The 1980s: Nostalgia Overload

[PRgal]

Where were YOU during that time period?  In 1983?  I was 3 1/2, going on 4 and probably a bit of a chatterbox, so I don't remember anything going on in the show.  I wonder if they're going to mention something about Cabbage Patch dolls - weren't they THE gift that holiday season?  My mom managed to get me a brunette doll named Marcia (Marsha?), but I changed her name to Jennifer (because, you know, half the girls I knew were Jens.  It's THE name for my cohort - ha ha).  She had a red dress and I still have her somewhere.

ETA: I realize that in 1983, most computers had LESS than 640K RAM (wasn't 128K pretty standard back then?), but 640K seems to ring "80s" to me.  My family's first PC was 640 KB (though it was not until 1987.  Don't remember the make, just that it was DOS).

Edited May 31, 2014 by PRgal

[Boton]

My family got its first computer in 1983 when I was 13. It had 16K. It was a TRS80 Color Computer, and it was awesome. We eventually upgraded it to 32K. 64K was about as far as home computers went; you could get them with as little as 4K.

[PRgal]

For those of us who remember the Speak & Spell, not sure if you've seen the simulator...I think my parents REALLY wanted me in STEM because they got me a Speak & Math before a Speak & Spell.

[green]

Yeah I think you added an extra zero in making it 640K RAM.  Guess at age 3 your math was still a little shaky.  :-)

 

The Commordore 64, super popular big during the 80's decade, was 64K thus it's name.

 

Wikipedia:

 

(Commodore 64) "Volume production started in early 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US $595 (equivalent to $1,500 in 2014).  Preceded by the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes (65,536 bytes) of RAM, and had favorable sound and graphical specifications when compared to contemporary systems such as the Apple II. While the Apple cost circa US$1200, it was sold as a complete system with disk drive and dedicated monitor—the 64's $595 price included only the system unit. The Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer was initially priced at $399, but had only 4kB RAM and could not match the 64's graphics and sound abilities."

 

Ironically though the Commodore 64 didn't come with a monitor it did come with an adapter cord to use a TV as it's screen.  It only took a quarter of a century for the return of computers interfacing directly with TVs in a big way.  It wasn't as good as buying the Commodore monitor since it converted digital to analog but hey all things new were once old.  And it was good enough when cyan was still the king of computer colors.

 

You also see how expensive Apples were compared to other options back in the day.  And IBMs had no function in a home being built for business applications in mind period and were just as expensive if not more so.  Commodores and Radio Shack's (that was what Tandy means) Trash 80 didn't have compatible operating systems with each other or Sun or Atari or Apple or IBM.  You can start to see how making a cheap IBM clone that can unite all personal computers outside of Apple (Apples never used DOS/Windows OS obviously thus can't run the same software) was a huge huge deal.  Personal computing was stymied by the lack of one computer being able to talk with another.  This broke everything wide open.  Also made a multi-billionaire out of Bill Gates who happily leased his DOS/Windows OS platform to any and all PC clone makers.

Edited June 2, 2014 by green

[PRgal]

Maybe someone should change the title....this thread is meant to be a nostalgia thread! :)

[88Keys]

I still have my Speak and Spell.  And it still works.  I have the Speak N Play (music), too. 

[green]

Maybe someone should change the title....this thread is meant to be a nostalgia thread! :)

 

And it is.  This is a techie show.  And there is nothing more nostalgic about the techie 80's then 64K RAM chips.

[Snowprince]

To answer the original question:

 

1983 - I'm a bright shiny new P-2 fresh off probation with the LAPD. 1 day in roll call we're given little handbooks and a brief overview on how to work this new fangled thing called an MDT (Mobile Digital Terminal). It's mounted on a swivel stand in front of the dash where the "Hot Sheet" stand used to be. I didn't get to the formal in service training class up at the academy for a couple months, so my practical introduction on how to fly this thing was "just skim thru the handbook and play with it, you'll get the hang of it." Being a techno-phobe, I was of the mindset that computers were evil and would someday enslave us all...to some degree, I guess I was right.

