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 decades. Typewriter. Calculators, tv, oven. A car. You listen to music on a big old stereo system with a turn table. 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 machine is. There was a handful of technology at that time. One was the telephone answering machine. Youd be drive home, and youd say, i cant wait to check my messages. You know, it had become part of the day, honey, im checking my messages. From the noisy streets of new york to the laidback 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. Its the latest fad. Tiny stereo cassette players with featherweight headphones. Its like carrying your stereo with you, you know, on your head. The walkman took listening to music from a fixed location in your home to mobile. You are witnessing the ultimate miniaturization of the cassette player. Never has so much genius been coaxed into so little space. In all the great bursts of innovation, there is always some kind of scientific break through that has to happen first. And none of this stuff could have happened in the 1980s without the transistor being invented in the 1940s. And japan in particular understood that they could make things smaller, more versatile. Sony was brand name that really mattered in the 1980s in technology. Ill take the sony efrmgts the original sony walkman was so solid it was a pleasure to hold. It had density, heft. Pop it in, close it. A very satisfying sound. Not just click click. It was gorgeous, gorgeous machine. It provided you with the sound track to your life. Transformers and Cabbage Patch dolls may be the two top sellers this year, but for adults theres only one hot item, the vcr. Christmas shoppers have made the videorecorder one of the hottest sellers, but its a lot selling a Million Units a month. More than a krms gift. Its an invention that some say is changing the whole idea of television. There are so many inventions where you can track the success back to the smashing of a limitation, and the vcr smashed the limitation of time. Most people use vcrs for what they call time shifting. Lets say this sunday is your parents 50th wedding anniversary, but you cant miss the steelers. Set the timer on the recorder, pop in a tape and watch the steelers when you get home. It changed the paradigm of television. The makers of tv programs and movies shown on television claim their films lose their rerun value when theyre recorded on home videotape recorders and played later. The studios said this violated copyright laws and sued for instigating widespread in the home law breaking. You cannot have highclass entertainment if 50 million taping machines are out there in an unauthorized fashion with no compensation to owners, taking from them what rightfully belongs to them. The Supreme Court today answered a multibillion dollar business question, affecting the wallets of millions of americans and one of the nations fast east growing forms of recreation. Home videotaping. They ruled that using the machine to tape programs is legal and violate no, sir copyright you law. Not only did the movie industry lose that one but they were totally wrong. The vcr turns us into a generation of movie nuts. It may be the Fastest Growing industry in america. The sale of tapes to that people buy or rent to play at home. More than 24,000 retail outlets across america now rent or sell tapes of all kinds. You go to a store and pick out something you missed. If the old days if you missed a movie, you missed the movie and its not restricted to blockbuster films. Jane fonda with workout tapes have shown you can make money with a product geared specifically to the home market. Not just taking movies home but making them at home and anywhere else you happen to go. I was the kid who had a camcorder. It was the size of kentucky, and it had to be, because it played vhs cassettes. The setup can be used by just about anybody. Its about to revolutionize the industry. Theres no developing. You can rewind and record over it if you didnt like the take. That is an enormous shift. Efrmts americans by billions of dollars of electronic equipment. Just when you think youve bought the latest in audio and video, theres a new generation of gear which has clearer pictures and better sound. This camera, using a simple little tape like that, just possibly the wave of the future. When you have a cold, pain from a headache can make this. Feel like this. Allinone cold symptom relief from tylenol®, the 1 doctor recommended pain relief brand. Tylenol®. 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. Thats 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 wed never seen before. There was essentially an arcade in every mall or 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 wed grab a joystick and move a character around or fire something at a spaceship. Weve 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 cant keep the home version stocked. One dealer describes the demand. Phenomenal. Telephones ringing every five minutes. Its 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 anybody 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. 