Flashback: The top gadgets and tech stories of 1978

It has been an unbelievably hectic few weeks with the sale of my company (The Lever) to the mighty And Partners, and the formation of our new business under the And brand: And Digital. Have still found time for the occasional radio spot though, last week joining Becky Want on BBC Radio Manchester to talk about the tech stories of 1978.

Obviously 1978 was a fantastic year for the technology industry... I was born! But seriously, here are the big stories of the year:

• Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc, the first visual spreadsheet system for personal computers. For such an apparently dull application it became a huge driving force for the sales of PCs and today people use spreadsheets for everything.

• Epson introduced the first dot-matrix printer to be a big success with home users. Its flexibility meant that dot-matrix printers quickly replaced those that could only print whole letters in the style of a typewriter.

• The first spam e-mail was sent by Gary Thuerk, then an employee at Digital (which became part of Compaq, which became part of HP). He used it to advertise the new DECSYSTEM-2020 on ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet.

• The 5.25-inch floppy disk became an industry standard.

• The first worm virus was developed by John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC - the incredible place that I am now thinking should be a world heritage site, or perhaps be named as the eighth wonder thanks to its incredible role in the history of computing.

• Korea Semiconductor was renamed Samsung Semiconductors - now one of the global giants of consumer electronics.

• NEC (Nippon Electricity Company) introduced the 'Voice Data Input Terminal' - the first computer with a voice interface. It could recognise a library of 120 different words spoken in groups of up to five.