As this is not only the last issue of the year but the last of the 1980s, a retrospective was clearly called for – but the events of the past five years, starting with the launch of the 3090s by IBM at the beginning of 1985, through the acquisition of Sperry by Burroughs in 1986 to create Unisys Corp, the US-Japan chip wars of 1987 and the ceding of its computer business to Bull by Honeywell, through to the soaraway success of Sun Microsystems that led to AT&T joining forces with the company, which directly gave IBM the opportunity to put the Unix world into schism, with open systems standards and the RISC revolution hovering in the background and changing forever the comfortable assumptions about the industry, are too fresh in people’s minds to need repeating here. They are anyway being chronicled day by day in our Five Years Ago rubric. So instead we decided to devote the space to the first five years of the decade, which set the agenda for today’s environment. It will soon become clear that the signs of revolution were there for all to see – to anyone with the perception to sort the fundamental from the ephemeral – but who would dare lay claim to such perception?
