-
Commodore releases the VIC-20
Intended to be a less expensive alternative to the PET, the VIC-20 was highly successful, becoming the first computer to sell more than a million units. -
3 ½-inch floppy drives
The first significant company to adopt the 3 ½-inch floppy for general use was Hewlett-Packard -
Franklin's Ace 1000
Created almost five years after the original Apple II, Franklin's Ace 1000 main logic board is nearly identical to that in the Apple II+ computer, and other models were later cloned as well. Franklin was able to undercut Apple's pricing even while offering some features not available on the original. -
Apple introduces the Lisa
Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing -
CD ROMs introduced
For music, the CD (Compact Disk) had come out in 1981. For data, the big date is 1984 when Phillips introduces the CD-ROM (the last part stands for Read Only Memory). In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, affordable computer CD-ROM drives will enable multimedia encyclopedias, games, novels and reference information on CD, often with hypertext links for navigation.
