Project management software was in the midst of a boom in the late 1980s. According to a May 1987 report from Wendy Woods’ Newsbytes, one company claimed that sales of project management software had increased an astounding 315 percent from February 1986 to February 1987. This likely reflected the growing adoption of minicomputers in offices and large organizations, and the fact such PCs were now powerful enough to handle complex software that had once been the exclusive province of larger mainframes and minicomputers.

The first Computer Dealers Exhibition was held in 1979 in the ballroom of the original MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. (That hotel is now known as Bally’s.) According to a 2021 retrospective by Bob McGlincy for Exhibit City News, that first show drew 167 exhibitors and roughly 3,900 attendees. Subsequent exhibitions–known by the abbreviated name of COMDEX–would draw substantially greater interest from the growing personal computer industry and its customers.

Operating systems like the original MS-DOS were not capable of multitasking–they could only run one program at a time. But you could fake multitasking by taking advantage of the “terminate and stay resident” (TSR) system call in DOS. Essentially, a program that used this call was not cleared from RAM when a new program loaded and remained available to the system until the next reboot.

Such “RAM resident software” was the subject of this next Computer Chronicles episode from November 1986. Stewart Cheifet opened the program by telling Gary Kildall that when Borland first released Sidekick, it was a big deal that you could pop-up a simple calculator on your screen using a RAM resident program. Cheifet then showed a physical calculator–an HP-12C financial calculator–and noted there was now a computer version of the device, which was also available as a TSR program.

If you’ve ever watched retro-tech YouTube videos, you might get the impression that the most widely used computer programming language of the 1980s was BASIC. While it’s true that BASIC was how most elementary and secondary school students learned the “basics” of programming, in practice you didn’t see a lot of commercial software developed in the language. Nor was BASIC something that was likely to be used day-to-day in a business.

Computer software giant Adobe recently made headlines with its proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma, the developer of a popular web-based interface design application. According to Wikipedia, this is the 56th acquisition made by Adobe, Inc.–formerly Adobe Systems, Inc.–since 1990. It’s definitely been quite a ride since John Warnock started the company back in 1982 after leaving Xerox PARC to develop his PostScript printer language.

Warnock was previously a guest in a September 1985 Computer Chronicles episode covering laser printers. He made a return appearance in this next episode from October 1986 as the subject of a Wendy Woods report. Overall, this episode was the second in a two-part look at desktop publishing (DTP).

In September 1986, roughly 1,000 people attended the first Seybold Conference on Desktop Publishing, where the featured speaker was exiled Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. As usual, Jobs was desperate for attention, so he proceeded to insult the participants by telling them, “You’re here at a $600,000 event to talk about a non-existent industry in two years.” According to Wendy Woods’ Newsbytes, Jobs apparently believed that companies would soon offer “computers with built-in software for desktop publishing,” rendering the standalone software market obsolete. (Spoiler: That didn’t happen.)

On August 12, 1991, the Boston Computer Exchange (BCE) held an “Irish wake” for the original IBM Personal Computer. The 10-year-old PC had finally reached the point where it had no resale value, a BCE manager claimed, so it was now time to mark the machine’s “transition from a salable commodity to a donation item.”

The BCE was one of the first used computer dealers in the United States. Even jumping back five years to 1986, Computer Chronicles had already taken notice of the growing market for second hand computers. Indeed, BCE’s co-founder was among the guests on this October 1986 episode devoted to the topic.

Business applications and games may garner the most attention when talking about computer software from the 1980s, but for many companies the real key to success was in utility programs. Keep in mind, this was a time when operating systems like MS-DOS and CP/M still came on floppy disks. This meant there wasn’t much room for extra features, even utilities that we would now consider basic features of a modern operating system.

During the run of Computer Chronicles thus far, IBM launched a number of products that failed to dominate their respective markets, including the PCjr, TopView, and token ring. But that didn’t stop Big Blue from trying to recapture its early PC glory days. This next Chronicles episode from October 1986 demonstrated yet another stumble in the form of the IBM RT PC, which despite the name was not part of its personal computer line, but rather an experimental minicomputer/microcomputer hybrid based on an architectural approach known as RISC.

The Battle of the 16-Bit Computers was in full swing by late 1986, with the Apple IIgs joining the fray against the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST at the lower end of the market. One of the key fronts in this battle was sound–specifically, the ability of these newer machines to produce digital music. Computer music was still in its infancy but had taken a significant step forward thanks to the development of a new standard called MIDI, which was the focus of this September 1986 episode of Computer Chronicles.