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.

Last year, I acquired a copy of the 1984 Morrow Pivot Owner’s Handbook, the manual for the portable MS-DOS computer manufactured by Morrow Designs, which was written by John VanderWood and illustrated by Bill McCarty. Of course, Morrow Designs founder and chairman George Morrow was a longtime Computer Chronicles contributor. Morrow’s first appearance on the show was on a January 1985 program where he demonstrated the Pivot.

I’ve scanned the full manual, which you can download here or at the Internet Archive. This is actually the second edition of the manual. Notably, this edition contains several “inserted” pages with point numbers, such as “7.1” and “7.2.” This was likely done to avoid the additional time and expense of redoing the manual’s index, which in those days still had to be done by hand.

Since 2013, Randy Kindig, Kay Savetz, and Brad Arnold have co-hosted ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast, which focuses on the Atari 8-bit line of personal computers produced between 1979 and 1992. In addition to their regular monthly podcast, the ANTIC catalog includes more than 450 interviews with individuals who worked at Atari and other companies involved in the 8-bit computer industry of the time.

I wanted to point out two recent interviews conducted by Kay Savetz with Frank Foster and Robert Moore, which he published earlier this month. Foster and Moore were two of the principals behind Hybrid Arts, one of the first companies to develop MIDI music applications for both the Atari 8-bit line and the 16-bit Atari 520ST. Moore appeared in a September 1986 Computer Chronicles episode to demonstrate Hybrid Arts’ EZ-Track, a consumer product that enabled ST users to send commands from an ST directly to a Casio keyboard; and ADAP, a high-end digital audio workstation that provided what Moore described as a “tapeless recording studio.”

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.”

Clint Basinger has covered retro technology and PC gaming since 2009 on his YouTube channel LGR. Basinger recently published a video covering the first Computer Chronicles holiday buyer’s guide episode from December 1985, where he was kind enough to reference my blog on that same program. Specifically, Basinger was intrigued by the discussion of Lotus Signal, which I only covered more in-depth in a separate blog post as well as an episode of the podcast.

If you used a computer at school during the 1980s or early 1990s, there’s likely a handful of software titles that you can still recognize today, such as The Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The companies behind these iconic programs once competed in a market that featured dozens of small firms jockeying for sales at a time when personal computers were still a relatively new concept for most consumers. And as the PC slowly became a mass-market consumer electronics product in the 1990s, the software industry started to undergo its own rapid consolidation and contraction.

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.”

Gavilan Computer Corporation made headlines in early 1983 when it announced its Mobile Computer, a nine-pound, battery-powered Intel 8088 PC with an 8-line LCD screen, full-sized typewriter keyboard, and a “solid state mouse” that was a precursor to the modern trackpad. Founded by a former CEO of Zilog and backed by $31 million in venture capital, Gavilan was poised to be the next big thing in personal computing. Sadly, it wasn’t, and in October 1984, Gavilan filed for bankruptcy and quickly disappeared, memorialized by a brief report in an early 1985 Computer Chronicles episode.