─── THE 1980s WING ───
the founding dead. before the web. dial-up bulletins, dead protocols, the genesis.
130 dead. ordered by year of death, newest first.
pre80s | [80s] | 90s | 00s | 10s (2010-2014 · 2015-2019) | 20s
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1989-12-01
ANALOG Computing (1981 - 1989)
two men who met at a star trek convention in 1978 had an atari magazine on the newsstand by january 1981. analog computing ran seventy nine issues on type-in...
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1989-11-01
NEC PC-8800 Series (1981 - 1989)
about 940,000 machines shipped and almost nobody outside japan has ever seen one. nec announced the pc-8801 on 22 september 1981 and put it on sale that...
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1989-09-01
Viditel (1980 - 1989)
viditel went live in august 1980 and gave the netherlands a public dial-up information service eleven years before the web. it painted 24 lines of text onto a...
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1989-08-01
The Source (1979 - 1989)
the source was the first thing in america you could call a consumer online service. it predates the web by sixteen years and predates anyone in turkey having a...
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1989-06-01
North Star Computers (1976 - 1989)
the first name over the door was kentucky fried computer, a mail-order operation in a berkeley garage, and it lasted until the chicken company noticed. what...
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1989-05-05
Infocom (1979 - 1989)
twenty six people were left in the cambridge office on the day the lights went off. infocom had sold around two million games made entirely of sentences, then...
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1989-04-17
ETA Systems (1983 - 1989)
control data could not sell enough cyber 205s to stay in the supercomputer business, so in august 1983 it pushed the whole effort out into a company of its own...
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1989-04-12
Apollo Computer (1980 - 1989)
hewlett-packard paid $476 million in cash for a company that had been the largest engineering workstation vendor on earth thirty months earlier. apollo built...
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1989-02-03
Filmation (1962 - 1989)
on 3 february 1989 group w closed the studio, one day before a new federal law would have required sixty days of notice for a mass layoff. the timing is the...
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1989-01-01
Filmstrip (1925 - 1989)
a spool of 35mm film with thirty-two to sixty-four still pictures on it, pulled through a projector one frame at a time while a record or a cassette played the...
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1989-01-01
Microtex 666 (1986 - 1989)
an australian videotex service for microcomputer enthusiasts, reached by dialing telecom australia's viatel network. sean howard owned it and promoted it...
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1989-01-01
Red Ryder (1984 - 1989)
wat buchanon wrote it in microsoft basic in 1984 and gave it away on bulletin boards with a manual full of jokes about apple. after he died his friend scott...
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1989-01-01
Cullinet (1968 - 1989)
charles wang bought it in 1989 for around three hundred million dollars in stock, which was a modest price for the company that had argued software could be a...
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1989-01-01
IQ 151 (1985 - 1989)
a display terminal designed for the army at the czech technical university in 1982 turned into the computer czech schoolchildren learned to program on. zpa...
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1989-01-01
IVC videotape (1967 - 1989)
sunnyvale built a one inch helical videotape line that sold more than thirteen thousand machines across twenty two years, then bet the company on a two inch...
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1988-12-31
Seeburg 1000 (1959 - 1988)
seeburg built a phonograph in 1959 that played both sides of a stack of nine-inch records at 16 2/3 rpm and gave nobody any way to choose a song. shops and...
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1988-12-31
Ultimate Play the Game (1982 - 1988)
ashby-de-la-zouch is a small town in leicestershire, and for four years it held the most feared software house in britain. tim and chris stamper built ultimate...
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1988-12-01
Sharp X1 (1982 - 1988)
two divisions of the same company built two incompatible home computers and sold them against each other for six years. sharp's electronics equipment division...
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1988-11-21
8-Track Cartridge (1965 - 1988)
stereo 8 was an endless loop of tape in a plastic shell, eight tracks across the width read two at a time, which meant one cartridge held four programs and got...
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1988-10-14
Applied Data Research (1959 - 1988)
seven engineers walked out of sperry rand in 1959 and built the thing nobody had built yet, which was a software company with a product to sell instead of...
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1988-10-01
Kurzweil Computer Products (1974 - 1988)
on 13 january 1976 a machine read walter cronkite's sign-off out loud at the end of the cbs evening news, and stevie wonder, who caught the story on television...
