1983

1983 was somewhat of a fallout year in the PC industry. The older players, mostly 6502 and Z80/8080 systems began their descent while the IBM PC and clone systems began a meteoric rise that has resulted in the descendants of that architecture pretty much owning the market for "personal" systems.

Early in the year Apple Computer introduced the Apple Lisa which had been under development for some time. The Lisa was based on a Motorola 68000 16-bit processor and introduced the affordable Graphical User Interface to the masses. Apple had borrowed heavily from the development efforts of Xerox and their Alto machines developed several years earlier. During the year Apple continued development of an inexpensive version of the Lisa which would become the Macintosh. They also kept the legacy of the Apple ][ alive with the introduction of the Apple IIe.

Microsoft was busy as well and, borrowing from the same sources as Apple as well as Apple itself, developed the first version of Windows.

Over the course of 1983 it became apparent that hard drives were the wave of the future. The majority of the major computer manufacturers from Apple to IBM all introduced hard drive subsystems or machines built around hard drives. Even portable makers such as Kaypro were introducing machines with built-in fixed-disk mass storage.

During the year over 5 million PCs sold more then doubling again the number of machines sold to date. Well over 8 million inexpensive computers were now in the hands of consumers worldwide.