It's difficult to think of the eighties as anything but a time of mind-bending change. As the seventies ended, America was in the grip of a frustrating standoff with Islamic militants holding U.S. citizens hostage, underscoring the nation's vulnerability to hostility from without. As if the oil embargoes of the seventies hadn't already made that point, the Iran hostage crisis made for an edgy beginning to a decade whose hallmark would be sweeping social, political, and technological change.
With Ronald Reagan ascending to the presidency, an era of massive defense spending began. Pledging to make America stronger than ever, Reagan embarked on an ambitious defense agenda that included a futuristic space-based shield against intercontinental ballistic missiles that was dubbed "Star Wars." Eager to reclaim America's dominance in the peaceful exploration of space as well, NASA regained the spotlight as the first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle, took flight in 1981.
While America was strengthening itself, its rivals were coming apart at the seams. When President Reagan implored Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down that wall," it signaled the beginning of the end to decades of conflict, hot and cold, with a rival that had seen its social and political system fail. Henceforth, a new era of cooperation began as America took on the responsibility of ushering the former Soviet Union into the painful, but necessary, process of becoming a free and open society.
But in the eighties, the Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to be demolished. Others fell not with the shouts of rebellion and the sound of crumbling brick and concrete, but with the beeps and boops of computer modems reaching out to each other across telephone lines. The eighties were the decade of the personal computer, when computing conquered the world finally and completely. If there were any doubts, Time magazine's naming of the computer as its "Man of the Year" for 1982 shattered them utterly.
PCs had begun as a niche product, aimed at hobbyists and others interested in playing with a new toy that hadn't yet found much in the way of practical application. But it was just a matter of time before the giants of the well-established mainframe computing industry noticed their potential.
IBM had dabbled with personal computing as early as 1975, but in 1980, Big Blue turned its attention to the matter more fully. A top-secret development effort code-named "Acorn" resulted in the development of the open-architecture IBM PC. Based on Intel's 8088 microprocessor, the machine sported 16 kbytes of RAM and one or two 5.25-in. disk drives. Users could choose between two operating systems: CP/M-86 or IBM PC-DOS, which had been developed by Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's fledgling Microsoft.
The open architecture was the cornerstone of a well-thought-out marketing and development program. Before the machine's launch in 1981, IBM had been canny enough to offer prototypes to would-be developers of software and peripherals. By the time the PC hit the street, it was all there. If business users had been skeptical of desktop computing in the past, the fact that IBM was now behind it was validation.
Before long, "clones" arrived on the market and soon there were over 100 companies plying the PC waters. Among them was the Osbourne Computer Company with the first "luggable" portable computer. But IBM's biggest rival, Apple, was a formidable competitor. By 1980, Apple had already captured 50% of the PC market and had the advantage of plenty of available software titles for the Apple II.
Having a PC on one's desk was great. Still, it took a peripheral device to not only cement its utility but also to begin the marriage of computing and telephony. The modulator/demodulator, or modem, had been invented in 1960 at AT&T's Bell Labs as a means for mainframe and mini computers to transmit data back and forth. Reintroduced commercially for the PC in 1981 by Hayes, modems were the vital link that allowed PC owners to dial into online services like CompuServe and the Source. Albeit painfully slow at 300 baud, they created the means for PCs to communicate with each other and began the world's movement to what would be dubbed "cyberspace" by William Gibson in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer.
Indeed, by 1982, the underpinnings of the Internet arrived when TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) was established as the standard for ARPAnet. By 1987, the number of network hosts would exceed 10,000. It took until just 1989 for that number to reach 100,000.
The rapid growth of the PC industry called for equally rapid development of enhanced processing power. Faster CPUs, larger memories, and improved disk storage fueled new generations of machines. IBM's PC XT raised the bar in 1983 by providing a 10-Mbyte hard drive, three more expansion slots, 128 kbytes of RAM, and a 360-kbyte floppy drive. Apple answered with its Lisa, a $10,000 machine that fell on its face.
Yet Lisa pointed computing in a direction that would stick. It was notable for a graphical user interface (GUI) that saved users from the dreaded "C:" prompt of a DOS command line.
Apple's next shot across IBM's bow would be more dramatic. Launched in a famous commercial during the halftime of 1984's Super Bowl, the Macintosh marched personal computing into the future. It broke with the PC in that it was based not on an Intel processor but on Motorola's 8-MHz, 32-bit 68000 processor. Not only that, the machine ran a proprietary operating system that was incompatible with the IBM PC's DOS.
The Macintosh was an instant success. It made computing more intuitive and user-friendly. IBM was forced to respond, and the response was Microsoft Windows. It took some time for the Windows concept to catch fire with PC users, but eventually most abandoned the DOS prompt for the icons and pull-down menus of Windows.
Microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memories grew faster, larger, and more powerful throughout the eighties. In 1984 alone, 256-kbit and 1-Mbit DRAMs arrived to satisfy the insatiable demand for memory. Motorola's 68040 processor, a 32-bit CPU, upped the clock rate to 25 MHz. Intel's 16-bit 80286 anchored IBM's PC AT, expanding the desktop machine's capabilities. The 80386 arrived in the fall of 1985, bringing with it 32-bit processing and on-chip memory management. Finally, the 1.2 million-transistor 80486 was introduced in April of 1989.
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