Timeline of computing 1980–89

This article presents a detailed timeline of events in the history of computing from 1980 to 1989. For narratives explaining the overall developments, see the History of computing.

Tim Paterson's DOS 1.0 was 4000 lines of assembler.

MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter), text only, introduced with IBM PC.

MS-DOS 1.0, PC DOS 1.0.

Microsoft (known mainly for their programming languages) were commissioned by IBM to write the operating system, they bought a program called 86-DOS from Tim Paterson which was loosely based on CP/M-80. The final program from Microsoft was marketed by IBM as PC DOS and by Microsoft as MS-DOS, collaboration on subsequent versions continued until version 5.0 in 1991.

Compared to modern versions of DOS, version 1 was very basic. The most notable difference was the presence of just 1 directory, the root directory, on each disk. Subdirectories were not supported until version 2.0 (March, 1983).

MS-DOS was the main operating system for all IBM-PC compatible computers until Microsoft released Windows 95. According to Microsoft, in 1994, MS-DOS was running on some 100 million computers world-wide.

At introduction the fastest version ran at 12.5 MHz, achieved 2.7 MIPS and contained 134,000 transistors.

Introduced with the IBM XT this version included a Unix style hierarchical sub-directory structure, and altered the way in which programs could load and access files on the disk.

PC DOS 2.1 (for PCjr). Like the PCjr this was not a great success and quickly disappeared from the market.

MS-DOS 2.11, MS-DOS 2.25
Version 2.25 included support for foreign character sets, and was marketed in the Far East.

Microsoft Windows is annonced.

Applications that came as part of the package included MacPaint, which made use of the mouse, and MacWrite, which demonstrated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processing.

Released for the IBM AT, it supported larger hard disks as well as High Density (1.2 MB) 5¼" floppy disks.

This was the first version of DOS to provide network support, and provides some new functions to handle networking.

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