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1988-09-27
MASSCOMP (1981 - 1988)
the smaller company bought the bigger one for 241 million dollars, mostly borrowed, and then took the bigger one's name along with its new jersey headquarters....
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1988-08-08
Convergent Technologies (1979 - 1988)
on 8 august 1988 unisys took over a company most of its own customers had never heard of, and that was the arrangement working as designed. convergent...
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1988-07-12
Coleco Industries (1932 - 1988)
coleco started in 1932 as the connecticut leather company, founded in hartford by maurice greenberg to supply shoe-repair shops. it spent the post-war decades...
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1988-06-20
American Motors Corporation (1954 - 1988)
george mason merged nash-kelvinator and hudson on 1 may 1954 to build something large enough to survive beside general motors, then died five months later...
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1988-06-01
80 Micro (1980 - 1988)
wayne green started it in january 1980 as a spinoff of kilobaud that would cover the radio shack trs-80 and nothing else. by 1982 it was carrying more...
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1988-01-01
MacPaint (1984 - 1988)
macpaint shipped with the first macintosh on january 24 1984. bill atkinson wrote it in 5,804 lines of pascal augmented by 2,738 lines of 68000 assembly. susan...
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1988-01-01
Video 2000 (1979 - 1988)
philips and grundig put video 2000 on sale in 1979 with a cassette you flipped over like an audio tape and an automatic tracking system neither vhs nor betamax...
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1988-01-01
Lucasfilm's Habitat (1986 - 1988)
habitat was the first place online that looked like a place. chip morningstar and randy farmer put jointed cartoon bodies on a commodore 64 in 1986 and let a...
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1988-01-01
PlayNET (1984 - 1988)
two engineers out of ge research put a graphical online service on the commodore 64 in 1984, years before anybody else made a home computer draw its own...
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1988-01-01
PMD 85 (1984 - 1988)
roman kišš built it out of whatever was on the shelf at tesla piešťany, using telephone keys from another tesla plant for the keyboard, and it became the first...
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1988-01-01
Spectravideo (1981 - 1988)
a stand at winter ces in las vegas in january 1983 held the sv-318, a home computer with a rubber keyboard and a small joystick built into the case. microsoft...
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1988-01-01
Datasoft (1980 - 1988)
june 1980, chatsworth california, and for seven years datasoft did the unglamorous work of the eight-bit era: port the arcade hit, buy the movie license. bruce...
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1988-01-01
Celerity Computing (1983 - 1988)
the ncr/32 was a 32-bit chipset sold by a company best known for cash registers, and a san diego startup bet its whole architecture on it. celerity computing...
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1988-01-01
ExtraVision (1983 - 1988)
the decoder killed it. from april 1983 cbs was transmitting a full teletext magazine inside the unused lines of its own television signal, with news and...
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1988-01-01
Cantata 700 (1965 - 1988)
twenty six hours of instrumental cover versions fit on one 3m cartridge, and the machine that played it had no record button. shops bought the box and leased...
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1987-12-01
Oric (1983 - 1987)
a french company bought oric out of receivership in 1985 and buried it two years later. the oric-1 had gone on sale in january 1983 at £129, aimed directly at...
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1987-10-01
Vector Graphic (1976 - 1987)
a spare bedroom in westlake village, $6,000 of capital and an 8k memory board for the altair is the entire origin of vector graphic, incorporated on 23 august...
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1987-10-01
Family Computing (1983 - 1987)
the word family came off the cover in october 1987, and the whole story is in that one edit. scholastic launched the magazine in september 1983 for households...
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1987-09-01
Living Videotext (1983 - 1987)
dave winer built his first fortune on the outline, a document that folds into itself, and sold the company that made it to symantec in september 1987....
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1987-07-31
Forethought, Inc. (1983 - 1987)
fourteen million dollars in july 1987, for a program that had been on sale barely three months. it was the first significant company microsoft ever bought....
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1987-01-02
Hebdogiciel (1983 - 1987)
a weekly newspaper of programs you typed in by hand, sold off french newsstands from october 1983. gérard ceccaldi ran it as a permanent argument with the...