 

Scroll thru the below link to see the "state of the art" of the department at that time, a pic of the in car MDT is about halfway down.

 

http://harrymarnell.net/kma367-3.htm

Edited June 4, 2014 by Snowprince

[DaveA]

Sometime in '83 I was working in software developing stuff for CPM-86 and Concurrent CPM on our proprietary hardware.  We had just gotten a dual floppy IBM PC to evaluate porting some of our CPM code to DOS.  Anyway, with the PC came an IBM Technical Reference manual that contained the motherboard schematics and a printed assembly listing of the BIOS.  So I don't understand the need to unsolder the ROM chip and read out the contents in the most difficult manner possible.  I suppose it was just for TV drama or perhaps the tech mnual came out later as I don't really remember when in '83 this happened.

[ABay]

In 1983, I was old enough to drink. And did. It was really the only way to survive the Reagan Years.

 

Here's the thing, I remember bad parts of the late 60s and the 70s because I was very young but aware enough of the world to understand that police officers really shouldn't attack peaceful protesters with fire houses and police dogs (or pepper spray but that's another decade) and to personally feel the effects of discrimination against women. But those decades are far enough in my personal past to be sweetened by time and emotional distance, even while acknowledging the bitter.

 

The 80s, not so much. I was an adult, albeit a young one, and it makes a difference in how I remember the times. I miss my college friends and hanging out with them but I'm not at all nostalgic for the decade.

[Hanahope]

Well, this show (and forum) brings back the memories.  I was in high school in the early 80s and my dad was an electrical engineer for Xerox.  We actually had a 'home computer' in 1980 that had these big floppy discs, 10 inch I think.  I don't know what he used it for, other than keeping a checking/savings account ledger, and calculating car mileage/expenses.

 

I actually used to type up my school reports on the computer, save them to the discs and print out with the dot matrix printer.  The computer also played some simple games, I remember one that was sortof like Asteroids, but much slower so it wasn't as fun (yes, I usually was the only girl at my local video arcades - Centipede was my favorite too, along with Asteroids and Galaga).

 

When I started college, my dad gave me a Xerox memory writer, a big typewriter with a small 5 inch monitor attached to it by an arm on the side.  I had 5 inch floppy discs for saving my documents.  It was very helpful for me to type, save, print my reports.  I even made some money typing reports for classmates.  In law school, it allowed me to type up all my class notes, organize them, create outlines and made it a lot easier to study for exams.

 

I wasn't exposed to other computers very much until around 1989, when I had a boyfriend that built his own 'frankenstein' computer and he got me into playing games (my first being Wizardry).  I remember seeing computers at school for the students to use for their work, but since I had my memorywriter, I never used them.  I never saw students playing games on them.

I wish I could remember more about that time and my dad (who died in 1994), but I was more interested in boys back then than computers.  There wasn't any 'take your daughter to work' day back then and I never visited my dad's office.

 

My parents didn't really encourage me to go into STEM fields, despite my ease with math and science.  Unfortunately, that ease made it boring for me, so I chose a field that was more difficult and challenging to me, law.  Yeah, I think I blew it, since I really only 'get by' in the legal field and its not that challenging anymore (and I'm not much of a 'people person' for clients).  You can bet I'm not making that mistake with my kids.

 

I was always ahead of the curve, computer wise.  I was one of the first in my lawfirm to use a desktop computer for my own work instead of dictating, and I always asked by co-workers and secretaries to help them solve easy computer problems so they didn't have to call the tech company unless it was something more complex.

 

Its a bit amazing to me when I think that my kids have never known life without  computers, mobile phones and ipads.  Depending on how much more sex they have to include, I may make my kids watch so they know how their mom lived back in the dark ages.

[scowl]

I was using the most primitive computer hardware available because I couldn't afford a real computer. I built a computer kit with a 6502 CPU and maybe 48K of RAM. I wrote code in BASIC (which came on a ROM), assembler and Forth. Since the kit came with the schematics I came up with simple hardware projects like a printer interface, a sound generator, and a real time clock.

