1979 – 1985: The Dawn of the PC 

The first microcomputers were little more than gadgets for geeks. But when VisiCalc for the Apple II appeared in 1979, the personal computer outgrew the garage and got down to business. Two years later, IBM unveiled its PC; before long, putty-colored boxes were as big a part of corporate America as the Dictaphone and the three-martini lunch.

Then a funny thing happened. The market Apple created and IBM legitimized got taken over by upstarts such as Kaypro, Compaq, and a college student named Michael Dell. Thanks to the PC’s open architecture, “IBM clone makers” could assemble standard parts and sell machines cheaply.

These clones had another thing in common: a disk operating system written by a tiny company called Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Apple was readying the Lisa, the first commercial computer to sport a graphical user interface. Then came the Macintosh, desktop publishing, and the famous “Big Brother” Super Bowl ad. In 1985, Microsoft responded with its own GUI, a primitive version of Windows, sparking years of legal wrangling. When Compaq leapt ahead of IBM to introduce the first 386s, the revolution was complete.

Computers became an intrinsic part of popular culture. In 1982, the PC was Time magazine’s “Machine of the Year” — narrowly defeating the Dustbuster and the hot-air popcorn popper. And William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer used the term cyberspace to describe a world dominated by networks of connected machines — a fiction soon to become reality for American enterprises.