markup:

"Generalized markup is based on two novel postulates:

"Markup should describe a document's structure and other attributes, rather than specify the processing to be performed on it, as descriptive markup need be done only once, and will suffice for future processing. Markup should be rigorous so that the techniques available for processing rigorously-defined objects like programs and data bases, can be used for processing documents as well.

"SGML descended from IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) that Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie developed in the 1960s. Goldfarb, editor of the international standard, coined the 'GML' term using their surname initials. As a document markup language, SGML was originally designed to enable the sharing of machine-readable large-project documents in government, law, and industry. Many of these documents must remain readable for several decades — a long time in the information technology field. SGML also was extensively applied by the military, and the aerospace, technical reference, and industrial publishing businesses. The advent of the XML profile has made SGML suitable for widespread application for small-scale, general-purpose use" (Wikipedia article on Standard Generalized Markup Language. accessed 12-29-2009).

Applied Biosystems markets the first commercial DNA sequencing machine, based on Leroy Hood’s technology.

Having searched for an acceptable ink formulation to replace oil-based printer's inks since 1979, The American Newspaper Publishers Association approves the use of soy ink, based on soybean oil.

This environmentally friendly substitute for petroleum-based ink became widely used throughout the printing industry.

To photograph, store, and organize the art work of the painter, Andrew Wyeth, Fred Mintzer, Henry Gladney and colleagues at IBM develop a high resolution digital camera for photographing art works and a PC-based database system to store and index the images. The system was used by Wyeth's staff to photograph, store, and organize about 10,000 images. "Pictures were scanned at a spatial resolution of 2500 by 3000 pixels and a color depth of 24 bits-per-pixel, and were color calibrated." This was the first digital image database of cultural materials.

Formal proposals are made by the Department of Energy in US to sequence the human genome.

It was estimated that one worker could produce about 50,0000 bases of finished DNA sequence per year at a cost of about $1-$2 per base. Based on these costs, the human genome would take 60,000 person-years and cost $36 billion to complete.

The number of hosts on the Internet exceeds ten thousand.

25,000,000 PC’s have been sold in the United States.

John and Thomas Knoll develop ImagePro, the prototype of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop 1.0 shipped in February 1990.

Programmer and photographer Bill Atkinson writes HyperCard for Apple Computer. 

HyperCard was one of the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. "It combined database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also featured HyperTalk, written by Dan Winkler, a powerful and easy-to-learn programming language for manipulating data and the user interface. HyperCard users often employed it as a programming system for Rapid Application Development of different kinds of applications, database and otherwise.

American filmaker Terry Sanders and the American Film Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources, issue Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record. a film narrated by Robert McNeil.

"The unforgettable story of the deterioration and destruction of our world’s intellectual heritage and the global crisis in preserving library materials. . . .

"Millions of pages of paper in books, photographs, drawings and maps are disintegrating and turning to dust. This remarkable film provides a comprehensive assessment of the worldwide situation, demonstrates methods of restoration and preservation and suggests ways to prevent new documents from facing ultimate destruction" (from the American Film Foundation blurb; on July 28, 2009 it was available on DVD from the foundation in 33 and 58 minute versions).

Norwegian engineers Torliev Maseng and Odd Trandem develop the technology that became accepted as the Global System for Mobil communications (GSM).

Maseng's work "included the use of channel estimation and the combination of equalization, error correcting codes and modulation in which the Viterbi algorithm was used by all components" (Wikipedia article on Torleiv Maseng, accessed 12-29-2009).

" 'The most important reason we prevailed was that our system was the best in handling the interference created when radio signals are reflected by buildings and topography,' Mr. Maseng says.  

“ 'As the number of reflected signals increases, there is a greater chance that the radio transmitter or receiver gets confused and mixes up the signals. Norway has an abundance of those kinds of natural topographic challenges.'  

"A central concept in understanding how the system works is bandwidth. Bandwidth can be compared with the speed at which people talk. In this analogy, the faster you talk, the higher the bandwidth. But high bandwidth can be a problem in places with lots of reflected signals. The same problem explains why most hymns are sung slowly in church. If they are sung quickly, the acoustics of the church turn the hymn into an unintelligible mess.  

