Timeline:1980

1980: The idea Feb - The IBM 5120 Desktop PC is shipped to the public, and craned into the public arena. The 5120 is the cheapest in IBMs range of computers at that time, at just $9,340 ($27,000 today). Like all of its predecessors in the IBM range, the 5120 is an all-in one unit, with everything built in to a very solid casing structure, which weighed in at 105lbs, thats almost 48 kgs (not including the included printer).

Feb - Initial samples of M68k were released to the public. Jay Miner is among the first to receive the latest 8 Mhz chips for testing. Jay goes away and sees the internal 32-bit architecture of the sixty-eight thousand as a huge breakthrough, and a games machine running on such as system would be incredible. Overclocking the master clock on the motherboard to 28.636 Mhz and dividing the number by 4 to run a CPU, a Graphics Co-Procressor, a graphics display chip, and a sound chip, all at 7.15909 Mhz, it would be possible to build a dream machine.

April: Cyan Engineer Jay Miner, having had nothing interesting to do since December, had become increasingly bored with the pokey antics of the Colleen TIA chipset inside the 400 and 800 machines. Rather than incorporate the new 68000 cpu into the system by further refining existing technology, he proposed the development of a new computer entirely. He spoke to executives at Atari. Atari were initially wary of the extra finance involved with this, especially as the 400 and 800 systems had yet to make much money. So they asked Jay to go away develop the idea on his own, and come back to them when he had something completely designed.

May 19, 1980, during the National Computer Conference in Anaheim, California.Apple launched the Apple III computer, w/128K RAM, and optional monitor, available for $4500 to $8000. Twice as fast as the Apple II and with twice as much memory, with its amazing 128k or Ram. It was also several times heavier than the Apple II at 26lbs (11.8kg) in weight, with most of this weight due to a gigantic single-piece aluminium shield, to comply with strict regulations of the time. It came with Sophisticated Operating System (known as SOS), and used the modded Synertek 6502A CPU, to deliver up to 2mhz of raw power. Steve Jobs insisted that fans were too noisy for his new system, and as a result many of the systems released without fans overheating, and suffered from warping issues.

1st June - The Sinclair Research ZX80 computer is introduced the the UK as a mail-order kit for £79 or pre-assembled for £99, and retailed for $199.95 in the United States. There is a long waiting list of several months for the kit, initially announced in February of 1980, and it will be late in the year before orders are met. The ZX80 used the Zilog Z80A CPU at 3.25 mhz, had a simple 32 column by 22 row character display text mode, and came with just 1K of ram, expandable up to 64k. Weighing just 12 ounces, with no colour, no sound, and visually no memory, this mini micro went on to sell 50,000 units before its successor, the ZX81 came along in March 1981.

June: The VIC-1001 / VIC-20 debuts at the Summer Computer Electronics Show in Chicago. The Commodore VIC-1001 is announced as the worlds first Colour Computer for less than $300 and is sold in Japan's Seibu Department Store. The machine would later be rebranded as VIC-20, and sales to the rest of the world began in 1981.

June: Also at the Summer CES in Chicago, Mattel Toys show the Intellivision. The Intellivision is a 2nd gen console ships in the fall of 1980 for $299 ($832). Engineering on the Intellivision video game system began in 1978 at Mattel Toys in Hawthorne, California, and although Europe and Japan would not get to see the Intellivision until 1982, The Intelligent Television was also marketed as the Sears Super Video Arcade, the Radio Shack Tandyvision One, and the GTE/Sylvania Intellivision. When prices began to fall the machine became a success, selling 3 Million units globally while production continued until January 1984, and earning Mattel Electronics a cool 100 million profit by 1982. The system used a 16 bit General Instrument CP1610 CPU running at 894.8 khz, it had a 159 pixels wide by 96 pixels high display; which became 192×160 on a TV screen thanks to the TVs scanline doubling effect. It had a 16 colour palate, and a huge 1456 bytes of ram thanks to most of the logic being hard coded into cartridge roms. It was also the first device to support downloadable games thanks to the later PlayCable network, which operated through cable TV. A keyboard expansion was announced which would also upgrade the console to 64k of memory, but it never shipped officially, leaving consumers with a product which quickly became outdated.

November - while Jay Miner is still working on his 16 bit computer design, which used the Motorola 68000 CPU, Nov; M68k production chips available over the counter - Initial speed grades were 4, 6, and 8 MHz. 10 MHz chips became available during 1981. Dec: Apple Incorporates M68k into their Macintosh and Lisa Revision 2 prototypes, running at 8mhz. The Machintosh project is now expressly under the control of Steve Jobs, who having been kicked out of the Lisa team, would often fly into rages with the constant delays and changes to the Mac.. Apple also doubling the ram of the Mac up to 128K

December - The Atari 800 Team are disappointed not to get bonus promised the previous November, after Atari make their computer department look barely profitable on paper to avoid paying it. Jay Miner thinks it now or never, and confronts management about his plans for the M68k based computer. They think it would be too costly to now invest again in an entirely new computer design when they already had a design which seemed solid and useable in the Atari 800 machine. Jay was told "NO!" to his ideas. In frustration Miner then quits Atari and moves to ZyMOS where he designs medical chips for pacemakers, which literally go on save countless lives.