the average family home. cory practices her violin. christian plays with his cars. and mike and carol worry over the bills. we went into the 1980s in pretty much the same technology that s been in place for a couple of decades. typewriter. calculators, tv, oven. a car. you listen to music on a big old stereo system with a turntable. maybe you had a digital watch, and that was the only thing that was going to be digital that you actually owned. hello? i m not here now, but my faithful machine is. there was a handful of technology at that time. one was the telephone answering machine. you d be driving home and you d say, i can t wait to check my messages. you know, it had become part of the day. honey, i m checking my messages. from the noisy streets of new york to the laid-back tranquility of california, americans are tuning out and tuning in. when i think of technology in the 1980s, i think of the walkman. the walkman was huge. it s the latest fad. tiny st
the average family home, cory practices her violin, christian plays with his cars and mike and carol worry over the bills. we went in with pretty much the same technology that s been in place for a couple of decades. typewriter. calculators. tv. oven. a car. you listen to music on a big old stereo system with a turntable. maybe you had a digital watch and that was the only thing that was going to be digital that you actually owned. hello? i m not here now but my faithful machine is. there was a handful of technology at that time. one was the telephone answering machine. you would be driving home and you would say i can t wait to check my messages. you know, it becomes part of the day. honey, i m checking my messages. from the noisy streets of new york to the laid-back tranquility of california, americans are tuning out and tuning in. when i think of technology in the 1980s, i think of the walkman. the walkman was huge. it s the latest fad. tiny stereo casset
starting to pop up in the mid 1980s, the customers were people who had a business reason for having these things. or some super-rich dude who just wanted to show off. the big breakthrough idea was the idea of cellular systems. it s called cellular because your car phone is tied into different radio transmitters, each one called a cell. as you travel, the signal from your phone travels from cell to cell. this was something that had never been done before. if you don t have one now, you probably will have one in a decade, say the phonemakers, as the price comes down into the range of other high-tech toys. there were people who understood even in the early days that being trapped in a car was not freedom. people are fundamentally, naturally mobile. i like to say the technology will go from a phone in the car to a phone in the briefcase to finally a phone in your pocket. and this is it. this is a portable cellular phone. you ll be able to take this to any american city and call
if all goes according to plan, columbia, this nation s first space shuttle, will fly like a skylark next march. if the shuttle program works the way it s been designed to, it will be a technological feat rivaling america s visit to the moon, a major moment in the history of flight. the space shuttle had new systems, new technology. the primary thing is the fly by wire system. which is you don t have pulleys and cables, it s all done by electronics. all the commands go through a computer. it was built as the world s first reusable spaceship, one that would commute to space carrying scientists and satellites. the most important thing was the digital revolution of faster, more powerful computers with complex software. computers are absolutely necessary to fly a spacecraft like the shuttle. it s the most sophisticated, most complex system that has been put into space yet.
access, portable, and cheap, started to catch on. different ways to communicate with friends, different ways to experience virtual worlds. i don t think we have seen a decade like that. is where it will reside. what is happening today is truly a revolution in the deepest sense of the word. it will be hard to recognize the way we live. technology can make our lives better. technology means anything is possible. at the fascinating future, one in which computer scientists are beginning to question. with the free flow of information, can someone topping my computer and invade my privacy. will electronic mail, lead to junk mail, will stores as we know it disappear? too many shoppers like squeezing tomatoes? will we wind up with a cashless