Publishing this list on Buzzblog has become a January ritual, this being the fourth annual. If you’d like to see the old pictures, the slideshow lives here. Otherwise, here’s a truncated version, roughly alphabetized (and the sharp-eyed will note that a few aren’t really geeky; my list, my prerogative.)
* The release of an AM/FM Watch from Citizen practically redefined cool. No, really, it was cool back then … in a Dick Tracy kind of way.
* Commodore rented New York’s Lincoln Center to debut its Amiga 1000 personal computer, which featured 256KB of RAM and a price tag of $1,595.
* What remains of AOL will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
* The first laser printer for the Mac, Apple LaserWriter featured a resolution of 300 dpi and a whopping price tag: $6,995.
* Opening July 3, the first of three “Back to the Future” films would be the year’s top box office draw at $380 million?
* The first Blockbuster store opened in Dallas.
* Perhaps foretelling the demise of the pay phone, British Telecom announced that it would begin phasing out its iconic red telephone kiosks. More than 12,500 remain in use from a high of 75,000.
* Formally known as buckminsterfullerene C60, the buckyball — a molecule composed entirely of carbon — was discovered by Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley, who would win the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
* Canada’s Chess’N Math Association was founded.
* New Coke … really, 25 years ago.
* The Cray-2 became the world’s fastest computer at 1.9 GFLOPS.
* Backed by $5 million from the BBC and American investors, John Hendricks launched The Discovery Channel.
* Beginning with Symbolics.com on March 15, the year would see the registration of the first half-dozen dot-com domain names. The other five: BBN.com, Think.com, MCC.com, DEC.com and Northrop.com.
* In March, Richard Stallman published his GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Software Tools and on Oct. 4 he founded the non-profit Free Software Foundation.
* The Jetsons returned to TV. Yes, the original was a child of the ’60s, but roughly two-thirds of the 75 episodes knocking around syndication were created during the show’s second production run, which began in 1985 and ended two years later.
* MacGyver became the DIYer’s secret agent of choice.
* You don’t get much geekier than the MIT Media Lab, which celebrates its 25th this year.
* Forced out at Apple in September, Steve Jobs founded NeXT, Inc.
* The Nintendo Entertainment System hit U.S. stores on Oct. 18.
* A trio of British Antarctic Survey scientists published a paper in the May issue of Nature in which they described a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Fortunately, the hole was patched by MacGyver and there’s nothing to worry about today.
* A battery-assisted recumbent tricycle that tops out at 15 mph? Who wouldn’t want a Sinclair C5? … Only 12,000 were sold.
* Robert Ballard and his team discovered the wreck of the Titanic on Sept. 1.
* Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was at his most prolific in 1985, sending four bombs. On Dec. 11, one of them killed Hugh Scrutton, a computer rental store owner and Kaczynski’s first murder victim.
* Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
* And finally, on Nov. 20, Microsoft released Windows 1.0 (actually it was Windows 1.01).
Tell me what I missed. The address is buzz@nww.com.
