Computer Chronicles returned for its sixth season in October 1988 with an episode covering the second Macworld Expo of the year, which was held from August 11 to 13 at Boston’s World Trade Center and Bayside Exposition Center. The show featured approximately 350 companies displaying products over 1,200 booths. The three-day attendance was estimated at around 40,000 people.
The Boston Macworld came at the mid-point of Apple CEO John Sculley’s tenure with the company. Steve Jobs was long gone, although as we’ll see later he was about to launch his comeback. The Macintosh II’s success finally enabled Apple to make significant inroads into the business market and report record sales in 1987. HyperCard, the software development tool that was the talk of last year’s Boston Macworld, continued to attract interest, even if it hadn’t quite taken the larger computing world by storm. And there was a growing sense that Apple could become the dominant personal computer company of the 1990s, especially as IBM and its clone makers continued to battle over new standards for the PC platform’s system bus.