1980 to 1989: The Rise of Personal Computers and Personal Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 173

The IBM PC catapulted Microsoft to become a major player in the software
industry, and Bill Gates became the world's wealthiest man for many years. The
famous disk operating system , or Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS), had been ordered by
IBM in 1981, and the first version was released to outside customers in 1982. DOS
was the main operating system of the early PC era.
The Windows operating system was originally an extension to DOS, but by the
time of Windows 2 in 1982, it began to have a graphical appearance with overlap-
ping screen images.
Early in the decade, Apple selected the Objective-C programming language as
its main language for Apple products. The language was originally developed by
Dr. Tom Love and Dr. Brad Cox at ITT, and it was acquired by Stepstone Corpora-
tion when ITT sold its telecommunications business to Alcatel. Objective-C is still
used in Apple products, making it one of the longest-lasting industrial program-
ming languages.
This decade saw the incorporation of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI)
in 1984 and increasing rigor of software development. Software assessments as
designed by Watts Humphrey were offered by SEI, and assessments plus bench-
marks were offered by Software Productivity Research (SPR), starting a year be-
fore SEI. Both methods expanded rapidly in this decade.
Programming languages began to explode in numbers and variety with new
languages such as Ada, Quick Basic, Pascal, C11, Objective-C, and dozens of oth-
ers appearing. New languages came out at a rate of more than two per month dur-
ing this decade.
This decade witnessed the arrival of the internet and what would later facilitate
the World Wide Web. The internet is a collection of protocols that connects com-
puters and networks to each other. The term “world wide web” was coined by Tim
Berners-Lee and is a set of services that use the internet. It would be the next dec-
ade before the World Wide Web actually became global.
The internet derived from the older ARPANET and several other similar net-
works in Europe. Other enabling technologies were needed; among them was the
famous internet protocol suite TCP/IP. The TCP/IP standard facilitated the emer-
gence of a new commercial business of “internet service providers,” or ISPs as
they are commonly called. (Other enabling inventions such as hyper-text markup
language [HTML] are discussed in the next chapter dealing with the 1990s.)