Engineering Mentality News Today

♪ ♪ ♪ 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 thats 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? im not here now,...

♪ ♪ 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 thats 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? im not here now but my faithful ...

Starting to pop up in the mid 1980s, the customers were people who had a business reason for having these things. or some super-rich dude who just wanted to show off. the big breakthrough idea was the idea of cellular systems. >> its called cellular because your car phone is tied into different radio transmitters, each one called a cell. as you travel, the signal from your phone travels from cell to cell. >> this was something that had never been done before. >> if you dont have one now, you pro...

If all goes according to plan, "columbia," this nations first space shuttle, will fly like a skylark next march. >> if the shuttle program works the way its been designed to, it will be a technological feat rivaling americas visit to the moon, a major moment in the history of flight. >> the space shuttle had new systems, new technology. the primary thing is the fly by wire system. which is you dont have pulleys and cables, its all done by electronics. all the commands go through a computer. >> i...

Access, portable, and cheap, started to catch on. >> different ways to communicate with friends, different ways to experience virtual worlds. i dont think we have seen a decade like that. >> is where it will reside. >> what is happening today is truly a revolution in the deepest sense of the word. it will be hard to recognize the way we live. >> technology can make our lives better. technology means anything is possible. >> at the fascinating future, one in which computer scientists are beginnin...

>> more than 24,000 retail outlets across america now rent or sell tapes of all kinds. >> you go to a video store and pick something out that you missed. in the old days, if you missed a movie, youd miss the movie. >> and the markets not restricted to blockbuster films. jane fonda through her workout tapes has shown one can make money with a product geared specifically to the home video market. >> the success of camcorders marks the second phase of the video revolution. not just taking movies ho...

Three-quarters of the market. this personal computer costs about $1,400 and fits nicely on a desk corner. duplicating its performance just five years ago would have cost $75,000 and involve a unit the size of a large refrigerator. >> when the average american thought computer, they thought ibm. it made these mainframe computers that ran pretty much everything. >> ibm was one of the most powerful corporations in america. and in technology, it was the most powerful company that had ever existed in...

It is much more chaotic. things rise and bubble and fall back and great ideas pop out, but nobody can find a use for it so it goes away. it is a confluence of developments happening at the right time. >> small and portable for the 90s, according to manufacturers showing wares in chicago. sony has a new camcorder that fits in your hand and a combination tv and vcr that goes into your purse or briefcase. >> if you have one of these and you have one of these, you do not have one of these, you are m...

Operating system for your pc, and well get a cut of every machine you sell. and in addition, he made sure that it was not an exclusive license. that he was going to be able to sell this software to ibm, but he was also going to be able to sell the same software to the other people. because gates intuited that there were going to be people that would build knockoffs of ibm and the pc clones. >> it was a genius move on the part of bill gates, who was still in his early 20s when he made this decisi...

>> 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 were 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 whod been messing around on the edges of what would become the personal com...