1980's Tech

Exploding Space Shuttle, The Berline Wall Torn Down 1989 & The Integrated Circuit of or IC or chips made in semiconductor foundries was becoming the core part of consumer electronics (Tape Cassette & CD Players) with booming sales like boom boxes & early personal computers with the first graphical user interfaces or GUI's with the Apple Lisa! 

You could almost call the 1980s the era of transistor mass manufacturing that drove down the cost of chips such that they became the core part of appliances, consumer electronics, the ECU in vehicles that enabled emissions controls with oxygen sensors & catalytic converters & control of fuel injectors & ignition timing, greater fuel efficiency & lower tailpipe emissions. Turbochargers started showing up in passenger cars & direct gasoline injection research & EV research was booming at the world's automakers.

Early TFT laptop computers & the first tablet computers were commercialized. The technological basis of what would become smartphones in 2007 & technically MID's from PALM in the early 2003's. Computerized inventory management & customer relationships management & database software technology was emerging. Consumer GPS devices was on the horizon & interest rates for financial loans were climbing. Ronald Regan was the President of the United States & then Bush Senior. 

At intel super large 300 mm integrated circuit wafers cut from 350kg boules by a diamond coated band saw with a wire blade many km long in a maze of pully wheels to make the setup more compact. The compact disk or CD an optical data or media format for music & content was making a splash in the music distribution industry where it eventually overtook cassette tapes & turned into DVD's with greater data capacity that supplanted VHS as the movie distribution standard format before streaming became the big deal. Significantly, Netflix started out as a mail & then online DVD mail order swap return system of content distribution, mostly movies. 

This was the era when digitalization of information started. Scanners that could take chemical photos & produce digital file formats on computers started showing up at the commercial & prosumer levels *early expensive models) noteworthy the drum scanner as the industry standard high-resolution unit while consumer models focused on a CCFL bar scanner CCD glass bed against white high reflectance background lit technology dominated the early personal consumer market. 

COTS or consumer off the shelf technologies like the first consumer GPS receivers went on sale. Fluorescent T8 bulbs with digital ballasts started to replace T12 with magnetic ballasts. Metal halide HID bulbs were first made available as incumbents to the venerable long lasting monochromatic low & then high-pressure orange light sodium vapor bulbs. In the incandescent bulb market, xenon enhanced halogen bulbs started to become available. Hints of what would replace vacuum tube TV technologies were just emerging in Japan. CCFL & VFD were the dominate information display technologies in scientific equipment, along with some Nixie Tubes in very old but continually produced equipment from Russia & East Germany. Analog was starting to give way to digital in a big way. 

Moore's law became the mantra of efficiency, such that double the performance became available at the same price in just a couple more years. People started planning when their product designs would become possible using this law as a predictive roadmap for development. Early computer products, then the Intel 8080 chip & IBM PC, popular in middle schools & high schools, early on looked at as toy, but when IBM entered this space & it became serious business in industry. Adobe in 1982 along with Sun System & Sysco Systems 1984. Silicon has a lot of millionaires as a result of this progress. Silicon Valley started to boom. Everyone was out to change the world, like an information gold rush. 

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniacki was both a hardware & software developer genius that really got Apple started, with Steve Job, starting out building computers in Job's suburban home bedroom. How can we somehow meet the masses & reach the public - a low cost product to improve a lot of people's lives? The Apple I & Apple II & then the GUI enhanced LISA. Computers at the time were dominated by a typing based of memories codes, not a graphical interface or windows, something PARC or Xerox Palo Alto Research created these GUI ideas. Memory was so expensive that the first computer was $10,000 & they pusched the development in 1984 the Apple Macintosh, for people that were creative & wanted to have fun but also needed to do work, with a point & click button mouse, with picture icons that people could click & drag, entering the modern compute space with a revolutionary graphical user interface that dominates all consumer & business compute at every level today, even on smartwatches, wearable information Jewlery fitness trackers (Apple Watch, lots of band choices) & connected IoT. Music & technology started merging significantly at the Oz festival, made possible by the microprocessor which went on to transform the ways that people do both business & pleasure. 

Gaming consoles emerged with the Atari, though Arcades were the way that most people played computer games in the 1980's. Ski ball & pinball, but then video combat games like alien & then Donkey Kong & Packman, inspired by a pizza with a slice missing. Games became smaller & cheap enough to come home, video consoles like the Atari 2600 with the CRT-TV as a display. The games were conversion of popular arcade games & home video games became a hit. Nolan Bushnell founder of Atari found a niche, initially running at about 1mhz. The ability for other companies to produce games for the Atari, which caused Atari to lose control. Nintendo learning from this made their consoles & games proprietary in a locked ecosystem to avoid losing control. MTV & HBO were making a splash on the TV & VCRs entered the consumer space. 

