1984 - Technology

Technology

The Macintosh computer introduced by Apple January 24 is a "user-friendly" PC with superior graphics capabilities. New York-born Apple engineer-writer-artist-composer Jef Raskin, 41, has come up with the name and, more importantly, had his colleague Ted Atkinson persuade Steve Jobs to visit Xerox Parc at Palo Alto (see 1970), where Jobs has discovered computer menus, the mouse, and other revolutionary Xerox breakthroughs. Jobs has chosen the 68,000-transistor Motorola 68000 microchip as the brain of the new computer.

Cisco Systems is founded in December by former Stanford University computer whiz Leonard Bosack and his wife, Sandra Lerner, 29, to develop computer networking (Internet) technology. They set up shop at San Jose, Calif., with two employees and will introduce the first commercially successful router next year, enabling once-incompatible computers in remote computer networks to communicate; by the end of the century fully 80 percent of all communications on the Internet will be handled by Cisco routers, and Cisco Systems will have 29,000 employees producing 150 products that include dial-in access servers (introduced in 1992), switches (1993), WAN switches (1994), hubs, firewalls, and caching engines (all 1995), cable boxes and cable head-ends (1996), DSL head-ends (1997), Internet phones (1998), home modems (1999), and wireless LANs (2000).

Bell Laboratories announces December 20 that it has perfected a one-megabit random access memory chip able to store on a tiny sliver of silicon four times as much information as anything now available.