Real Estate in France Apartments for Rent and for Sale

They were incredibly expensive. Inside each cell there would be about 100 different radio frequencies in use, allowing about 50 simultaneous calls. The genius of the cell phone idea was that you could break up a city into many small cells. Each cell would have a tower holding the antennas, and that tower would be able to transmit only two or three miles. Then, those frequencies could be reused in cells across the city by spacing things out properly.

To understand why camcorders took the world by storm in the 1980s, you have to understand what they replaced. Then you sent it in to be developed. At the time, you used an 8mm movie camera to make “home movies.” You had to buy a 25 foot long roll of 16mm film, put it in the camera (preferably in the dark), thread it and shoot two minutes of film. Then you opened the camera up again, turned the roll of film over in the camera, rethreaded it, and shot another two minutes.

The whole experience was breathtaking. Cassettes stretched and broke. The capstan that pulled the tape past the head would suffer from “wow and flutter.” Albums had problems with dust, scratches, warping (from heat) and “wow and flutter” as well. At the time, the best turntables had massive platters (to reduce “wow and flutter”) and tone arms counterbalanced like a precision chemistry scale (to try to reduce wear). The oxide flaked off. The other thing about CDs was the absence of wear.

People traded recipes and personal letters by fax rather than sending them in the mail. There are many other new technologies that arose in the 1980s: Satellite television, laser disks, the first simple home robots (like the Heathkit Hero), bulletin board systems for computers, the space shuttle (first launched in 1981) as well as the first shuttle disaster (1986), the MIR space station (1986), digital music synthesizers, the Rubik’s cube and the DeLorean car. See How Fax Machines Work for details. That is part of what made the 1980s such an amazing decade. All of this activity has now been replaced by e-mail and e-mail attachments, but the fax machine gave us an early taste of what that would be like. There were so many firsts, and it is truly surprising how many of these technologies are still with us today. For lots more information on the technology in this article, check out the links on the next page.