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 a cheap substance that could be manufactured. These chips can control the flow of electrical current that in effect enables them to store and remember zillions of bits of information on a surface just a little bit thicker than an eggshell and smaller than a fingernail. This silicon chip supplies the brainpower for 1001 electronic gadgets from wristwatches to microwave ovens. It gives birth to a new hightech 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 the university. That was a hell of powerful combination. There were these two cultures engineered with ph. D. S and hobbyists. There was a lot of Counter Culture people. So you had cheap semiconductors. People that would look at things differently than what the conventional person was, and thats 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. There were a lot of people into the changes in technology and how we a part of it, even at our companies we were the fringe element. We had the jeans. Were not managers and leaders. But a Clever Design on its own had value. You had these guys like bill gates and steve wozniak. And bill gates appall allen messing around on the edge of the personal computer industry. But no one in Corporate America and no one in most of the homes of america thought that the personal computer was anything that would ever have, would ever even happen, let alone have any relevance to them. For all of us, the computer revolution was really exciting. It was like, wow, this is wide open. It was a group of people who want to make a change in the world. And eventually, the two forces in Silicon Valley, the hobbyists and the buttondown business guys ended up coming together when the chip makers realized the things that the hobbyists were doing could lead to a new product called the personal computer. It was at a club where they displayed the computer theyd been working on, and it caused a sensation. We had absolutely no idea what people were going to do with these things when we started out. As a matter of fact, the two people who it was designed for was woz and myself, because we couldnt afford to buy a computer kit on the market. We got it working and showed it to our friends and everybody wanted one. Woz was the technical genius and jobs was the marketing genius, and you needed both of those kinds of mindsets to make this new Technology Work and create this company out of thin air, called apple. Since the Apple Computer company was founded five years ago, its sales have sky rocketed from 100,000 to 100 million. With the most popular type write othersized computer on the market. Steven jobs is 26 years old and sees his computers future as the future of man kind. How many calculators do you have . Two maybe. And you use the automatic teller machines . Sure. So life is seducing you into using these things. Its not at 1984ish vision. Its going to be very human and very gradual and seduce you into how to use it. Random access memory is internal memory built inside of this computer. These new computers were rough, ugly, difficult to use inventions when they first came out. It would crash and you would have to figure out what to do. It would not always create the right results t did take a mindset of someone willing to cut it some slack. Dont take big steps. Everybody kind of agreed their could be the next big thing after the Printing Press if we do did right. Its not just having a machine. The world needed to be made better. Those are the things that actually can lift a society into a new way of thinking. Industry experts say were no longer on the verge of the personal computer revolution. Were right in the midst of it thank you. And its gathering steam with more and more people jumping aboard every day. Witness katy perry. Witness katy perry become a legal witness. Witness katy perry and left shark. Or a card shark. Grandma . Witness katy perry work. Witness katy perry firework. Witness katy perry swish. Witness katy perry. Aaaaaaw look at that dog katy perry with music videos and behind the scenes footage, xfinity lets you witness all things me. In the early part of the 80s, the general image of the computer was always this giant machine with Little Things all over it. The mindset was the computer as the brain. And it was a threatening concept. 1980s is a period of time when the big, giant, impersonal machine that lives in a huge, air conditioned room someplace suddenly becomes something that sits on your desk. Something is happening out there, something thats expanding your world. Small computers are happening. As soon as we have Intelligent Machines creeping into our daily lives, into our hospitals, into our businesses, then its going to be a new world out there. Computer stores have become the neighborhood soda shops of the by nary generation. The disciples, young and old of smart machines. Companies that were starting to build personal computers, Companies Like atari, tandy, commodore, began to see them as a public market. It was seeping into the public consciousness. Personal computers have been the business of at least 25 companies, with radio shack and commodore grabbing three quarters of the market. This personal computer costs about 1400 and fits nicely on a desk corner. Duplicating its performance five years ago would have cost 75,000 and required 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 technology. Because of this activity in personal computers it started to make ibm look like they were behind the eight ball. They look at the apple ii and say, huh, we could build one of those. We built computers that put men on the moon. Well get that business, squad car these guys no problem. Ibm has entered the small Computer Market for the first time. The idea has become so big that the giant of computer companies, ibm, is busy marketing its new small computer. It will, they say, give credibility to home computers. Theyll no longer be just another new gadget. Ibm has set an objective to build the office of the