"This phenomenon also confounds radio signals. But Mr. Maseng and Mr. Trandem came up with a clever solution. The problem is that if the data speed is too high, the receiving equipment cannot deal with signals that ‘hang in the air’ at the same time, and the signal becomes chaotic. But if the bandwidth is too low, there is a greater chance that the signal will disappear because the receiving equipment cannot distinguish between different echoes.  

"Maseng and Trandem altered their bandwidth during testing; they could do this because they devised a way to see their results in real time. By doing this they were able to find the optimal bandwidth between the two extremes. Their competitors could not. The two researchers were clever, but they also had a powerful tool to help them: A Cray supercomputer, purchased by NTNU’s predecessor, NTH, in 1986. “The computing power of the Cray was a great help in finding the optimal bandwidth,” Odd Trandem says" (http://www.ntnu.no/gemini/2005-01e/gsm.htm, accessed 12-29-2009).

Integrational linguist Roy Harris publishes The Language Machine.

"This volume completes the trilogy which began with The Language-Makers (1980) and The Language Myth (1981). The Language Machine examines the impact of the electronic computer on modern conceptions of language and communication. When Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels the notion that a machine could handle language was an absurdity to be satirized. Descartes regarded it as foolish to suppose that a robot could ever be built that would answer questions. But today it is widely assumed that mechanical speech recognition and automatic translation will be commonplace in tomorrow’s technology. Underlying these assumptions is a subtle shift in popular and academic conceptions of what a language is. Understanding a sentence is treated as a computational process. This in turn contributes powerfully to accepting a mechanistic view of human intelligence, and to the insulation of language from moral values" (http://www.royharrisonline.com/linguistic_publications/The_Language-machine.html, accessed 07-23-2010).

Richard L. Adams, Jr. founds UUNET Communications Services, the first commercial internet service provider. On May 12 UUNET passed its first traffic via the CompuServe Network using UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Protocol).

"Although the ISP initially offered services only to research institutes and universities, it wasn't long before Adams began expanding operations. The launch of AlterNet in 1990 marked UUnet's first foray into commercial service, as well as its conversion to a for-profit company. The firm's new focus on the corporate sector paid off a few years later when it landed the contract to carry Internet traffic for the Microsoft Network, beating out competitors like AT&T Corp. and MCI Communications Corp. Adams took UUnet public in 1995, in one of the largest technology public offerings to date, and a year later agreed to a $2 billion buyout offer from MFS Communications, which was acquired by WorldCom shortly thereafter" (http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/2/Adams-Richard-L.html, accessed 02-28-2009).

C. Gordon Bell, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Computer Networking, Infrastructure and Digital Communications of the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology, publishes A Report to the Office of Technology Policy on Computer Networks to Support Research in the United States. A Study of Critical Problems and Future Options. The report states:

“Over the next 15 years, there will be a need for a 100,000 times increase in national network capacity to enable researchers to exploit computer capabilities for representing complex data in visual form, for manipulating and interacting with this complex data and for sharing large data bases with other researchers.”

“As the first step, the current Internet system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the networks supported by agencies for researchers should be interconnected. These facilities, if coordinated and centrally managed, have the capability to interconnect many computer networks into a single virtual computer network. As the second step, the existing computer networks that support research programs should be expanded and upgraded to serve 200-400 research institutions with 1.5 million bits per second capabilities.

“As the third step, network service should be provided to every research institution in the U.S., with transmission speeds of three billion bits per second.” (p. 3)

Bell summarizes the report in an article called Toward A National Research Telecommunications Network.

OCLC acquires Forest Press, publisher of the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

Pixar's Tin Toy becomes the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award, for the "best animated short film."

"Tin Toy marked the first time a character with life-like bendable arms and knees, surfaces and facial components was animated digitally. The challenge was balancing it's 'cartoony' look with a baby's real looks."

Larry Costello founds Antiquarian Databases International (ADI).

A Bulletin Board Service (BBS), ADI was the first operational online antiquarian bookselling site, and an extremely early venture in ecommerce, but it closed after only a few months.

Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair begin publication on paper of the magazine bOING bOING, "The World's Greatest Neurozine."

The magazine became a founding influence in the development of cyberpunk. It become a website in 1995 and was relaunched as a blog—Boing Boing, "a directory of wonderful things," in 2000.

