Timeline of computing 1980–1989
Date Place Event
January UK Sinclair Research Ltd announced its first ( and only ) personal computer aimed to the business market , the Sinclair QL , at an attractive introductory price of £399 . The machine was based on the 68008 CPU of Motorola , the low-cost version of Motorola 68000 with 8-bit external bus . The QL ( abbreviation of Quantum Leap ) did not become a market success , because of quality issues of the first series and due to the Microdrive used as storage medium instead of the much more reliable floppy discs , and its development and production later caused serious financial difficulties to the company
January United States Apple Macintosh released , based on the 8 MHz version of the Motorola 68000 processor . The 68000 can address 16 MB of RAM , a noticeable improvement over Intel 's 8088/8086 family . However the Apple achieved 0.7 MIPS and originally came with just 128 KB of RAM . It came fitted with a monochrome monitor and was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a Graphical user interface . The Macintosh included many of the Lisa 's features at a much more affordable price : $ 2,500 . Applications that came as part of the package included MacPaint , which made use of the mouse , and MacWrite , which demonstrated WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get ) word processing
May United States Hewlett-Packard release the immensely popular LaserJet printer , by 1993 they had sold over 10 million LaserJet printers and over 20 million printers overall . HP were also pioneering inkjet technology
June UK Amstrad CPC was introduced first in Britain , later in other European markets as well . The machine was based on the popular 8 bit Z80 CPU . The mainboard ( i.e . the computer itself ) and a cassette recorder ( Datacorder ) were both integrated in the keyboard . The CPC could be bought in a bundle with a monochrome ( GT64 ) monitor for £249 or a colour ( CTM640 ) monitor for £359 . The monitor also served as the power supply in order to have only one plug to be connected to the wall outlet . CPC became very popular in France and Spain , and in Germany where it was marketed by Schneider Rundfunkwerke AG under its own label . In 1985 two further models ( CPC 664 and 6128 ) with built-in 3-inch floppy disc drive were released
August United States MS-DOS 3.0 , PC DOS 3.0 Released for the IBM AT , it supported larger hard disks as well as High Density ( 1.2 MB ) 5¼ floppy disks
September United States Apple released a 512KB version of the Macintosh , known as the Fat Mac
End United States Compaq started the development of the IDE interface ( see also 1989 ) . IDE = Intelligent Drive Electronics . This standard was designed specially for the IBM PC and can achieve high data transfer rates through a 1:1 interleave factor and caching by the actual disk controller - the bottleneck is often the old AT bus and the drive may read data far quicker than the bus can accept it , so the cache is used as a buffer . Theoretically 1 MB/s is possible but 700 kB/s is perhaps more typical of such drives . This standard has been adopted by many other models of computer , such the Acorn Archimedes A4000 and above . A later improvement was EIDE , laid down in 1989 , which also removed the maximum drive size of 528 MB and increased data transfer rates
? United States Turbo Pascal introduced by Borland
? United States Motorola released the 68020 processor
1984