At the movies, meanwhile, fans' eyes were popping. Silicon Graphics' 3-D imaging was behind many of the extraordinary technical effects that seemed to bring prehistoric animals to life in Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie, Jurassic Park, a box office record-setter. Then came Forrest Gump, with scenes of its slow-witted hero in action with dead presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

The same year saw the debut of a new product promoting connections between PC users: PCMCIA cards. Named for its designer, the Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association, the device, about the size of a business card, but thicker, could be inserted in a slot in a pocket-size computer to give it special functions such as extra memory.

Handheld personal digital assistants -- PDAs -- also bowed in. The palm-size computers had no keyboards; instead, users wrote on a plastic grid with a special pen. There was no standard operating system, and a consortium called General Magic formed to try to develop the proper software.

Two computer giants' marketplace skids led to ousters of John Sculley at Apple Computer and John Akers at IBM. At NExT Computer, Steve Jobs decided to focus on software and quit hardware. Borland International of Scotts Valley, once seen as a major PC software player, entered deep decline.

A new Cray Y-MP C90 supercomputer -- the world's fastest -- was added to Ames Research Center's NAS (Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation) program equipment. It upped Ames's computing power more than sixfold. The C90 can do more than 6 billion calculations per second, and can hold 1 billion words in memory.

Space shuttle Endeavour's crew successfully repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit. Many rated the fix-it mission NASA's biggest test since the 1969 moon landings.

On July 1, 1994, the Navy disestablished Moffett Field Naval Air Station, and NASA's Ames Research Center began managing the facility as Moffett Federal Base. Since 1987, Ames had operated its 14th wind tunnel -- the largest wind tunnel on earth for aerodynamic testing.

Computer and telecommunications firms were converging, as evidenced by AT&T bidding to merge with McCaw Cellular, the largest U.S. independent cellular company, and Bell Atlantic seeking to buy cable television conglomerate TCI, Inc., so as to use TCI lines outside its own service area to carry telephone calls. (The Bell Atlantic-TCI deal later fell through.) Cable TV companies could compete with telephone companies, which in turn wanted to enter the cable TV business to finance laying of fiber optic cable to homes.

Intel Corp. in 1993 unveiled its fifth-generation microprocessor, the Pentium, packing 3.1 million transistors and capable of executing more than 1 million instructions per second (MIPS). Motorola brought out a rival chip family, the PowerPC microprocessors, developed jointly in conjunction with IBM Corp. and Apple Computer.

Late in '94, the Internet became the medium carrying harsh consumer criticism of Intel for its reluctance to replace Pentiums after a flaw affecting complicated division problems was revealed. At length the company bowed to public opinion and offered a replacement to any owner who asked for it, at a cost estimated at $475 million.

In early 1995 Intel and Advanced Micro Devices settled their legal battle, begun in 1987 after Intel declined to share its 386 microprocessor technology with AMD, which then cloned the chip. During the litigation, Intel had brought out its i486 and the Pentium; AMD had brought out a 486 and was at work on K-5, a fifth-generation microprocessor of its own design.