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1987-01-01
Betamovie (1983 - 1987)
sony shipped the betamovie in may 1983 and it was the first camcorder anybody could buy, a camera and a recorder welded into one body at 2.5 kg instead of the...
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1987-01-01
Seattle Computer Products (1978 - 1987)
twenty five thousand dollars in december 1980, then fifty thousand more the following july, and the operating system that would run the next fifteen years of...
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1987-01-01
Dragon 32/64 (1982 - 1987)
kenfig, near port talbot, is where the welsh development agency put its money in 1982, into a computer company owned by the toy firm that made corgi cars. the...
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1987-01-01
Super Cassette Vision (1984 - 1987)
seventy percent of the japanese home console market belonged to a toy company in 1982, and the toy company was epoch. the cassette vision had sold around...
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1987-01-01
Sharp MZ (1978 - 1987)
the model number came off a bath buzzer. sharp had a registration code sitting unused for a bathroom product in 1978 and spent it on a 4-bit trainer kit called...
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1987-01-01
Centronics (1971 - 1987)
the fat 36-pin plug on the back of a printer was named for a company in hudson, new hampshire that shipped the first affordable dot-matrix printer in 1970 and...
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1987-01-01
Lisp Machines, Inc. (1979 - 1987)
the mit ai lab had one lisp machine design and two companies that wanted to sell it. richard greenblatt took the half that refused outside investors and tried...
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1986-12-31
Confravision (1971 - 1986)
the post office opened confravision in 1971 and it was a video call you had to travel to. six studios in british cities with five seats and five microphones in...
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1986-09-16
Sperry Corporation (1910 - 1986)
burroughs, an adding machine company out of detroit, came for it twice and got it on the second attempt. the sperry board approved $4.8 billion on 27 may 1986,...
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1986-08-01
Apple Lisa (1983 - 1986)
apple announced the lisa in january 1983 at a price nobody outside fortune 500 could pay. it shipped with a gui and a mouse plus protected memory the mac would...
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1986-06-27
RCA SelectaVision (CED) (1981 - 1986)
rca spent seventeen years building a videodisc you played with a needle, then put it in american shops in march 1981 against a vcr that could already record....
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1986-06-09
RCA (1919 - 1986)
the united states navy did not want a british-owned company holding america's transatlantic wireless stations, so in october 1919 general electric incorporated...
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1986-04-01
Sinclair QL (1984 - 1986)
a hundred and fifty thousand quantum leaps were sold and one of them mattered more than all the rest. sinclair announced it on 12 january 1984 at £399, with a...
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1986-03-31
Viewtron (1983 - 1986)
knight-ridder spent six years and more than fifty million dollars building an online newspaper and then switched it off. viewtron went live across four florida...
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1986-03-11
Morrow Designs (1976 - 1986)
a high school dropout who went back to school at 28 and came out of berkeley building the cheapest serious business computers in america. the micro decision...
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1986-03-01
AT&T Sceptre (1983 - 1986)
at&t built a set-top box for american videotex and put it on sale in october 1983. it painted naplps pages onto a household television and could do nothing...
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1986-01-01
Imagic (1981 - 1986)
imagic was started on 1 june 1981 in los gatos by people who had just walked out of atari and mattel, and for about eighteen months it was the best third party...
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1986-01-01
Acornsoft (1980 - 1986)
acornsoft was the software arm of a british computer company that mostly wanted to sell computers. for about five years it shipped the games and the serious...
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1986-01-01
Memotech MTX (1983 - 1986)
two hundred thousand computers for soviet schools was the order that would have saved memotech. moscow gave it to yamaha's msx machines instead in 1985, on...
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1986-01-01
Enterprise 128 (1983 - 1986)
on 14 september 1983 a london company showed the press a home computer with two custom chips and a word processor in rom, then said it would ship in seven...
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1986-01-01
Thomson MO5 (1984 - 1986)
laurent fabius stood in front of the french press on 25 january 1985 and announced that the state would put more than 120,000 computers into 50,000 schools at...
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1986-01-01
System Development Corporation (1956 - 1986)
half of santa monica's air conditioning, or so the joke went, was cooling one building full of vacuum tubes. the building belonged to a company rand had spun...
