New Media Timeline (1979)

By: David Shedden

December 16, 2004

Previous: 1978 / Next: 1980 Intro and links to the other years in the timeline
TECHNOLOGY The USENET service is established by three graduate students at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Motorola releases its 68000 microprocessor. Apple will use this powerful processor for its Lisa and early Macintosh computers. In 1979 the first Japanese commercial cellular network is started. U.S. cellular telephone networks began a few years later. However, until the early 1990s cell phones were so large that they were used primarily as car phones. WordStar, one of the first commercially successful word processing software programs for personal computers, is released by Micropro International. July 1, 1979 — The first Sony Walkman is sold. (You might say the audio cassette Walkman and the first commercial transistor radio (1954) were the iPods of their generations.) The Atari company introduces its 400 and 800 computers. This is the beginning of the “Atari 8-bit” series.		THE MEDIA British Telecom introduces an interactive videotex system called Prestel. News Examples: March 27, 1979 — “Egypt and Israel Sign Formal Treaty,” March 29, 1979 — “Radiation Is Released in Accident at Nuclear Plant in Pennsylvania,” New York Times. (Abstracts available from the Infobank database service.)

Previous: 1978 / Next: 1980

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David Shedden