1979

Atari 400/800

Atari showed their first two home computers. The Atari 400 was an innovative game machine. Four joystick ports, special graphic & sound chips made the Atari 400 the best game computer at that time. The graphic and sound chip were developed by Jay Miner who later developed the Amiga.

While the Atari 400 was designed as a game machine, the Atari 800 was more ambitious. With its real typewriter keyboard and a big memory (48 KBytes RAM) it was even suitable for small home offices. An additional cartridge port was only used by a few cartridges. Programs could be saved to cassette or disk.

CBM 3008

While Atari debuted in the home computer market, Commodore established the PET 2001 as a serious office computer. Due to trademark issues they were not allowed to use the name "PET" anymore so the successors were simply called CBM. The CBM3008 looked quite similar compared to its predecessor but offered a more professional keyboard and expanded RAM. The cassette recorder was replaced by a number block.

Motorola 68000

It can take a long time for a CPU to reach a mass audience: In 1979 Motorola introduced the 68000, a 16/32-bit CPU. Until it would power such machines as the Macintosh or Atari ST, it was used in workstations.

Birth of the adventure companies

The new home computers needed software and therefore several new companies were founded in 1979. Infocom and Sierra OnLine were two of them. Sierra was most successful in the second half of the 80's and early nineties but introduced the first graphic adventure game in 1980 (Mystery House). Infocom created text adventures, starting with the fantasy adventure Zork. Zork was already created in 1977 at the MIT and enjoyed huge success there - enough success to encourage creating a software company. Their first project was porting Zork over to other platforms, including Apple II and Atari 8 bit. The original Zork was split into three parts due to limited memory of the home computers but was extended so that each game could stand on its own. The Zork series was available for several years; the game sold over a million copies across all platforms.