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1986-01-01
British Leyland (1968 - 1986)
on 17 january 1968 forty percent of the british car market went into a single company. british motor holdings and the leyland motor corporation merged into the...
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1986-01-01
HT-1080Z (1983 - 1986)
2364 machines is the entire production run that reached hungarian classrooms, and that number is the whole story of the ht-1080z. the hiradastechnika...
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1986
Quadruplex Videotape (1956 - 1986)
quadruplex was the first videotape that actually worked, shown by ampex in a chicago hall in april 1956 to a room of broadcasters who could not believe it....
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1985-12-01
Adventure International (1978 - 1985)
scott adams played colossal cave on a mainframe, was told a machine with sixteen kilobytes could not possibly run something like it, and then wrote...
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1985-12-01
Creative Computing (1974 - 1985)
half a million people subscribed to a magazine whose main attraction was pages of program listings you had to retype yourself, one line at a time, with no way...
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1985-10-17
Mostek (1969 - 1985)
eighty five percent of the world's memory chips came out of carrollton, texas at the end of the 1970s, from a company founded in 1969 by engineers who had...
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1985-10-01
Sega SG-1000 (1983 - 1985)
on 15 july 1983 two japanese companies put a home console on sale, and only one of them is remembered for it. sega's sg-1000 cost 15,000 yen and ran a z80...
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1985-10-01
Trilogy Systems (1980 - 1985)
gene amdahl had already built the machine that beat ibm at its own architecture, so when he said he could put a processor on a single 2.5 inch square of...
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1985-08-13
Informatics General (1962 - 1985)
in january 1962 walter bauer talked two colleagues at trw into leaving with him to start a company that sold software, at a point when software was not a thing...
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1985-08-01
MacBASIC (1984 - 1985)
bill gates wanted the applesoft license renewed and named a price for it: apple had to stop shipping its own basic for the macintosh. apple agreed in august...
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1985-07-06
PC-Talk (1982 - 1985)
a book publisher who had owned a computer for about two weeks wrote a communications program in ibm basic, then decided to distribute it the way public...
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1985-06-01
VisiCalc (1979 - 1985)
visicalc was the first killer app. dan bricklin and bob frankston shipped it through software arts on october 17, 1979 for the apple ii, and it became the...
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1985-03-31
Telidon (1978 - 1985)
telidon was canada's answer to prestel and antiope, and technically it was the better answer. instead of drawing pictures out of mosaic character blocks it...
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1985-02-01
Tomy Tutor (1982 - 1985)
tomy promised that its documentation would let an eight-year-old use the machine without an adult in the room, and that promise is what killed it. the pyuta...
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1985-01-01
Plover-NET (1984 - 1985)
quasi-moto put plover-net up on an apple in long island in january 1984 and it became the busiest phreak board in the united states inside a year. six hundred...
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1985-01-01
Osborne Computer Corporation (1980 - 1985)
on 13 september 1983 a company that had gone from two employees to three thousand in about a year filed for chapter 11. adam osborne had built the first...
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1985-01-01
Shugart Associates (1973 - 1985)
al shugart founded this company in 1973 and was gone from it by 1974, after a fight with his own board, which left his name on a factory he no longer ran for...
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1985-01-01
Bally Astrocade (1978 - 1985)
$299 in april 1978 bought a games console with better graphics hardware than anything else in an american living room, and a promise attached to it. the...
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1985-01-01
NBC Teletext (1983 - 1985)
fifty pages of news and weather went out inside the nbc television signal from 16 may 1983, and almost nobody in america could read them. the nabts standard...
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1985-01-01
Acorn Electron (1983 - 1985)
one chip in ten came off the ferranti line working, and that single number is most of what happened to the electron. acorn put it on sale in august 1983 at 199...
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1985-01-01
Commodore Plus/4 (1984 - 1985)
commodore killed this one itself, and it did not take long. jack tramiel showed the 264 series at the january 1984 consumer electronics show and walked out of...
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1985-01-01
Galaksija (1983 - 1985)
the full schematic for a working z80 computer went into a special issue of a belgrade science magazine in december 1983, with no patent and no royalty on it,...
