Ask anyone who was between fifteen and twenty-five in the 1980s and they will tell you it was the best decade there has been, and Netflix’s Stranger Things has made a generation born thirty years later half believe them. The fashion is debatable. The technology is not: almost everything on a desk today — the personal computer, the graphical screen, the mouse, the digital music, the handheld game — arrived between 1980 and 1989. Here is the decade in ten machines.
1981: the PC, the shuttle and the invisible plane
IBM’s 5150 Personal Computer launched in August 1981 with an Intel 8088 processor and Microsoft’s DOS 1.0, and by licensing rather than owning its parts IBM accidentally created the open PC standard the world still runs on. Four months earlier, on 12 April, the space shuttle Columbia had flown the first reusable spacecraft mission. And in June, in secret, Lockheed’s F-117 Nighthawk made its first flight — the first aircraft designed to be invisible to radar, which the US Air Force did not admit existed until 1988.
1982–83: hearts, consoles and camcorders
In December 1982 surgeons in Utah implanted the Jarvik-7, the first permanent artificial heart, in a retired dentist who lived 112 days on it. In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan — sold abroad as the NES, it revived a video-game industry that had just collapsed — and Sony and JVC put the first camcorders in ordinary hands, recording video and playing it back from a single shoulder-mounted machine.
1984–85: the screen you point at
The Macintosh, launched in January 1984 with a Super Bowl advertisement, was the first mass-market computer driven by a mouse and pictures rather than typed commands. Microsoft answered with Windows 1.0 in November 1985; it was slow and nobody bought it, but its descendant is on over a billion machines. It is fair to say that without the graphical interface of 1984 the laptop you are reading this on would not exist in its present form.
Sound and pictures for everyone
Sony’s Walkman (born 1979, but a phenomenon of the 80s) made music personal and portable; the compact disc, launched by Sony and Philips in 1982, made it digital and, within a decade, killed the cassette. Fujifilm’s disposable camera of 1986, copied by Kodak the next year, put photography in every pocket for a few dollars. And in 1989 Nintendo’s Game Boy — grey, monochrome, running for 30 hours on four AA batteries — sold 118 million units and proved that a handheld could beat a console.
The Bangladesh timeline
Most of this reached Bangladesh late. The first personal computers arrived at BUET and a few banks in the mid-80s; the Walkman and the cassette were the 80s technology ordinary Dhaka actually lived with, and the VCR the one it queued for. The Game Boy and the Macintosh were things one read about. The gap was about ten years, and it has been shrinking ever since.
Source: Interesting Engineering, via Prothom Alo.
