1985; 1988

1985


- DNA is first used in a criminal case
- ATI Technologies is founded.
- NeXT is founded by Steve Jobs after resigning from Apple Computer.
- Solarquest, space age real estate game, first published by Golden.
- Buckyballs discovered by Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. One of the first nanomaterial discoveries.
- GNU Manifesto first written by Richard Stallman.


February 19 - William J. Schroeder becomes the first artificial heart patient to leave the hospital.
March 25 - The 57th Academy Awards are held at in Los Angeles, California with Amadeus winning Best Picture.
June 24 - STS-51-G Space Shuttle Discovery completed its mission, best remembered for having Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a Payload Specialist.
June - Tetris released
July 13 - Live Aid pop concerts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and London raise over £50 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.
July 19 - U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush announces that New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe will become the first schoolteacher to ride aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.
July 24 - Commodore launches the Amiga personal computer at the Lincoln Center in New York.
August 7 - Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts.
September 22 - Plaza Accord was signed by five nations.
October 4 - The Free Software Foundation is founded in Massachusetts, USA.
October 18 - The Nintendo Entertainment System is released in US stores.
November - QuantumLink, predecessor to AOL, launches
November 20 - Microsoft Corporation releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0.
December - Movie "Brazil" released - in an Orwellian vision of the future, the populace are completely controlled by the state, but technology remains almost as it was in the 1970's.


1988

TAT-8, the first transatlantic telephone cable to use optical fibers, is completed.
In England, Max Dowhham's "Cyberpunk: the Final Solution" published in Vague
Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net published
Mississippi Review entire issue published devoted to cyberpunk; academic colonization of the Movement begins in earnest
Shatter graphic novel published
Saibapanku Amerika [Cyberpunk America] by Tatsumi Takayuki published in Japan
Going GaGa begins publication
bOING bOING begins publication
Wetware published (Apr)
May 16 - California v. Greenwood: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that police officers do not need a search warrant to search through discarded garbage.
June 11 - The name of the General Public License (GPL) is mentioned for the first time.
July 6 - The first reported medical waste on beaches in the Greater New York area (including hypodermic needles and syringes possibly infected with the AIDS virus) washes ashore on Long Island. Subsequent medical waste discoveries on beaches in Coney Island and in Monmouth County, New Jersey force the closure of numerous New York-area beaches in the middle of one of the hottest summers in the American Northeast on record.
September 29 - STS-26: NASA resumes space shuttle flights, grounded after the Challenger disaster, with Space Shuttle Discovery.
The Internet worm strikes (Nov)
Interplay releases the Neuromancer Game; a computer role-playing game for the Apple II, Commodore C64, and Amiga
William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive published (Nov)

1989

Mondo 2000 begins publication
"Fiction 2000" conference held in Leeds (June)
Wetware wins the Philip K. Dick Award
Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel published
The Cuckoo's Egg published
Semiotext(e):SF published
Cherry comix special cyberpunk issue published
Crystal Express published
Tetsuo:The Iron Man released
Shadowrun computer game released
Mattel introduces the PowerGlove, a Virtual Reality input device
Timothy Leary interviews William Gibson
Satellite television service Sky Television plc is launched in Europe.