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1985-01-01
Hitachi Basic Master (1978 - 1985)
198,000 yen in september 1978 bought the first personal computer sold in japan, a hitachi machine running hitachi's own version of the motorola 6800 with basic...
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1985-01-01
Synapse Software (1981 - 1985)
by early 1984 it was the largest outside supplier of software for atari's 8-bit computers, and two thirds of its money was already coming from commodore...
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1985-01-01
Muse Software (1978 - 1985)
baltimore, on the corner of charles and mulberry, where a software company ran a computer store on the ground floor and wrote apple II games upstairs. muse...
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1985-01-01
Denelcor (1968 - 1985)
six machines went out the door between 1981 and 1985, and that is the entire commercial history of the first parallel computer with independent instruction...
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1985-01-01
Charlton Comics (1945 - 1985)
john santangelo went to jail in the early 1930s for printing song lyrics he had no permission to print, met a lawyer named ed levy there, and the two of them...
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1984-11-15
NEC PC-6000 Series (1981 - 1984)
four separate teams inside one company were building four incompatible personal computers by 1983, and nec settled it with an org chart. the pc-6001 came out...
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1984-11-01
NABU Network (1983 - 1984)
nabu ran a computer network over cable television in ottawa from october 1983, pushing software down the coaxial line at 6.4 megabits a second while the rest...
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1984-09-01
Otrona Advanced Systems (1982 - 1984)
the ibm pc went on sale a few months before otrona opened its doors in boulder, which settled the argument before the company had anything to sell. the attache...
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1984-08-01
Cassette Vision (1981 - 1984)
the processor was not in the console. it was in the cartridge, a fresh one in every game you bought, because the team that designed the machine could not get...
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1984-07-09
Imagine Software (1982 - 1984)
imagine lasted twenty two months. two men who had walked out of bug-byte registered it in liverpool in september 1982, and it sold cassettes fast enough to...
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1984-06-01
Camputers Lynx (1982 - 1984)
richard greenwood founded camputers in cambridge in february 1981 and built a home computer for people who wanted to compute. the lynx appeared at the personal...
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1984-06-01
Dragon Data (1982 - 1984)
june 1984: a receiver walked into a factory at kenfig in south wales that had been building home computers for less than two years. dragon data was set up by...
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1984-04-01
Fujitsu FM-7 (1982 - 1984)
on 8 november 1982 fujitsu put the cheap version of its own flagship on sale and watched it become the real product. the machine was developed under the name...
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1984-04-01
Atari Program Exchange (1981 - 1984)
dale yocum's idea was that atari should publish the programs its own customers were already writing, print them in a quarterly catalog with the author's name...
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1984-03-01
TI-99/4A (1981 - 1984)
2.8 million machines went out of a factory in lubbock, texas, and texas instruments still left the home computer business at a loss so large that its own share...
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1984-02-01
Vectrex (1982 - 1984)
thirty one point six million dollars is what milton bradley had lost on it by february 1984, having bought the company that made it barely a year earlier. the...
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1984-01-01
Qube (1977 - 1984)
qube was a two-way cable tv experiment run by warner-amex out of columbus, ohio from 1 december 1977 to 1984. thirty channels of pay-per-view and community...
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1984-01-01
GameLine (1983 - 1984)
gameline put a modem inside an atari 2600 cartridge in 1983 and sold games down a phone line for a dollar each. the download sat in the cartridge for about a...
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1984-01-01
PlayCable (1980 - 1984)
mattel and general instrument put a pdp-11 at the cable company and broadcast intellivision games down the tv wire as an fm signal. an adapter in the cartridge...
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1984-01-01
Timex Sinclair (1982 - 1984)
in the first weeks of 1984 a watch company walked out of the computer business it had entered eighteen months earlier, and took the cheapest machine in america...
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1984-01-01
Casio PV-1000 (1983 - 1984)
two cartridge numbers were assigned and never used, gpa-108 and gpa-113, and that gap is the clearest surviving record of what happened here. casio put the...
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1984-01-01
Sord M5 (1982 - 1984)
takara charged 10,000 yen more for exactly the same hardware, and the difference was the word printed on the lid. sord put the m5 on sale in november 1982 at...