 

Those actually worked so I built a graphics board which was 192x368 pixels, black and white (I didn't know how color worked yet!). I even built a floppy controller from a schematic I saw in a magazine (one chip to move the head around and another to read and write the data) and got it to work. I think a five inch floppy had 40 tracks and I was able to write 8K to each one giving me 320K of data on a single-sided floppy but I didn't have a disk operating system to I just wrote on the disk label what was in each track. My two disk commands copied the data to or from RAM to a track on the floppy.

 

I didn't know anything about Apple II's or TRS-80's or any "real" computers. I didn't understand why people just plugged their computers in and worked on them instead of tearing them apart and screwing around with their guts.

[Jamoche]

Got my first Apple ][ in 1980, when I was 15. First thing I ever programmed was a calculator, which was how I talked my way into my high school's computer classes as a sophomore when it was usually a senior-level class. My high school was the first to get a networked computer lab.

 

By 1983 I'd already had one paid programming job (and one threat of a lawsuit, but it was all talk, no action). Went to Texas A&M where (to tie into another AMC show) we were doing assembly language programs on IBM 360s. Why, I have no clue. It's not the sort of assembly these guys are doing to reverse-engineer the PCs, where you had to actually know what a register did - it had so many macros, I could prototype it on the Apple in Integer Basic.

[88Keys]

I was born in 1980.  I emailed my mom about this show, as she's kind of a computer person and might like it.  She said that our first computer was an Epson Qx-10 which ran Valdocs software.  And that the first computer I had was probably an IBM 256.  She still has the Epson.  I vaguely remember that the only thing it did was make graphs and pie charts. 

[Syme]

Where were YOU during that time period?  In 1983? 

 

I was working at NASA. We had a IBM 370-3033, dual CPU, with a 3800 laser printer.

It ran TSS, one of only 6-8 places in the world doing so. There was a Cray 1....

 

We were building a data acquisition system with multiple PDP-11/34's and a shiny new VAX 780.

 

We got our first 5150, with the monochrome monitor!

Edited June 8, 2014 by Syme

[PRgal]

I was born in 1980.  I emailed my mom about this show, as she's kind of a computer person and might like it.  She said that our first computer was an Epson Qx-10 which ran Valdocs software.  And that the first computer I had was probably an IBM 256.  She still has the Epson.  I vaguely remember that the only thing it did was make graphs and pie charts. 

 

I'm only a little older than you (born September '79, so maybe just a few months).  I remember making graphs on an early(ish) home computer (this was in '86) as well.  The first program I remember running was "Samples" when my mom bought our first DOS machine.  In order to run Samples, we had to go into BASICA, press F3 ("Load"), type in "Samples" and then press F2 to run it.  There were ten programs, I think, including one that played music (either Music or Keyboard).  We had that computer for YEARS (until some time in the early 90s!!!!!!) and games I played on that machine included Rogue, Jump Joe 2, Math Castle (had to answer math equations to find my way out of a haunted castle (or risk being eaten by a dragon)) and Paratrooper (BTW, a recreation of this game is available on iTunes for $0.99.  It's called DOS Paratrooper if you're interested.  You can get Rogue, too).

Edited June 8, 2014 by PRgal

[DrSpaceman]

I was 10 in 1983.  My brother bought a Commodre Vic 20 computer and I learned to do  BASIC programming on it, first just typing in the programs and later learning what it all meant.  Primitive black and white graphics.  One program just made a little black "ball" go around the screen. Another one a little stick figure guy did jumping jacks. 

[ganesh]

I learned BASIC too on the Apple II in like 5th, 6th grade and on my cousin's Commodore. Now I know python!

 

I actually used the Apple IIc for word processing up till 11th grade I think (1990). Then my parents' bought me an actual word processor/electric typewriter thing that I used till senior undergrad.

Edited June 8, 2014 by ganesh

[Soopertater]

We had to study BASIC in 8th grade (1983) on Commodore 64s.  We had a PC at home (think it might have been an Acer) that ran WordPerfect   Someone had a HUGE game written in BASIC called B-52, a totally command driven game where you guided a B-52 over Russian and nuked various cities.  over 60,000 lines of for/next loops, Gosubs, Data sets, and more Goto commands than a COMDEX.

