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1950s • 1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s

1980

Microcomputer Hard Drive

Seagate Technology of Scotts Valley created the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506. The disk held 5 megabytes of data, five times as much as a standard floppy disk, and fit in the space of a floppy disk drive. The hard disk drive itself is a rigid metallic platter coated on both sides with a thin layer of magnetic material that stores digital data.

1981

First Portable Computer

Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software worth about $1,500. The machine, made in Hayward, featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.

1982

Sun Microsystems Founded

On February 12, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student.

Electronic Arts, a video game publisher, was founded in 1982 after William M. 'Trip' Hawkins III left his position as Director of Marketing at Apple Computer. Electronic Arts had a successful run for many years under Hawkins' leadership. It was once the world's largest video game publisher and continued to hold the top spot among third-party publishers as of October 2007.

Adobe Founded

Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company in Mountain View after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution.

Symantec Corporation was founded in Sunnyvale by Gary Hendrix with a National Science Foundation grant. Symantec was originally focused on artificial intelligence-related projects, including a database program. Hendrix hired several Stanford University natural language processing researchers as the company's first employees. In recent years, Symantec has been primarily known for its Norton-branded antivirus and utility software.

1983

Apple introduced its Lisa. The first personal computer with a graphical user interface, its development was central in the move to such systems for personal computers. The Lisa´s sloth and high price ($10,000) led to its ultimate failure. The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive.

1984

Macintosh Launched

Apple Computer launched the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface, with a single $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Macintosh included many of the Lisa´s features at a much more affordable price: $2,500.

Cisco Founded

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer operations staff at Stanford University, founded cisco Systems in 1984. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company's engineers insisted on using the lower case 'cisco' in the early days. Cisco's first product, Bosack, adapted multiple-protocol router software originally written some years before by William Yeager, another Stanford employee.

1987

Microsoft acquired Forethought of Menlo Park, the maker of PowerPoint. Later that year, PowerPoint is awarded MacUser's "Best New Desktop Presentation Product".