Herbert e. Matz
Hard disks, which really didn’t exist in the personal computer marketplace in 1980, bangkok thailand condos for sale became inexpensive and ubiquitous as the decade progressed. The advantage was that these systems were simple to program and they fit well with the character-based screens that were common at the time. You typed in commands like DIR or COPY, and the operating system would respond. See How PCs Work for details. Like just about every operating system at the time, DOS had a command-line interface. By the end of the 1980s, PCs were everywhere. When IBM released the PC, it came with an operating system called DOS. But “normal people” (meaning, non-geeks) had a lot of trouble feeling comfortable with DOS.
With a fax machine, you could send a sheet of paper to someone, anywhere in the country, complete with a signature, in seconds. During the “golden age” of the fax machine in the 1980s, people faxed everything. Ads and brochures could be sent out by fax. Nearly every legal document got faxed once it was signed. E-mail really didn’t exist yet (except in military and university environments), so the fax machine was amazing. Lunch orders went into restaurants by fax rather than being phoned in.
Then in 1984 there was an event that changed everything. Because we all use GUIs every day, it is hard for us to understand today how revolutionary the Mac was. Apple released the Macintosh computer with its unbelievable Graphical User Interface (GUI). A local computer store in Albany, NY had gotten a Mac in stock and had it on display. But if you ask people who lived through the transition, many of them can actually remember the day they saw their first Mac.
For more information on cell phone technology, see How Cell Phones Work. The handset was, essentially, two walkie-talkies in a case. Maybe it was cell phone envy? The portable telephone was another “must have” technology in the 1980s. When these phones came on the market, everyone had to buy one. One walkie-talkie handled your voice, while the other handled the voice of the caller. When they first came out, these phones were incredibly simple.