BTW...anyone keeping track of the songs featured during the show?  This week I distinctly heard Boz Scaggs and Bad Brains.  Last week I definitely heard The Clash, and maybe The Human League (???)

[scowl]

I was working at NASA. We had a IBM 370-3033, dual CPU, with a 3800 laser printer.

 

I cringe whenever I think of the IBM 370 with the segmented memory architecture, then I remember that the 8088 in the IBM PC also had segmented memory. Well, at least it had a stack.

 

 

We got our first 5150, with the monochrome monitor!

 

The tiny monochrome monitor. My dad bought one of these for his business. The floppy drive enclosure was 90% empty space because even small computers needed to be big for IBM. Or maybe it was supposed to be a printer stand?

[Syme]

It needed that big box to hold the big power switch. And the monochrome monitor had to plug into it as the flyback would smoke if it was run without the PC's horizontal sync drive....

 

Know zip re: 370 internals, just it was super rare to find a dual CPU much less  the only one running TSS. The only languages available were assembler and FORTRAN. As a result, there were utilities written in FORTRAN; we had a 8080/Z80 cross compiler.

 

The stock TSS editor didn't believe in editing copies of files then saving; it read and wrote straight to disk err DASD sectors. {And no, there was no "undo"....}

 

 

 

[scowl]

The 5150 came with a ridiculously small built-in 5 inch monitor. I think you could plug in an external monitor but since it had to be an IBM monitor it would have cost thousands of dollars.

 

The 5150 sort of relates to the show. That was IBM's first attempt at a "personal" computer meaning it only took up a half a desk and was connected to a (mostly empty) box the size of a small refrigerator. 

[dubbel zout]

*Waves warmly to Snowprince*

 

 

I was finishing my junior year of college in 1983, and the big splurge was having one of the word processing services type up your paper instead of using an old-fashioned typewriter. Luddite that I was (and still am, to a certain extent), I kept using my electric typewriter. It didn't even have a separate correction tape—I had to use Wite-Out. Hee. And I still used carbon paper to type my letters to my family.

 

After I graduated, I moved to NYC to work in book publishing, and desktop publishing was just starting to happen. It took a few years for it to become the norm. I moved over to magazines, and that's where I really learned computers. (Makes sense, given the much shorter print deadlines.) We went through practically every Apple, starting with the Mac Plus. It was thrilling to finally get a color monitor, even if the first one bascially a 19-inch television.

 

I also had a few laptops, and remember having to buy a separate modem attachment. I also remember connecting the phone line directly to the computer when I got my clamshell iMac laptop and feeling as if I was on the cutting edge. Hee again.

[scowl]

In 1985 I had a typewriter that had a parallel printer interface. It was quite amazing to see a typewriter typing by itself. I turned in papers that were identical to typewritten... which doesn't sound like a big deal now if you never saw the 9 pin dot matrix printouts we had back then.

 

You had a 19 inch color monitor? When the IBM PC came out, I remember two color monitors, a 14 inch one and a 15 inch one. The 15 inch one cost almost twice as much as the 14 inch one. I got a 19 inch color monitor in the mid 1990's for $800 and it was one of the cheaper ones. One of the "game changers" of the PC is that you couldn't hook it up to your TV set which was shocking to us computer hobbyists. It was obviously a way for evil IBM to make more money.

[Soopertater]

We used to tear off the guide holes in the dot-matrix printer paper and use them for spitballs. :-)

[Abstract]

I was in elementary school in 1983. My dad bought one of those Texas Instruments computers that you plugged into the tv. I learned to play Munch Man and Chisholm Trail (obviously knockoffs of Pac-Man and Oregon Trail), and a smattering of BASIC programming.

[88Keys]

We used to tear off the guide holes in the dot-matrix printer paper and use them for spitballs. :-)

 

We used to fold two of them together to make a springy snake.  :)

[dubbel zout]

We used to tear off the guide holes in the dot-matrix printer paper and use them for spitballs. :-)

 

We used to use the chads from punch cards as confetti at football games.

