Take A Walk With Me Back In Time To Technology In The 80's

I always get a chuckle when my youngest son asks me how I called my friends when I was younger. It makes me smile when I tell him that I walked to their house and knocked on the door. Our idea of playing with friends was going to a friend’s house and then we would go outside and play something.

I remember around the age of 7 a few friends and I would put on a play at my house in the garage and charge .50 for people in the neighborhood to watch the play. That doesn’t seem like much for a play, lemonade and popcorn but our garage was always packed on Saturdays.

When I got a little older I got hooked on technology when I saw my first computer. That was back when the schools only had a few per school. I was always first at the door waiting for the computer room to open up for class. Of course they have changed tremendously over the years. This is the reason for this post.

Taking a trip back in time as we flash back to the 80’s. There are a lot of changes that happened before the 80’s but I chose the 80’s because I think there were some great advances made during that time that some people will be able to relate to. This is not an all-inclusive list, just a few of my favorites.

So let’s get started with Cell Phones of the 80’s

A lot of the early cell phones were called car phones. They were big and bulky and you could not carry them around with you.

In 1983 Motorola came out with DynaTac 8000x phone which was considered the first mobile phone because you could carry it with you. It was also known as the brick due to its’ size and shape. It offered an hour of talk time. The first public cell phone comes out from Motorola.

In 1984 Nokia came out with the Mobira Talkman which was the size of a radio with a corded handset but it had a much longer talk time.

In 1989 Motorola came out with the first flip phone where the bottom part of the phone, the mouthpiece, flipped down to use it. It was called the MicroTAC. It was the first pocket phone.
Although I had one of the earlier models I liked the flip phone best just because of the portability of it. I would’ve had to carry a big bag to carry the brick phone. Although I am not visiting the 90’s in this post, I will mention briefly that the bag phone came out in the early 90’s and at that time it was more popular because of the longer talk time and longer range of use.

Of course at that time I had no idea I would have the phone that I use now. Over the years, they have gone from really big, to very small, to medium size and now it seems everyone wants an even bigger phone almost as big as a tablet. Which, I cannot picture myself holding a tablet up to my ear and trying to talk.
Just like clothing I guess, if you wait long enough everything comes back in style.

Now let’s travel to my favorite popular video games from the 80’s

Pong- Home Game- 1975 (it’s not from the 80’s but I had to include it)
In 1979- Asteroids- became popular in 1980
PacMan-1980

Missile Command-1980
Zork-1980
Space Invaders- 1980
Defender- 1980
Tempest-1981
In 1981- Donkey Kong
Scramble-1981
Frogger- 1981
Galaga- 1981
Tron- 1982
Qbert-1982
Ms. PacMan-1982
Deathchase-1983
Star Wars-1983
Super Mario Brothers-1985

The Legand of Zelda-1986
Duck Hunt-1987
Tetris-1988

Computers in the 80’s

In 1982- the Commodore 64 came out. A popular system even for collectors today.

In 1982- Disney released the movie Tron, which was one of the first to use computer graphics. This also inspired the game called Tron.

In 1989- Apollo introduced the workstation based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor built for applications with intensive graphics needed. At the time Apollo was the leader with workstations.
Their main competitor was Sun Microsystems. Hewlett Packard acquired Apollo in 1989.

In 1982- The first IBM PC, Model 5150, with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and using Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system became a milestone that paved the way for IBM clones to start being designed and marketed to the public. I remember this one from my younger days and although I never called it by its’ model number, I always called it the 8088 when I talked to friends because we didn’t care what a model number was, we always talked about the parts and what we wanted to add, change or tweak.

In 1983- Wow, do you remember those huge 5.25 inch floppies and the little 12” black and white screens. With no hard drive to store anything on, all of the computing and analyzing I did was on those huge floppies.

In 1984- during the Super Bowl commercial Apple introduced the Macintosh. The Mac was the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface. It included MacPaint and MacWrite, a WYSIWYG editor.

Also in 1984 Compaq released their IBM compatible clone after getting the MS-DOS OS license from Microsoft. They designed their first IBM clone by reverse engineering IBM’s BIOS software. They paved the way for others to follow with their own IBM compatible computers.

In 1984- Michael Dell creates PC’s limited when he was a student of the University of Texas at Austin. He sold IBM compatible computers built from stock components. Dell dropped out of school to focus on his business and by the early 1990s; Dell became one of the leading computer retailers

In 1985- Steve Jobs founds a new company called NeXT. The computer he created, an all-black cube was an
important innovation. The NeXT had three Motorola microprocessors and 8 MB of RAM. Some of its other innovations were the inclusion of a magneto-optical disk drive. Apple acquired NeXT 1996.

In 1987- Apple came out with the Mac portable that had a handle so users could take it with them but it was too heavy and expensive for the average user. It was discontinued due to low sales.

In 1987- The first IBM system to include Intel´s 80386 chip, the company ships more than 1 million units by the end of the first year. IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with IBM PCs for the first time. Many credit the OS/2 for making the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array (VGA) standard for IBM computers. The system was IBM's response to losing control of the PC market with the rise of widespread copying of the original IBM PC design by “clone” makers.

Images Source- Pixabay
Source- http://www.businessinsider.com/complete-visual-history-of-cell-phones-2011-5#1982-8

Source- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games

Source- http://www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg/video-game-history/timeline

Source- http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/

Hope you enjoyed this flash back to the 80's. Do you have some favorites from the 80's?