future. Before ibm came in, companies would not think about buying personal computers, but suddenly, when ibms selling one it becomes a safer decision. Ibm personal computer is stiend for office, school or home use, aimed at exactly the same market as its competitors. When ibm started developing the ibm pc, it needed an operating system. And this young guy named bill gates had started this Little Company called microsoft. Bill gates was that unusual combination of a tech guy who was as good as the best tech guys but had a business sense, and a business vision. At the time, everyone was making it up as they went along. There was nothing that came before it. There was no personal computer industry. So when gates said to ibm, how about this . Well write youre operating system for your pc, and well get a cut of every machine you sell, and in addition, he made sure it wasnt an exclusive license, that he was going to be able to sell the software to ibm, but he was also going to be able to sell the same software to other people, because gates intuited that there would be people build knockoffs of ibm in the pc clones. It was a genius move who was still in his 20s. And youve got these guys at ibm in blue shirts and dark ties looking at this Company Microsoft and saying, who cares . Software . We build big machines. Ibm did not realize it was essentially handing all this power to this little nerd. If you had stayed at harvard a few more years, would this computer revolution pass you by . Perhaps. Things moved quickly in the industry. It was an urgency to get out there and be the first one to put a basic on the micro computer that cause the me to drop out. If you dont have one, you will be amazed what these little gadgets can do. The idea was that ordinary people might have a use for computers. Now it took a while to figure out what those uses might be. The mane thing was spreadsheets and word processing. The computer was the best typewriter you could ever have. It gave you a new way to write. You could change thing around. And check your spelling. It would always look perfect. Bottom line numbers. My dad had the large ledger sheets and i remember taking a computer to show them. And and i remember taking a computer to show him a spreadsheet. And suddenly, he understood the value of a personal computer. There was a drastic mindset change in the whole country about what a computer was. And happened over a very short period of time. Gather around and well tell you a lit bit more about the system. Here at the west coast computer fair, the speed of development is so great that each fair outdates the previous one. It is lower prices that has helped the tremendous boom. About one home in ten will have a computer by the end of this year, by 1990, the number could be two out of three. We knew the personal computer was getting serious when the competition started. Compaq. This is the one higher resolution. Great other expandability than ibms pc. Ibms entry heated up an already volatile market. One industry innovator, osborne computer was forced into bankruptcy last month. And apple, the industrys number one had to concede it was now number two, behind ibm. All of a sudden, you were in an oldfashioned competitive business in which you really have to be better than the other guy. There are 150 micro computer businesses, and all of them want 50 of the market, and that just isnt going to happen. This is the newest kind of office in america. And this is the telephone which will ring in it. The big thing was the phone in the car, which was like, we are now officially in the modern era. And the first thing you always said was, hey, im calling from the car. When these things started to pop up in the mid 1980s, the customers were people who had a business reason for having these things or a super rich dude who just wanted to show off. The big break through idea was the idea of cellular systems. Its called cellular because your telephone is tied in to different transmitters, called a cell, and as your car travels, the signal goes from cell to cell. This is something never ton before. If you dont have one you probably will have one in a decade say the makers. As the price comes down to the range of other hightech toys. There were people who understood even in the early days that being trapped in a car was not freedom. People are fundamentally, naturally, mobile. I like to say the technology will go from a phone in the car to a phone in the briefcase to finally a phone in your pocket. And this is it. This is a portable cellular phone. You will be able to take this to any American City and call virtually any place in the world, and its maker, motorola says a smaller version than this will be on the market next year. First cell phones look like soviet army field telephones, these huge lunch boxes you hold up to your head. This is just the birth of this industry. All inventions start out in a very rough state. Whether its computers or cell phones. It took a while to refine them and make them into something that wed all use. You look at the bottom of the screen. It says please type return. The computer has become a national mania, and were told, miss the electronic boat and youre sunk. In the future, everythings probably i going to be computerized. So youre going to have to know how to use computers. My son just took a class in school, and hes only 8 years old. I figure i just as soon be as smart as he is. They arent friendly except for playing pac man. A small snag in Computer Marketing is called techno phobia. Fear of these bloodless little wizards. Manufacturers