The 80s Club

I remember this game so well. It’s like I saw it yesterday…
Actually, I did see it yesterday, because my two year old was trying to play it! No kidding. I think this was my older brother’s first electronic game, along with the baseball version. He would play them for hours, never giving me a turn.
Somehow, it ended up in my house, and the crazy thing still works! (I can’t get a cordless phone that will keep a charge for more than 30 minutes, but this thing is still going strong!) I have a feeling …read more

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The Internet Society has a nice long article all about the history of the internet, from its earliest inception on through modern times. As a pseudo-geek married to a geek, I found it to be an enjoyable read and quite informative. A couple excerpts related to the 80s:
Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems …read more

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It’s so weird to see old TV and movies from the 80s where people are talking into cell phones that look like a shoe box. But this was the era that the cell phone started to become a high tech gizmo everyone wanted. Heck, I even had one. It was huge. I was working in a not so safe neighborhood and my husband insisted I have it in the car just in case. It was probably about 30 lbs!
You can read more about the history of cell phones here: The History of .Net.
Today not only are cell phones much, …read more

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Human Genome Project:
According to the Timeline page, this project’s beginnings hail all the way back to 1983; but it isn’t until 1987 that we see funding for the project underway. The project formally begins in 1990, and 1999 sees the first human chromosome completely sequenced.
The U.S. Human Genome Project, coordinated by DOE and NIH, is a multi-year effort to find all the genes on every chromosome in the human body and to determine their biochemical nature.
You can read more on the HGP website; and for a look at genetics explained in more average-person-friendly terms, stop by Genetics and Health …read more

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The year: 1982
The place: In the Machine

This is a movie I, being a typical girl, did not see during the 80s. Thanks to my husband (who says this movie is what the Matrix wanted to be) I am ignorant no longer. This movie is all about being sucked into the Mainframe, and life and death are on the line. If you like sci-fi and love suspense and adventure, this movie is for you. Don’t expect the sort of graphics we are spoiled with now, but do keep in mind that for its time, TRON …read more

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When I was in high school, my mother insisted that I take 2 years of typing and 1 year of shorthand classes. I hated it! I told myself there was no way that I would ever have the type of job that required me to sit down and type all day, let alone take dication! I wasn’t very good at it either. I was super fast, but very inaccurate – I still joke that I type 60 words a minute with 59 mistakes.
Of course, now I’m very grateful that I did what my mother told me to do, because as …read more

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 From 1982 to 1985, I lived with my walkman permanently attached to my body. I especially liked wearing when I did research in the library. It was so quiet in there (not like most libraries these days), and it was kind of cool that I was listening to blaringly loud music in such a solemn environment.
 Today, I don’t live with it on, but my cell phone has an MP3 in it and I wear it when I go for walks. Actually, when you compare the two, other than size, they really aren’t that different. Here’s a Sony ICDU60 – 512MB …read more

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Remember all the cool, hi tech gadgets from the 1980s?
 
For example music mediums were transitioning from 8-tracks to cassettes. I remember being very put out that the 76 Super Beetle I had inherited from my sister after she went away to college only had an 8-track player in it. She’d spent some big money – $50 – on the stereo system, and the car was so old that the radio no longer worked. To top it off, only two 8-tracks worked in it – Rod Stewart “Hot Legs” and Nazareth “Hair of the Dog.”

To pay tribute to the …read more

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