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
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
the mushrooming industry gives birth to a new high-tech cult and a place called silicon valley. the magic part of silicon valley is that there was this boiling pot of people who were involved in technology, involved in science. silicon valley was hp, sri, xerox park, and stanford university. that was a hell of a powerful combination. there was these two cultures, engineers with ph.d.s and hobbyists. it was a time when there was a lot of social ferment in and around the bay area. there was a lot of counterculture people. so you had cheap semiconductors. you had people that would look at things differently than what the conventional person was. and that s what the technology needed then. one of the things that was really hard about making a computer was now on a chip. so all of a sudden, people who had a thirst for this stuff could go out and buy a home brew computer. you could make them yourself.
capable of generating artistic endeavors and not just number-crunching business things. is there anything that you d like to see? we d love to have it in a book right now, you know, about this size, but that s technically impossible. steve s like, i want to make a friendly computer, a computer that comes from a different kind of place, that owes its inspiration to people who are thoughtful and creative and human and humane. morning, chris. this is an experimental office system of the xerox research center in palo alto, california. anything else? what about flowers? my anniversary. i forgot. xerox in the 1980s was one of the most exciting companies in america. xerox had this booming copier business. it wasn t a personal computer company, but they opened up this lab called the palo alto research center. xerox park was xerox s think tank. they were working on all these crazy, out-there ideas which included the mouse and overlapping windows and fonts and graphics on a compu