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
like them or not, video games are the youth phenomenon of our day. quarter by quarter, $6 billion got fed into video game slots last year. that s double what americans spent to go to the movies. people flock to them because the arcade game could afford expensive hardware at the time. and the hardware had enough power to do things we d never seen before. there was essentially an arcade in every mall, in every street corner. the lunch money was not safe if there was an arcade around. arcade games at the time were the first machine that we could really interact with. we could cause a world to do something. so we d grab a joystick and move a character around or fire something at a spaceship. we ve never had experience like that before. the popularity of these video games is nothing short of a social phenomenon. pac man is seemingly everywhere. retailers can t keep the home version stocked. one dealer describes the demand. phenomenal. telephone s ringing every five minutes. it s
that before. the popularity of these video games is nothing short of a social phenomenon. pac man is seemingly everywhere. retailers can t keep the home version stocked. one dealer describes the demand. phenomenal. telephone s ringing every five minutes. it s pac man mania. my big memory of the 80s was my best friend got this $300 console that connected to your tv. you just play this thing forever, and it was the first time anyone had ever seen anything but tv on a tv. and i thought, wow, this is technology. the imaginary rockets are controlled by the same chips the u.s. army used in their defense programs. but the significance of the chip does not only lie in gadgets. her whole future will be changed by the silicon chip business. it was discovered that you could actually etch a whole lot of transistors onto a piece of of silicon, which was basically a cheap substance that could be
that s double what americans spent to go to the movies. people flock to them because the arcade game could afford expensive hardware at the time. and the hardware had enough power to do things we d never seen before. there was essentially an arcade in every mall, in every street corner. the lunch money was not safe if there was an arcade around. arcade games at the time were the first machine that we could really interact with. we could cause a world to do something. so we d grab a joystick and move a character around or fire something at a spaceship. we ve never had experience like that before. the popularity of these video games is nothing short of a social phenomenon. pac man is seemingly everywhere. retailers can t keep the home version stocked. one dealer describes the demand. phenomenal. telephone s ringing every five minutes. it s pac man mania.
people flock to them because the arcade game could afford expensive hardware at the time. and the hardware had enough power to do things we d never seen before. there was essentially an arcade in every mall, in every street corner. the lunch money was not safe if there was an arcade around. arcade games at the time were the first machine that we could really interact with. we could cause a world to do something. so we d grab a joystick and move a character around or fire something at a spaceship. we ve never had experience like that before. the popularity of these video games is nothing short of a social phenomenon. pac man is seemingly everywhere. retailers can t keep the home version stocked. one dealer describes the demand. phenomenal. telephone s ringing every five minutes. it s pac man mania. my big memory of the 80s was my best friend got this $300 console that connected to your