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
how many calculators do you own? two, maybe. right. you use the automatic bank telling machines? sure. so life is already seducing you into learning this stuff. it s not going to happen at once and it s certainly not a 1984-ish vision at all. it will just be very gradual and very human and will seduce you into learning how to use it. random access memory is internal memory built inside of this computer. these new computers were big, ugly, difficult to use inventions when they first came out. it would crash and you had to figure out what to do. it would not always create the right results. so it really did take a mindset of someone willing to cut it some slack. take little steps. don t take big steps. everybody kind of agreed that this could be the next great thing after the printing press if we do it right. it s not just having a machine. the world needed to be made better. those are the things that actually can lift a society into a new way of thinking.
if all goes according to plan, columbia will soar like a skylark next month. if the shuttle program works the way it s designed to work 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, primary things. fly by wire system. 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, faster, more powerful computers with complex software. computers are absolutely necessary to fly a spacecraft like the shuttle. it s the most sophisticated,
moore s law, named for gordon moore, one of the engineers who worked at intel. basically it was an observation computer engineers are getting to the point where they can essentially double the computer power of computer chips every 18 months or so. and this was what really made the power of computers explode in the 1980s, because every 18 months, these things were getting twice as good. you could basically put a whole computer on a chip, it was less expensive to manufacture. so you had smaller which led to faster which led to cheaper. under any other field of consumer products, things get more expensive over time. milk, gasoline, houses. but not technology. one of the striking things about the development of especially hardware during the 1980s, was the fact that it was getting so much more powerful so rapidly that there developed a strong tendency on the part of people who were about to buy a computer, should i buy the computer today? no, in fact if i wait six months for the sam
called technophobia. fear of these bloodless little wizards. the manufacturers are trying to overcome it by making them what they call user-friendly. isn t that pretty. now what do i do? making computers easy enough to use for a beginner, it wasn t always true. people have never encountered this stuff. don t shift. so there is a great disconnect between the ambitions of the apples and microsofts and the realities of people trying to use these things for the first time. right now, if you buy a computer system and you want to solve one of your problems, we immediately throw a big problem right in the middle of you and your problem, which is learning how to use the computer. substantial problem to overcome. once you overcome that, it s a phenomenal tool. steve jobs thought that a