IBM was not having the best year in 1985. In October, Big Blue reported its third consecutive drop in quarterly profits. TopView, IBM’s attempt to introduce multi-tasking into DOS, had not taken the business market by storm. And then there was the ever-increasing competition from various PC clone makers.

But we’re still in the period where many industry observers kept their faith in IBM’s ability to brute-force its will upon the market. That leads into our next Computer Chronicles episode from October 1985, which focused on computer networks. As Stewart Cheifet mentioned during the last episode’s “Random Access” segment, IBM had recently launched its new token ring system, which was the company’s challenge to 3Com’s Ethernet standard in local area networking.

A “Random Access” item in the last episode discussed a 1985 bill introduced in the United States Senate, S.1305, which proposed to prohibit anyone from “knowingly entering or transmitting by means of a computer” any content related to child pornography. Although similar legislation is now on the federal statute books, this particular bill never made it out of the Senate despite enthusiastic support from then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

There was substantial resistance to S.1305 from civil liberties advocates and the tech industry, who feared the legislation would stifle the nascent computer bulletin board system (BBS) market. In a February 1986 Baltimore Sun column, David H. Rothman cited one BBS operator–who happened to be a lawyer–who said, “Just word of one prosecution would be enough to frighten some board operators” into shutting down completely. The problem, Rothman explained, was that the word “knowingly” in S. 1305 could implicate honest BBS operators who were simply too overwhelmed to monitor their users’ posts 24 hours a day. For example, another operator he spoke to said that he made a diligent effort to prevent users from illegally posting people’s credit card numbers, yet “[n]umbers went up [] before he could zap them, and authorities subjected him to a legal battle.”

Few industries were transformed more by the rise in computer technology than the media. This next Computer Chronicles episode from October 1985 looked at the interaction of computers and the media, with a focus on practical applications in the television, radio, and newspaper industries. The final segment also returned to a favorite topic of the show, computer graphics, where the work of one of the guests would help lead to the creation of a whole new form of media–the computer-animated film.

The Macintosh never lived up to the hype of the infamous “1984” Super Bowl ad. But by the end of 1985, the Mac started to find its niche as a desktop publishing machine. It was actually the launch of Apple’s LaserWriter printer in March 1985 that helped spark this new age of computer-based publishing. Indeed, the $2,500 Macintosh was effectively an accessory for the $7,000 laser printer, not so much the other way around.

There’s a telling comment from the previous Computer Chronicles episode that helps set the stage for this next program. When discussing the state of the computer software industry in late 1985, Electronic Arts founder and CEO Trip Hawkins said the market was driven by men who were primarily interested in entertainment. He explicitly said “men.”

The notion that computer games–and by extension, computers in general–were just for “men” reflects the larger problem of sexism that continues to plague the tech industry even today. Keep in mind, the problem was even worse in 1985 when access to computers was still a luxury for most people. This only exacerbated the difficulties for women looking to enter the male-dominated culture of computer engineering. In June 1985, Stanford University released a study that found only about one-third of computer programmers and analysts were women–and the women who held those jobs earned “far less” than their male counterparts.

This next episode continued the previous discussion about the noticeable slowdown in the computer industry during the summer of 1985. This time, the focus was on software and hardware manufacturers, including three companies that not only survived the slowdown but remain major players in the industry today.

Like the previous show, Stewart Cheifet did his cold open from a street location in Silicon Valley, specifically Semiconductor Drive in Sunnyvale. He rhetorically asked about the future of the high-tech business given the ongoing slowdown in computer sales.

The third season of Computer Chronicles debuted in September 1985 with a two-part look at the “slowdown in Silicon Valley.” Basically, these next two episodes consisted of round tables with people representing different facets of the computer industry to discuss why things seemed to be going much worse in 1985 as opposed to 1984. This first episode focused on the perspectives from venture capital, the media, analysts, and retailers, while in the next episode we’ll hear from software and hardware manufacturers.

When Computer Chronicles first delved into the topic of computer graphics back in April 1984, the focus was largely on high-end professional systems, such as the $150,000 Quantel Paintbox. More than a year later, in June 1985, Chronicles closed out its second season with another computer graphics show that looked at more affordable offerings for personal computer users.

Would Artists Abandon Paintbrushes for Graphics Pads?

Stewart Cheifet did his cold open at a California museum standing in front of what he described as “a fine example of abstract expressionist art” by artist Dan Cooper that was made using an Apple II. Cheifet quipped that old artists’ tools like brushes were becoming “passe” and replaced by touch-sensitive graphics pads and sophisticated graphics software.

In 1963, Japan’s government decided to build a planned scientific community about 35 miles north of Tokyo that would meet the country’s growing demand for high-tech research and technology. Known as Tsukuba Science City, the site today is home to roughly 150 research, educational, and high-tech business institutions. From March to October of 1985, Tsukuba also hosted a world’s fair called Expo ‘85, which was the sole focus of our next Computer Chronicles episode.

As we round the home stretch for the second season of Computer Chronicles, the show makes its first extended foray abroad. The next two episodes focus on Japan. This first episode from May 1985 examines the state of the Japanese personal computer market, while the second looks mostly at the country’s robotics industry.

Had Japan’s Window of Opportunity Closed?

Stewart Cheifet presented his cold open from Japantown in San Francisco. He said that while many Japanese products had become popular in the United States, one export that had not been very successful was the Japanese computer. This episode would explore why that was the case.