The star of the November 1986 COMDEX show was the Intel 80386 microprocessor. As I discussed in my post about the Chronicles episode covering that event, Compaq and Zenith were among the first companies to announce their own 386-based PCs. This allowed these “clone” makers to get the jump on IBM, which was continuing to drag its feet on its own next-generation PC, the PS/2, which would not come out until August 1987.

Email is one of those technologies that has seemingly always been around in one form or another. The earliest electronic mail systems date back to the 1970s. But before the rise of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s, the vast majority of computer users–to say nothing of the general population–had no access to email. There were several reasons for this, including the costs of additional hardware and email services, as well as the learning curve for using specialized communications software.

The second annual buyer’s guide episode of Computer Chronicles aired in early December 1986. Although the Intel 80386-based PCs were the hot items coming out of COMDEX a few weeks earlier, the Chronicles gang chose to focus their gift-giving ideas on the software and small-scale hardware side of the computer industry.

On that note, Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing George Morrow–sitting in for Gary Kildall for the second week in a row–the Selectronics PD-100, a credit card-sized computer with a keypad and 2 KB of memory that functioned as a “personal directory.” Cheifet demonstrated how you could use it to keep a Christmas shopping list. Morrow retorted, “How long did it take you to put all that [information] in there, Stewart?” Cheifet laughingly replied it didn’t matter since he had a “lot of fun” playing with the device.

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.

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Thirty-six years ago today, episode 482 of Jeopardy! hosted by Alex Trebek aired in syndication. One of the contestants was someone familiar to readers of this blog: Paul Schindler, the longtime software reviewer and frequent panelist on Computer Chronicles. As it turned out Schindler–who recently celebrated his 70th birthday–was something of a game show aficionado back in the day.

According to Schindler’s own account, he first tried out for the original Jeopardy! (1964 - 1975) hosted by Art Fleming. While a freshman at MIT in the early 1970s, Schindler took the train from Boston to New York, where Jeopardy! *taped at the time, to take the test. But he never received a callback, which Scindler thought might have been due to his long hair and beard scaring off the producers at the time.

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).