After the Sex Pistols' final concert at San Francisco's Winterland, the stage was set for a high-tech disco inferno. The Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever album went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 24 weeks. And the groove was laid for the first windows-based personal computer. Ricardo Montalban knew it--why else would he have starred in a new TV series called Fantasy Island?

	What happened to Atari? Atari could have been a contender with its GEM windowing OS. While it had many devoted fans and a great deal of potential, the company was mismanaged, lacked positive leadership, and eventually even lost ground against its gaming competitors Sega and Nintendo.
	What happened to Seattle Computer Products? The company was originally a hardware manufacturer that just happened to create DOS to run its machines. After some legal wrangling, the author of DOS, Tim Paterson, left the company to join Microsoft. In 1981, Microsoft bought all rights to DOS from Seattle Computer Products and adopted the name MS-DOS.

1978
Apple unveils a cool new advancement in their Apple II line: the addition of the floppy disk.

Xerox makes its big move to promote the Alto computer: the company secretly gives away 50 Altos to the computer science departments at Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT.

1979
Microsoft (by now, a single-word, unhyphenated company) moves its base of operations from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Bellevue, Washington--overshooting Silicon Valley by two and a half states.

Game machine manufacturer Atari ships its first line of computers: the Atari 400 and 800. The makers of Pac-Man, however, use a text-based operating system--a modified version of DOS 2.0--and stick with it until 1985.

Xerox makes its second big move in marketing the Alto: they show it in a private demo to representatives of Apple Computer, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Xerox isn't giving this information away--they exchange the demo and a glimpse at what their research center is doing for the right to buy 100,000 shares in Apple for $1,000,000. But many feel Xerox mismanages this deal; even the engineer who performed the demo goes on record to say it's a bad idea.

1980
Atari stakes its claim on the personal computing market with a bold ad in the trade mags that states, "Atari promises to be the most popular personal computer of the 1980s."

IBM meets with Microsoft about a project that goes by the codename of Acorn, which will eventually become the PC. IBM wants to use Digital Research (Kildall's company) for the OS and Microsoft for programming languages.

Microsoft decides to enter the OS market by buying 86-QDOS (which stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System), a 16-bit single-user operating system from Seattle Computer Products.