Lotus introduces Lotus Notes developed by Ray Ozzie at Iris Associates.

Notes was the first commercial networked-based communications and collaboration, or groupware, program. Ozzie derived the Notes concept from his experience working with PLATO Notes at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [PLATO Notes is noticed in this database.]

Z39.50 becomes the international standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval.

Z39.50 made it possible for a user to search and retrieve information from other computer systems without knowing the search syntax used by those other systems.

Computer game designer Chris Crawford holds the first meeting of the Computer Games Developers Conference in his San Jose, California living room.

About 27 game designers attended.

Physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Research introduce Mathematica 1.0, "a computational software program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields and other areas of technical computing" with powerful two dimensional and three dimensional visualization tools.

Mathematica evolved from Symbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, "a computer algebra system designed by Chris A. Cole and Stephen Wolfram at Caltech circa 1979 and initially developed in the Caltech physics department under Wolfram's leadership . . . . It was first sold commercially in 1981 by the Computer Mathematics Corporation of Los Angeles which later became part of Inference Corporation; Inference Corp. further developed the program and marketed it commercially from 1983 to 1988. SMP was essentially Version Zero of the more ambitious Mathematica system.

"SMP was influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied)" (Wikipedia article on Symbolic Manipulation Program, accessed 05-16-2009).

Fire breaks out in the newspaper room on the third floor of the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad.

"By the time it was extinguished the following afternoon, it had destroyed 400,000 books of the 12 million housed in the building; two to three million more were damaged by heat and smoke; and over one million were damp or wet from the firemen's hoses. The extent of the damage made it the worst library fire in history. (The Los Angeles Public Library fire by comparison, also destroyed 400,000 books, but damaged only a half million by heat and smoke.)

"Many of the lost volumes were part of the Baer Collection of foreign scientific works: an early estimate gives 300,000, a later one 190,000, as the number lost. The rest were Russian books, many of then early scientific and medical books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries." (The Abbey Newsletter Volume XII, number 2 [1988].)

Joseph D. Becker of Xerox Corporation, Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple develop a universal character set.

Becker coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project in his report, Unicode 88:

"1.1. Abstract

"This document is a draft proposal for the design of an international/multilingual text character coding system, tentatively called Unicode.

"Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as 'wide-body ASCII' that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.

"In the Unicode system, a simple unambiguous fixed-length character encoding is integrated into a coherent overall architecture of text processing. The design aims to be flexible enough to support many disparate (vendor-specific) implementations of text processing software.

"A general scheme for character code allocations is proposed (and materials for making specific individual character code assignments are well at hand), but specific code assignments are not proposed here. Rather, it is hoped that this document will evoke interest from many organizations, which could cooperate in perfecting the design and in determining the final character code assignments" (http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf, accessed 01-29-2010).

The first computer worm to attract wide attention, the Morris worm or Internet worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell, quickly infects a great number of computers on the Internet.

"It propagated through a number of bugs in BSD Unix and its derivatives. Morris himself was convicted under the US Computer Crime and Abuse Act and received three years probation, community service and a fine in excess of $10,000."

The number of hosts on the Internet exceeds 100,000.

Sony releases the Sony ProMavica MVC-5000, one of the first digital cameras. The name MAVICA stands for magnetic video camera.

The first gateways between private e-mail carriers and the Internet are established. CompuServe is connected through Ohio State University, MCI through the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Digital high-definition TV software, based on video compression algorithms, is developed at Bell Labs.

Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories recognizes that a viewer or listener does not need to download the entirety of a program to view or listen to a portion of it, as long as the receiving device ("client computer") could, over time, receive and present data more rapidly than the user could digest the data. At the InterTainment '89 conference held in New York City Raila used the term "buffered media" to describe this concept. It became the basis for "webcasting."

The Abyss, a film featuring complex computer generated images (CGI), most notably a seawater creature dubbed the pseudopod, becomes the first film to win the Academy Award for Visual Effects produced through CGI.

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN writes Information Management: A Proposal, proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. 

In his words, this was a "an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was 'Mesh' "

GRiD Systems, a subsidiary of Tandy Corporation, introduces the first commercially available tablet computer: the GRiDPad, which uses an operating system based on MS-DOS.