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The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is an 8-bit third-generation home video game console produced by Nintendo. Nintendo first released it in Japan as the Family Computer (FC), commonly known as the Famicom, in 1983. The NES, a redesigned version, made its debut in test markets in the United States in October 1985, before becoming widely available in the rest of North America and other countries during the following years. -
Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984. The ad featured the destruction of “Big Brother” – a veiled reference to IBM -- through the power of personal computing found in a Macintosh. The Macintosh was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface and was based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Its price was $2,500. -
Microsoft Windows was launched as the latest operating system for micro-computers, as they were called at the time. The aim was to replace the older DOS operating system, and although it was hopelessly inferior to Apple's OS, it enjoyed some success, and soon turned a generic term, Windows, into a commercial trade-name. -
Nvidia's first product was the NV1, a PCI card which was sold under the name "Diamond Edge 3D". It featured a complete 2D/3D graphics core based upon quadratic texture mapping, VRAM or FPM DRAM memory, an integrated 32-channel 350 MIPS playback-only sound card, and a Sega Saturn compatible joypad port. Several Sega Saturn games were ported to the NV1. The games included NASCAR Racing, Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter, which was the first 3D game to run on the card. -
The GeForce 256 was the first product released under the GeForce brand and was described by Nvidia as a "Graphics Processing Unit", a term which later became more commonly used to describe any graphics card. Nvidia's definition at the time was "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second." -
Based on Microsoft NT technology, the operating system was considered much more reliable and stable than Windows 98 which was the operating system of choice for most home PC users.
It was quickly adopted by businesses worldwide. -
The PlayStation 4 featured a more familiar AMD x86-64 Accelerated Processing Unit. The PlayStation 4's GPU could perform 1.843 teraflops, making it, at the time, the world’s most powerful games console. The PlayStation 4 used a processor developed by AMD in cooperation with Sony. It combined a central processing unit and graphics processing unit, as well as other components such as a memory controller and video decoder. -
Moving away from the Xbox 360's PowerPC-based architecture and back into the x86 architecture used in the first Xbox, the console featured an AMD processor built around the x86-64 instruction set. Xbox One placed an increased emphasis on entertainment integration, offering the ability to overlay live television programming from an existing set-top box, split-screen multitasking of applications, and improved second screen support.