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What Happened in 1986? Part I: Technology


This year, System ID is proud to be celebrating 25 years in business. We thought it’d be fun to take a look at what else was happening in the world at the time. Turns out there was quite a lot going on in 1986! So we’ve sifted it down to what we thought were the best nuggets and separated them into six posts that we’ll share with you over the next week or so. Let’s start with what’s closest to our industry: Technology.

The first laptop computer was the IBM PC Convertible.
April 3, IBM unveils the PC Convertible, the first laptop computer. It was also the first IBM computer to use a 3.5” floppy disk, which eventually became the standard. Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) was designed by Mark Crispin as a remote mailbox protocol. It is now one of the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval.   The first PC virus, Brain, starts to spread. The brothers who wrote it, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, told TIME magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from piracy and it was supposed to target copyright infringers only. The virus gave a message saying that the machine was infected and for inoculation the user should call the brothers, listing the brothers' address and three phone numbers. If only viruses nowadays were so accommodating!