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.)

The Software Publishers Association (SPA) began in 1984 as the lobbying arm for the still-nascent computer software industry. The SPA later became intimately associated with Computer Chronicles. The organization was a presenting sponsor for several seasons, and during the 1990s the Chronicles dedicated episodes to coverage of the SPA’s annual software awards, the “Codies.” By the end of Chronicles’ run in 2002, the SPA had merged with the Information Industry Association to form the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), which continues to hand out the Codies today.

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.

The second part of Computer Chronicles’ fourth-season look at educational software was something of a grab bag. The September 1986 episode looked at everything from software targeting preschoolers to early efforts at offering college classes online. There was even a return of our old friend the LaserDisc!

Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing guest co-host George Morrow the VTech Learning-Window Teaching Machine, a “toy computer for kids” that parents could purchase for under $50. It taught kids math and spelling using a voice synthesizer. Cheifet noted that computers had been blamed for putting people out of jobs. Did Morrow think computers could be used effectively to train people for new jobs? Morrow said that he spent a lot of time with user groups and the professionals were using computers now as a transitional tool. The challenge for the industry was putting some “entertainment” into these products to help people make that transition.

The fourth season of Computer Chronicles premiered in September 1986 with a two-part look at educational software. In this first episode, the focus was on software used by educators in the schools. The next episode focused on educational software for the home.

George Morrow joined Stewart Cheifet as co-host for both episodes. Also joining the two hosts for the introduction: a frog sitting in a small terrarium (and no doubt enjoying the hot studio lights). Cheifet said that when he studied biology in high school, they had to kill and dissect frogs like this one. Now you could use software to do the same thing. Cheifet demonstrated Operation Frog, a frog dissection simulator running on an Apple IIc. Chiefet noted that some critics argued this type of software was no substitute for the “real thing.” Morrow disagreed. He said the software was a marvelous tool as a supplement, i.e., to do run-throughs and use as a reference tool.

Morrow Designs, Inc., the company founded by George Morrow and his wife in 1979, was part of the early wave of small manufacturers that produced microcomputers for the business market. Morrow Designs, Osborne Computer Corporation, Kaypro Corporation, and Vector Graphic all basically followed the same playbook: Sell a pre-assembled computer bundled with Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system and other business software, such as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

The short version of history tells us that these early companies all withered away after IBM debuted its own Personal Computer and made Microsoft’s PC-DOS (i.e., MS-DOS) the new operating system standard. But there were, of course, other factors involved in each company’s demise. In the case of Morrow Designs, the biggest reason for the company’s failure was George Morrow himself.

Since the mid-2000s, just about every personal computer made contains a multi-core and/or multi-threaded CPU. These are both practical applications of parallel processing technology, which was still in its infancy back in March 1986 when this next Computer Chronicles episode aired. At this point, parallel processing was largely the domain of expensive “super” minicomputers that were marketed as less-expensive alternatives–relatively speaking–to traditional mainframes.

Stewart and Gary Playing with Their Trains

In his cold open, recorded at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, Stewart Cheifet showed a video camera that was part of a computerized vision system attempting to mimic the human brain by processing millions of pieces of information in milliseconds. Sequential computers couldn’t handle that kind of speed, he said, so computer scientists needed to develop computers that worked more like the human brain in terms of parallel processing.