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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
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