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1984-01-01
Ovation Technologies (1982 - 1984)
windows on the world, 107 floors above manhattan, a press conference for a program that no outsider had ever run. ovation was announced in november 1983 as...
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1984-01-01
Starpath (1981 - 1984)
a cassette player, the kind already sitting in every american living room, wired into an atari 2600 through the headphone jack. that was the whole idea. the...
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1984-01-01
Sirius Software (1980 - 1984)
eighteen million dollars in unpaid royalties is the figure usually quoted, and sirius never saw any of it. in 1983 this was the fifteenth largest microcomputer...
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1984-01-01
Xonox (1983 - 1984)
k-tel sold compilation records off late-night television commercials, and in 1983 it decided the same instinct would work on atari cartridges. the xonox idea...
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1984-01-01
Bell System (1877 - 1984)
on 1 january 1984 the largest private company on earth split into eight pieces, because two years earlier it had signed a consent decree rather than lose the...
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1984-01-01
Western Electric (1869 - 1984)
the antitrust settlement that broke the bell system also erased the company that had built it. western electric made the telephones and the switching gear for...
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1983-12-31
American Multiple Industries (1982 - 1983)
$49.95 in 1982 money bought you a sealed atari 2600 cartridge with not for sale to minors printed on the box. american multiple industries traded as mystique...
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1983-10-01
Jupiter Ace (1982 - 1983)
richard altwasser and steven vickers had just finished designing the zx spectrum for clive sinclair when they left in 1982 to build their own machine. the...
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1983-10-01
Mattel Aquarius (1983 - 1983)
mattel's own programmers called it a system for the seventies, and they meant it unkindly. the aquarius was designed and built by radofin in hong kong and then...
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1983-01-01
Fairchild Channel F (1976 - 1983)
jerry lawson led the team that put a slot on the front of a games machine in november 1976, and every console since has had one. the channel f sold around...
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1983-01-01
Grundy NewBrain (1982 - 1983)
the bbc wrote the specification for its computer literacy project around the newbrain and then gave the contract to acorn, because newbury laboratories could...
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1983-01-01
IBM MT/ST (1964 - 1983)
every time somebody says word processor they are using a phrase ibm attached in 1964 to a selectric typewriter built into a desk, wired to a magnetic tape deck...
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1983
Compact Video Cassette (1980 - 1983)
the first video format that answered the question of whether you could carry one, and it answered it in 1980, four years ahead of everybody. the cassette...
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1982-10-26
DeLorean Motor Company (1975 - 1982)
in february 1982 the dunmurry plant went into receivership, and by the end of may nobody was building cars in it. john delorean was arrested on a cocaine...
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1982-05-12
Braniff International Airways (1928 - 1982)
deregulation arrived in october 1978 and harding lawrence answered it by adding routes faster than braniff could pay for them. fuel prices and twenty percent...
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1982-02-05
Laker Airways (1966 - 1982)
pan am cut its cheapest transatlantic fares by up to two thirds in october 1981, british airways and twa matched within weeks, and laker's cash inflow halved...
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1982-01-01
SCELBI (1973 - 1982)
milford, connecticut, 1973. nat wadsworth and bob findley put an intel 8008 across five circuit boards and advertised the result in the back pages of a ham...
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1982-01-01
Bandai Super Vision 8000 (1979 - 1982)
seven games were ever made for it, and all seven came out in 1979, the year it went on sale. bandai had put a real processor inside a japanese home console...
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1981-12-31
CYCLADES (1972 - 1981)
louis pouzin built a french research network on the idea that the network itself should promise nothing and the machines at the two ends should sort out what...
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1981-01-01
Datasaab (1954 - 1981)
sweden built its own computer industry inside an aircraft company. it started in december 1954 when saab took a license to copy besk, the national vacuum tube...
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1980-01-01
Elcaset (1976 - 1980)
sony, matsushita and teac introduced the elcaset in 1976 as a cassette that would measure like an open-reel machine. the deck pulled the tape out of the shell...
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1980-01-01
Traf-O-Data (1972 - 1980)
$360 bought the intel 8008 this whole thing was built around, and the prototype that followed came in near $1,500 two years later. two friends out of the same...