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.

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.