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VIC Commodore 20
In 1980, Commodore Business Machines, headed by Jack Tramiel and product manager Michael Tomczyk, released an 8-bit home computer. It would be the first of its kind to sell over 1million units -
IBM Personal Computer
The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. It was created by a team of engineers and designers directed by William C. Lowe and Philip Don Estridge in Boca Raton, Florida. -
MS-DOS "Grandfather of all operating systems"
MS-DOS, or Microsoft Disk Operating System, is the basic software for the newly released IBM PC, created by Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. PCs of this era mostly licensed MS-DOS. MS-DOS was eventually supplanted by Microsoft’s Windows operating system. -
CD-ROM "No more floppy storage"
Able to hold 550 megabytes of pre-recorded data, CD-ROMs grow out of music Compact Disks (CDs). The CD was developed by Sony and Philips in 1982 for the distribution of music. The first general-interest CD-ROM product released after Philips and Sony announced the CD-ROM format for book storage, which happened in 1985 -
US Internet gets a boost
U.S. Internet protocols (TCP/IP) get a major boost when the National Science Foundation forms the NSFNET, linking five supercomputer centers at Princeton University, Pittsburgh, University of California at San Diego, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Cornell University. Then Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1987 would get $600m in funds to promote infrastructure. This is where the famous phrase "information superhighway" was born.