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.

In May 1988, the United States Senate’s Rules Committee faced a dilemma. Wendy Woods reported that the Committee recently received bids for a contract to provide laptop computers for “workaholic” Senate employees seeking to replace their portable typewriters. It turned out there was only one bidder that met all of the Committee’s requirements–Toshiba. Unfortunately, Woods said, it was “politically impossible for the Senate to buy Toshiba laptops,” and an unidentified source said the members would “have to fudge the criteria a bit, to make sure someone else qualifies.”

Gregg Williams, writing about the introduction of the Apple Lisa for the February 1983 issue of Byte Magazine, noted that when it came to a choice of an input device to use with the new computer’s graphical interface, the designers “passed over such devices as light pens and touch-sensitive video panels in favor of the mouse, a pointing device used in several Xerox PARC machines.”

Apple’s main refinement–not necessarily an improvement–to the PARC mouse design was only providing a single button. According to Williams, “Apple broke with the conventional wisdom of two- and three-button mice after user tests indicated the people aren’t always sure which button to push on a multi-button mouse.”

Perhaps IBM’s most important contribution to the development of the personal computer was pushing graphics standards forward. Early microcomputers tended to output only text characters. And those machines that did implement some form of bitmap graphics, such as Steve Wozniak’s Apple II, did so without any eye towards establishing an industry-wide standard.

That changed with the introduction of the Intel 8088-based IBM Personal Computer in 1981. IBM developed two graphics cards–the Monochrome Display Adapter and the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA)–for use with its PC. The CGA card could output 16-color bitmap graphics with a resolution of 160-by-100 pixels, although in practice most programs used a higher-resolution 320-by-200 mode that only displayed 4 colors.

In early 1987, Apple planned to publish a database management program called Silver Surfer, which was developed by Acius. This prompted blowback from a number of third-party Macintosh developers, who felt that Apple should “stick to hardware” and leave the software to them. Unlike the Apple of today, then-CEO John Sculley’s company in 1987 could only go so far to antagonize the third-party developers necessary to keep the Macintosh platform viable. So Apple abandoned plans to publish Silver Surfer under its own label and returned the rights to Acius, who released the database under the name 4th Dimension.

How many applications is your computer running right now? If the answer is more than one, then you’re already well ahead of most personal computer of the 1980s. Early microcomputer operating systems like CP/M and MS-DOS could only run a single application at a time. There were certain hacks to try and get around this limit–such as RAM-resident software–but the typical 8- or 16-bit PC lacked the processing power to multitask even if the operating system could technically support it.

At the June 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Commodore International announced a cut in the wholesale price of its Commodore 64 (C64) computer from $360 to $199. This move was the latest salvo in a price war initiated the previous August by Commodore’s arch-nemesis, Texas Instruments, which announced a $100 rebate on its TI-99/4A computer, bringing its effective price down to $199. This had been TI’s attempt to undercut Commodore’s VIC-20, the predecessor to the C64, which was then priced at $239. But now that Commodore had brought the price of the newer and more capable C64 down to $199, TI was boned.

There were three basic means of distributing software in the 1980s: retailers, mail-order catalogs, and bulletin board systems (BBS). The latter provided the earliest form of “online” distribution, albeit one that was difficult to commercialize. After all, a developer couldn’t ask users to post their credit card number on a BBS.

But you could attach a message to a program uploaded to a BBS that invited people to pay you for software they found valuable. That’s exactly what Andrew Fluegleman did in 1982. Wendy Woods profiled Fluegelman in a January 1985 Computer Chronicles episode that I previously covered. His IBM PC communications program PC-Talk became the first example of “shareware” (although Fluegelman used the term “freeware,” which he trademarked.)

Tax preparation software was always a favorite topic of Computer Chronicles. This next episode from March 1988 included some returning guests and updates to several products featured in prior shows. As I discussed in an episode of the Chronicles Revisited Podcast, this was a period when a number of small developers competed in the tax preparation software market. We would not start to see the industry consolidation towards TurboTax under Intuit for another 5 or 6 years.

At the 1985 summer Consumer Electronics Show, Jack Tramiel’s Atari Corporation demonstrated a CD-ROM drive running the Grolier’s KnowldegeDisc, a digital version of the Grolier’s encyclopedia based on software created by Gary Kildall’s Activenture, Inc. At the time, Tramiel and his team said they would soon ship a working CD-ROM drive for its new Atari 520ST computer that would cost no more than $500.

It was a ludicrous promise. The companies actually developing CD-ROM players in late 1985, such as Sony, Hitachi, and Philips, were all quoting retail prices of between $700 and $1,000. Even Tramiel knew that he wouldn’t be able to deliver a $500 CD-ROM drive in 1985. That didn’t stop him from continuing to promise it in 1986 or 1987 or 1988, however.