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1980 First Optical Storage Disk was created by Philips –It used lasers to write information onto the disk –It had 60 times the capacity of a 5.25” floppy disk –Could not be overwritten or erased

1981 MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the newly released IBM-PC Sony introduced and shipped the first 3 1/2" floppy drives and diskettes The Osborne I Portable computer was released –It weighed 24 pounds, had a 5-inch display, contained 64 KB of memory, and contained two 5.25” floppy drives.

1982 Computer was named Time® Magazine’s “Machine of the Year” Disney’s “Tron” became one of the first movies to use computer-generated graphics The Cray-XMP was produced, which ran at 420 megaflops

1983 Compaq Computer Corp. introduced the first PC clone that used the same software as the IBM PC Microsoft Word was introduced –Distributed 450,000 demo copies of Word in the November issue of PC World Magazine MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was first introduced at the first North American Music Manufacturers show in Los Angeles.

1984 The CD-ROM was released by Philips and Sony IBM released the PC Jr. and the PC-AT –Based on the Intel chip –Accommodated 1.2 MB 5.25” floppy disks

1985 CD-ROMs came into widespread use Grolier’s Encyclopedia was the first CD- ROM product released The C++ programming language emerged as the dominant object-oriented language in the computer industry

1986 IBM and MIPS released the first RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer)-based workstations, the PC/RT and R2000-based systems. –had 1 megabyte of RAM, a 1.2-megabyte floppy disk drive, 40MB hard drive, and ran at 2MHz Compaq released the Deskpro 386, which was the first to use the Intel chipset

1987 IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers IBM released OS/2 at the same time, which allowed the use of a mouse for the first time on an IBM computer

1988 IBM’s Competitors developed the EISA 32-bit bus as an alternative to paying a fee to use IBM’s MCA bus. Pixar´s "Tin Toy" became the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award, taking the Oscar for best animated short film Robert Morris´ worm flooded the ARPANET –Morris programmed the worm to reproduce itself and computer files and to filter through all the networked computers

1989 Motorola announced the microprocessor, which contained about 1.2 million transistors –Eventually used in the Macintosh Quadra computers Maxis released “Sim City” Virtual Reality was introduced to the public at the Siggraph´s 1989 convention in Boston