In 1980, Alan Shugart’s Seagate Technology shipped the first hard disk drive designed for microcomputers, a $1,500 unit that stored 5 MB of data. Roughly a dozen companies came out with their own hard disks over the next year. It was not until 1984, however, when IBM shipped the PC-AT with a 20 MB hard disk that the storage devices started to gain wider acceptance in the PC market.

By 1988, the typical business PC shipped with a 40 MB hard disk. If this doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over the 20 MB standard of four years earlier, it’s important to consider the limitations imposed by the operating systems of the time. The first release of MS-DOS (or PC-DOS) in 1981 had no support of any kind for hard disks. When DOS 2.0 released in March 1983, it could only support a single 10 MB hard disk. DOS 3.0, released in August 1984, made it possible to support multiple hard disks, but each was limited to a single 32 MB partition.

The tenth fall COMDEX show was held in Las Vegas from November 14 to 18, 1988. During its first decade, COMDEX grew from a single ballroom with 157 exhibitors to dominate the Las Vegas Convention Center–and several nearby hotels–with over 1,700 exhibitors. Attendance had grown just rapidly, from about 4,000 visitors in 1979 to over 100,000 in 1988.

Christine Winter of the Chicago Tribune noted the product mix at COMDEX had also shifted from “large systems in the 1970s to an onslaught of personal computers in the early 1980s, followed by examples of the burgeoning ‘after market’ for add-on devices, peripherals and printers that grew up as PCs began to dominate the marketplace in the mid-1980s.” Now, in 1988, there was increased focus on laptops and low-end workstations.

Gregg Keizer, the editor of Compute! magazine, lamented in his editorial note for the December 1988 issue that, “There are not that many of us” who owned personal computers. He noted that “recent estimates tell us that no more than 20 percent of American households have a personal computer,” which was “not anywhere near the level of, say, VCRs.” Keizer imagined a world where computer software stores were as ubiquitous as video rental shops.

Apple Computer launched the Apple IIgs in September 1986 as the next generation of its venerable Apple II line. Strictly speaking, the IIgs was not an Apple II. The original Apple II designed by Steve Wozniak in 1977 was based on an 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor. Subsequent revisions, including the Apple IIe and IIc, were then built around the 65C02, an enhanced, lower-power version of the 6502 produced by Western Design Center, which continues to manufacture the chips to this day.

In June 1978, George Morrow and Howard Fullmer made a formal presentation at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim, California, proposing an official standard for the S-100 bus. The S-100 bus originated nearly four years earlier with the MITS Altair, the Intel 8080-based microcomputer kit famously featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair’s success among the small community of computer hobbyists spawned a number of early companies dedicated to either cloning the Altair or producing peripherals compatible with the S-100 bus. This included Morrow’s Thinker Toys (later renamed Morrow Designs, Inc.) and Fullmer’s Parasitic Engineering, Inc.

On Saturday, October 4, 1953, the NBC Radio Network debuted a new program called College Quiz Bowl, which pitted teams of four students from two universities against one another in a general trivia conquest. Each school participated remotely from their local NBC affiliate, while the moderator, Allen Ludden, read the questions from network’s flagship station in New York City. The winning team received $500 and remained on the program until they were beaten.

Computer Chronicles returned for its sixth season in October 1988 with an episode covering the second Macworld Expo of the year, which was held from August 11 to 13 at Boston’s World Trade Center and Bayside Exposition Center. The show featured approximately 350 companies displaying products over 1,200 booths. The three-day attendance was estimated at around 40,000 people.

The Boston Macworld came at the mid-point of Apple CEO John Sculley’s tenure with the company. Steve Jobs was long gone, although as we’ll see later he was about to launch his comeback. The Macintosh II’s success finally enabled Apple to make significant inroads into the business market and report record sales in 1987. HyperCard, the software development tool that was the talk of last year’s Boston Macworld, continued to attract interest, even if it hadn’t quite taken the larger computing world by storm. And there was a growing sense that Apple could become the dominant personal computer company of the 1990s, especially as IBM and its clone makers continued to battle over new standards for the PC platform’s system bus.

The fifth season of Computer Chronicles came to a close in June 1988 with an episode focused on computer-aided design (CAD) software. As is true with many major developments in the history of computing, CAD originated in military applications. Indeed, the first use of the term “computer-aided design” is credited to Douglas T. Ross, the head of the Computer Applications Group at MIT’s Servomechanisms Lab in the 1950s, who used CAD to describe a 1959 contract to design automated control systems for the United States Air Force.

Tim Slater, a guest in our next Computer Chronicles episode from June 1988, gave an interview in 2022 to The Sunny Harris Show! with Samuel K. Tennis podcast about his career promoting the concept of technical analysis as an investment strategy. In brief, technical analysis is where you base investment decisions on the performance of a stock over time–i.e., its price fluctuations and volume of shares traded–without assessing the underlying merits of the company. As Slater explained to Sunny Harris, his mentor in technical analysis didn’t even know the names of the companies he analyzed. His staff simply brought him the charts of the company’s stock performance without any identifying information.

Mel Brooks famously observed in his 1987 film Spaceballs that merchandising was “where the real money from the movie was made.” A similar credo might be applied to the tech industry of the time. Add-on boards and peripherals were where the real money from the PC industry was made. Not that selling the actual computers was unprofitable, mind you, but even the major players like IBM and Apple understood that the success of their hardware was largely due to the ability of third parties to provide a wide range of (relatively) easy-to-install expansions.