By the late 1980s, the personal computer market had become dominated by the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh platforms.

As the 1980s began, hard disk drives were a rare and very expensive additional feature on personal computers ( PCs ); however by the late ' 80s, their cost had been reduced to the point where they were standard on all but the cheapest PC.

Most hard disk drives in the early 1980s were sold to PC end users as an external, add-on subsystem.

MultiMate was a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. ( later renamed Multimate International ) for IBM PC MS-DOS computers in the early 1980s.

Turbo Pascal 5. 5 had a large influence on the Pascal community, which began concentrating mainly on the IBM PC in the late 1980s.

In the 1980s, the IBM PC and its clones largely took over the small computer market, and DEC was unable to counter this competition.

* 1987 – Roland MT-32: Also using Linear Arithmetic synthesis, it was supported by many PC games in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a high-quality music option until support shifted to General MIDI sound cards.

The term did not become widely known and used, however, until the early 1980s, essentially synonymous with the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market.

3Com began making Ethernet adaptor cards for many early 1980s computer systems, including the LSI-11, IBM PC, and VAX-11.

In the 1980s, it was common in IBM PC / compatible microcomputers for the FPU to be entirely separate from the CPU, and typically sold as an optional add-on.

During the late 1980s, Amstrad had a substantial share of the PC market in the UK.

The Amiga was the undisputed leader of mainstream multimedia computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, though it was eventually overtaken by PC architecture.

In the early 1980s, Borland enjoyed considerable success with their Turbo Pascal product and it became a popular choice when developing applications for the PC.

Although the IBM PC was designed for expandability, the designers could not anticipate the hardware developments of the 1980s, nor the size of the industry they would engender.

The processor speed and memory capacity of modern PCs are many orders of magnitude greater than they were for the original IBM PC and yet backwards compatibility has been largely maintained – a 32-bit operating system can still operate many of the simpler programs written for the OS of the early 1980s without needing an emulator, though an emulator like DOSBox now has near-native functionality at full speed.

The PC CPUs of the time had limitations in memory capacity and memory access protection, making them unsuitable to run OSes of this sophistication, but this, too, began to change in the late 1980s as PCs with the 32-bit 80386 with integrated paged MMUs became widely affordable.

Xerox only realized their mistake in the early 1980s, after Apple's Macintosh revolutionized the PC market via its bitmap display and the mouse-centered interface — both copied from the Alto.

In the 1980s, NCR sold various PC compatible AT-class computers, like the small NCR-3390 ( called an " intelligent terminal ").

Through the 1980s, Matrox's cards followed changes in the hardware side of the market, to Multibus and then the variety of PC standards.

IBM PC DOS ( full name: The IBM Personal Computer Disk Operating System ) is a DOS system for the IBM Personal Computer and compatibles, manufactured and sold by IBM from the 1980s to the 2000s.

A common view within the PC community is that the company failed because it specialized in computers designed specifically for word processing and did not foresee ( and was unable to compete against ) general-purpose personal computers with word processing software in the 1980s.

The workstation industry in general experienced hard times in the second half of the 1980s, as IBM Personal Computers and IBM PC compatibles began making inroads on their customer base.

* 1980s: Retail handwriting-recognition systems: Pencept and CIC both offer PC computers for the consumer market using a tablet and handwriting recognition instead of a keyboard and mouse.

In the mid 1980s, text-based and graphical user interface operating environments such as IBM TopView, Microsoft Windows, Digital Research's GEM Desktop and Quarterdeck Office Systems's DESQview surrounded DOS operating systems with a shell that turned the user's display into a menu-oriented " desktop " for selecting and running PC applications.

When emulators of 1980s video game consoles began to appear on home computers in the late 1990s, the Atari 7800 was one of the last to be emulated.

In the 1980s, Japanese personal computers such as the NEC PC-88 came installed with FM synthesis sound chips and featured audio programming languages such as Music Macro Language ( MML ) and MIDI interfaces, which were most often used to produce video game music, or chiptunes.

Dungeons & Dragons is known beyond the game for other D & D-branded products, references in popular culture and some of the controversies that have surrounded it, particularly a moral panic in the 1980s falsely linking it to Satanism and suicide.

Another big game changer for databases in the 1980s was the focus on increasing reliability and access speeds.

During one game in the 1980s, Hamilton Tiger-Cats wide receiver Earl Winfield was unable to field a punt properly ; in frustration, he kicked the ball out of bounds.

Role-playing fanzines allowed people to communicate in the 1970s and 1980s with complete editorial control in the hands of the players, as opposed to the game publishers.

Most of the syndicated programs were " nighttime " adaptations of network daytime game shows ; these game shows originally aired once a week, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s most ouf the games had transitioned to five days a week.

Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s as fewer new hits were produced, game shows lost their permanent place in the daytime lineup.

In the United Kingdom, game shows have had a more steady and permanent place in the television lineup and never lost popularity in the 1990s as they did in the United States, due in part to the fact that game shows were highly regulated by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in the 1980s and those restrictions were lifted in the 1990s, allowing for higher-stakes games to be played.

Digital joysticks were very common as game controllers for the video game consoles, arcade machines, and home computers of the 1980s.

* In the 1980s computer game Accolade's Comics the protagonist Steve Keene is offered tickets to the Latverian Ballet.

In the 1970s and 1980s it was thought that leg spin would disappear from the game due to the success of West Indian and later Australian teams exclusively using fast bowlers.

The practice of using graphics engines from video games arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios ' 1992 video game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter ( FPS ) video games, such as id Software's Doom and Quake.

By the late 1980s, the 68000 was inexpensive enough to power home game consoles, such as Sega's Mega Drive ( Genesis ) console.

In addition to home computers and game consoles, the 6809 was also utilized in a number of arcade games released during the early to mid 1980s.

Mecha have been featured in video games since the 1980s, particularly in vehicular combat and shooter games, including Sesame Japan's side-scrolling shooter game Vastar in 1983, various Gundam games such as the first-person shooters Mobile Suit Gundam: Last Shooting in 1984 and Z-Gundam: Hot Scramble in 1986, the run and gun shooters Hover Attack in 1984 and Thexder in 1985, and Arsys Software's 3D role-playing shooters WiBArm in 1986 and Star Cruiser in 1988.

In computer gaming, Murder Motel was an online text game by Sean D. Wagle, hosted on various dial-up bulletin board systems ( 1980s, originally Color64, ported to various other platforms ).

* In the 1980s a role-playing game based on this setting was produced by Chaosium named The Ringworld Roleplaying Game.

* In the video game Daleks ( published for operating systems of the early 1980s ), the Doctor can use the sonic screwdriver to teleport and to defend himself against the Daleks.

* Steve Jackson ( US game designer ), founder of Steve Jackson Games in the early 1980s

* Sega Master System, an 8-bit video game console from the 1980s