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 mushrooming industry gives birth to a new high-tech cult and a place called silicon valley. the magic part of silicon valley is that there was this boiling pot of people who were involved in technology, involved in science. silicon valley was hp, sri, xerox park, and stanford university. that was a hell of a powerful combination. there was these two cultures, engineers with ph.d.s and hobbyists. it was a time when there was a lot of social ferment in and around the bay area. there was a lot of counterculture people. so you had cheap semiconductors. you had people that would look at things differently than what the conventional person was. and that s what the technology needed then. one of the things that was really hard about making a computer was now on a chip. so all of a sudden, people who had a thirst for this stuff could go out and buy a home brew computer. you could make them yourself.
there was a lot of counterculture people. so you had cheap semiconductors. you had people that would look at things differently than what the conventional person was, and that s what the technology needed then. one of the things that was really hard about making a computer was now on a chip. so all of a sudden, people who had a thirst for this stuff could go out and buy a home brew computer. you could make them yourself. there was a lot of this kind of revolutionary thing with a lot of the technical people who were into the changes in technology and how we were a part of it. even though at our companies we were generally the fringe element. we had the jeans and we re not the managers and the leaders. but boy, just a clever design on its own had value. you had these guys like steve jobs and steve wozniak and bill gates and paul allen messing around on the edges of what would become the personal computer industry. but no one in corporate america and no one in most of the homes of a