1976 - 1990

1976 Murdoch buys The Times, The Sunday Times and the New York Post

1976 first Apple computer

1976 prepaid phone cards introduced in Italy

1976 Kurzweil Reading Machine

1976 Diffie & Hellman's New Directions in Cryptography describes public key cryptography

1976 Australia's Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) founded

1976 Australian Broadcasting Control Board becomes the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal

1976 Ethernet described

1976 Ted Turner delivers programming across US by satellite

1976 Cray-1, first supercomputer

1976 first Concorde flight

1976 cable television in 15% of US households

1977 Beaverbrook Newspapers sold to Trafalgar House

1977 Rivest, Shamir & Adleman publish RSA algorithm

1977 Star Wars

1977 QUBE interactive cable tv trial in Ohio

1977 Apple II PC offers colour and floppy disk instead of cassette tapes

1978 Bulletin Board software

1978 point-&-shoot camera

1979 3Com founded

1979 Eisenstein's The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change

     1980

1980 number of computers in US exceeds one million

1980 Microsoft DOS version 1.0

1980 Berners-Lee writes "Enquire Within" program

1980 Intelpost international electronic fax service

1980 CNN 24-hour news channel

1980 Wordstar is first PC word processor

1980 Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet

1980 first compact discs

1980 Fritz Machlup's Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution & Economic Significance

1980 Chandler's Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

1980 OECD Information Privacy Principles

1980 laptop computer

1981 Lagardere buys Hachette

1981 US General Accounting Office predicts that e mail will put two-thirds of postal workers out of work by 2000

1981 US businesses uses 850 billion pages of paper

1981 21 000 industrial robots in use in Japan, 6 000 in US

1981 launch of Space Shuttle and MTV

1981 first Nintendo home video game

1981 invention of the mouse

1981 Jim Rutt coins the term 'snail mail'

1981 Microsoft provides software for IBM personal computers

1982 US government drops 1969 antitrust case against IBM

1982 USA Today typeset in regional plants via satellite

1982 first PC Local Area Network

1982 Compaq founded

1982 Sky Channel (first European satellite TV channel) launched

1982 Kodak camera uses film on a disc cassette

1982 200 computers connected to the internet worldwide

1982 Australian Freedom of Information Act

1982 Lotus 1-2-3

1982 Sun Microsystems founded

1983 number of computers in US exceeds ten million

1983 mobile phone network starts in US

1983 Cisco founded

1983 Time magazine names computer as "Man of the Year"

1983 AT&T forced to break up

1983 American videotext service starts but fails in three years

1983 Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom

1983 Fairfax buys David Syme

1984 William Gibson coins term 'cyberspace' in Neuromancer

1984 CD Walkman

1984 first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) - Psion Organiser

1984 Sky TV, first UK satellite TV channel

1984 Camcorder

1984 Apple Macintosh, IBM PC AT

1984 32-bit microprocessor and one megabyte memory chip

1984 public float of Reuters

     1985

1985 Minsky's The Society of Mind

1985 Commonwealth Department of Science's National Information Policy paper disappears without trace

1985 Murdoch buys 20th Century Fox and Metromedia broadcasting stations

1985 first colour photocopiers

1985 AOL founded

1985 Symbolic.com becomes first registered dot-com domain

1985 car-based cellular phones in US

1985 average US TV viewing peaks at 7 hours 10 minutes per day

1985 US TV networks begin satellite distribution to affiliates

1985 pay-per-view channels open for business in US

1985 20% of US households have VCRs

1986 Aldus introduces PageMaker, first page design software

1986 US business uses 2.5 trillion pages of paper

1986 number of computers in US exceeds 30 million

1986 Hollinger buys UK Daily Telegraph

1986 General Electric buys RCA

1986 Capital Cities Communications buys American Broadcasting network for US$3.5 billion to create Capital Cities-ABC

1986 HBO scrambles its signals

1986 cable shopping networks

1986 Burroughs merges with Sperry to form Unisys

1986 Academic American Encyclopedia is first major reference work published on CD-ROM

1986 Microsoft Windows 1.0

1986 Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission Act

1986 Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society

1986 Schiller's Information & the Crisis Economy

1987 first debit card in UK

1987 Apple spins off application software business as Claris

1987 est. 1 million mobile phone subscribers in US

1987 Murdoch buys Herald & Weekly Times group, Harper & Row and South China Morning Post

1987 Bond gives Kerry Packer $1 billion for Nine television network

1987 Murdoch sells Ten network to Frank Lowy for $842 million

1987 Warwick Fairfax unsuccessfully privatises Fairfax group

1988 first internet worm

1988 4.7 million microcomputers, 120,000 minicomputers and 11,500 mainframes sold in US

1988 first transatlantic fibre optic cable completed

1988 Reserve Bank of Australia releases world's first plastic banknotes

1988 Commonwealth Privacy Act

1988 Prodigy videotex service, an IBM and Sears joint venture

1989 Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg

1989 premiere of The Simpsons

1989 Cosser buys control of Ten Network from Lowy for $22 million (lent by Lowy) and Qintex Group goes bust

1989 GridPad laptop features touch sensitive pad that recognizes handwriting

1989 launch of Murdoch's SkyTV in UK

1989 Time merges with Warner

1989 Sony buys Columbia Pictures

1989 AT&T buys cable giant TCI

1989 est. 138 million subscriber phone lines in US; global figure is est. 496 million

     1990

1990 World Wide Web described by Tim Berners-Lee

1990 Telecom New Zealand privatised

1990 Electronic Frontier Foundation

1990 first commercial provider of dial-up net access

1990 first palmtop computers

1990 99% of US households have at least one radio

1990 Moravec's Mind Children

1990 US business uses 4 trillion pages of paper

1990 Packer regains control of Nine television network




    next page  (1991-2000)