Mail order catalogs & TV informercials were the only consumer reprieve from ancient retail stores, the concept of retailing items in first person goes back thousands of years. VHS won out over Betamax because the movie studios preferred the VHS tape, the format war started. VHS uses a rotating recording head to encode analog signals into a magnetic tape & another head reads the sound. Betamax has better quality with a larger reader head with a little more detail on the tape, which limited the tape to 60 minutes, where VHS was able to offer 2 hours, giving JVC a big advantage, & rental tapes of movies from the likes of Blockbuster Video started. VHS tapes were cheaper & more widely accepted & most video stores had the front parts of the store with Hollywood Videos where the back of the store was renting Adult Content, the final nail in the coffin of Betamax. 

The Sony Walkman & cellphone kicked off. Sony also launched the Handycam & VHS player & music reproduction technology shrunk down to a boom box & then the original Sony Walkman, a revolution, when enabled mixed tape cassettes with new more powerful magnets enables smaller headphones to 1.5oz with samarium cobalt magnets replaced 14 oz ferrite magnet headphones from the 1970's. Cassette tapes & vinyl LP were replaced with CD for the first time with a digital storage method that does not degrade with repeated playing like cassettes & record LP vinyl's. The 1.2mm thick polycarbonate plastic CD's have a pattern impressed with the DATA & then aluminized to make a reflective layer, a laser backed on a 3-mile long 1/2 micro thick stripe of either mirror or scratches that diffuse, such the CD reader would encode 1 or 0 bits if it was reflected or diffused, as that stripe on the optical disc flying past the reader head. Sonly PDP101 launched in 1982. CD offered enduring quality music reproduction & then the Diskman offered CD on the go. Motorola Dynatec 8000x in 1983 showed people they could stay in touch with others while on the go with a 2lb handheld cell phone that cost $2000 & cost $1 per minute for airtime. More mediation of reality via technology helped people to change the culture & structure of information exchange.

The oil crisis of the 1970's prompted the automakers to start building smaller lighter & more fuel-efficient vehicles, what became known as Econoboxes. The DeLorean DMC12 was thought to brings jobs & prosperity to Ireland which at the time had a high unemployment rate & sectarian violence & terrorism ripping the country apart from within. By the time the DMC12 launched in 1983 the company was mostly bankrupt, but the cars were selling amazing at first, keeping the business floating. The innovative space-age design helped propel it into Back to the Future as a nuclear fusion powered time traveling vehicle & had good celebrity status to "live the dream" like DeLorean who married a supermodel. Sadly, it was overpriced & underpowered. It had a flashy exterior like its designer & interest rates for auto loans were high. DeLorean became involved in the importation & trafficking of cocaine in a sting operation by the DEA, so DeLorean Automobiles went under in 1983. Today they are still being made as remanufactured units, with brand new parts or made with upgraded & refurbished old models. They sell for $25-60K in good working order as a cultural icon vehicle that hit the limelight in 1981. It was one of the first cars to use mechanical fuel injection. A fiberglass underbody was mounted to a mild steel frame coated in epoxy. The stainless-steel exterior mounted to the fiberglass core. John DeLorean died in 2004 after suffering from a stroke while designing what was going to be a new car. 

The 1980 Rubik's cube invented by Erno Rubik, selling more than 100 million by 1982, t it has exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations, though as few as 22 moves can solve the 6-sided mechanical puzzle. Going on to become the world's bestselling toy with more than 300 million sold. Simon digital electronic memory repeat game invented by Ralph Bear & launched in 1980, was one of the first microprocessor enhanced games that real people could afford & this game was all the rage in the 1980's since it tested your speed, agility & memory. Video cameras, cell phones, computer chips, digital music, the 1980s set the stage for what were emerge as new ways to live in the 1990's, early 2000's & even today in 2022. Computers started affecting the ways that people lived, worked & played. 

I learned about all of this on my favorite TV program, Modern Marvels, the first & longest running History Channel program, it's now on YouTube where I watch it! The content focuses on how technologies affect & are used in modern society. So far more than 650, hour long programs have been produced, each with 44 min of content. The show started in 1992, so not exactly an 1980s tech, though it does cover issues that go back to the 1970s & even before that! 

My absolutely favorite version called Engineering Disasters, that focuses on how technology did not work correctly in the context of collapsing buildings & airplane crashes, resulting spectacular failures like the Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal India that released MIC gas, a chemical intermediate used for pesticide manufacturing, that is also very toxic to humans, such that this heavier than air toxin crept along the ground in proximity to the failed valve that released it, & ended up killing thousands of local people with MIC poisoning. Methylisocyanate a colorless low boiling liquid that easily vaporizes to sharp smelling gas denser than air with a flash point of only 20 F; toxic by inhalation & it violently reacts with water or H2O. The show typically shows the tragic yet valuable handmaidens of technological progress. We fail as we go & learn from our failures & incorporate those learnings into better ways as we go forward. 

Try this one as an example https://youtu.be/vIya5GfVYT8