[Watcher0363]

My first computer was a commodore 64 that was a surplus from Sears when they upgrade their computers. I learned basic on it. I used it to write handicapping programs. Funny thing was I came up with what I thought was a pretty good way of storing the data. It was pretty close to a fractal deal. I would work the numbers with a calculator and my process checked out, when I tried to use the computer to duplicate the results they never matched. I finally gave up that process. Years later I found out the chip had some kind of error on it that did not allow it to calculate numbers with large decimals correctly.  I believe chips with processing errors in them were quite common back then.

[PRgal]

I was in elementary school in 1983. My dad bought one of those Texas Instruments computers that you plugged into the tv. I learned to play Munch Man and Chisholm Trail (obviously knockoffs of Pac-Man and Oregon Trail), and a smattering of BASIC programming.

 

A neighbour of mine had that.  I printed my first Printshop birthday card on her computer.  I was probably five (we're looking at 1985ish).  She actually kept that computer well into the 80s, and got a DOS machine around late '89. People kept their computers for a very long time back then.  My current Mac is from 2012, and we'll likely get a new one in 2015.

[scowl]

This week on the table behind Joe's bare ass we saw the wonderful Radio Shack Model 100. Thirty years later this is still one of my favorite computers. It was the size of a thick notebook, it had a nice full-sized keyboard, and ran on standard AA batteries. The LCD display would be a joke today at 240x64 pixels but that's eight lines of ugly text. It had a built-in 300 baud modem, printer port, and a serial port if you owned a faster modem.

 

The software had decent (for the day) built-in software: word processor, an address book, a calendar (the built-in clock was novel for computers), and a telecom program for connecting to mainframes and BBS's (the pre-Internet forums). All your files sat in memory and were always with you.

 

This was a huge leap in usability. For the first time you could turn on a computer and instantly work -- no booting up. All your files were there. All the applications were there. You could take it to school or work and take notes in classes or meetings. The word processor was good enough for me to write college papers on.

[qtpye]

This is going to be a strange question, but what do you guys think about the accuracy of Gordon and Donna's house?  I think it is appropriate for what middle class looked like back then. It is kind of interesting that today they would probably living in some type of mcmansion.

[Hanahope]

This is going to be a strange question, but what do you guys think about the accuracy of Gordon and Donna's house?  I think it is appropriate for what middle class looked like back then. It is kind of interesting that today they would probably living in some type of mcmansion.

 

Well, I don't know exactly how much my parents made in the early 80s, but my dad was an electrical engineer for Xerox and my mom was a tenured public school teacher.  Our house looks about the same size as Gordon and Donnas (typical middle class 3/2) in a Los Angeles suburb with a very well regarded school system.

[qtpye]

Yeah, most of my parent's friend's, who were working professionals, lived in something similar.  It's just funny when you look at shows like House Hunters today and what people think is the minimum for a starter home (at least 3000 square feet, granite, three car garage, etc.) as compared to back then.

Edited July 3, 2014 by qtpye

[Hanahope]

Yeah, my family makes probably twice as much as what my parents made, yet here we are 30 years later, still in a 3/2 home that's 50 years old, in a decent suburb with a good school district.

[ganesh]

Our house was a raised ranch, which was common in the area. I lived in a really rural area. I think their house actually looks a lot like my aunt/uncle who lived in a more suburby area like on the show. 

[PRgal]

I'd say that their home's fairly accurate.  My parents bought a house in a new development around that time, so our kitchen was a little more modern and everything else a bit newer looking.  For example, our fridge resembled theirs, but it was white, rather than yellow (yellow is more 70s).  As for houses in general, I recently did an MLS search and noticed that homes in that neighbourhood are twice the inflation.  Keep in mind that I live in Toronto, where the average single family home is $600K+.

[ganesh]

Their fridge looked exactly like my parents' in the late 70s. 

[LJonEarth]

This is going to be a strange question, but what do you guys think about the accuracy of Gordon and Donna's house?  I think it is appropriate for what middle class looked like back then. It is kind of interesting that today they would probably living in some type of mcmansion.

 

That house looks exactly like the one I grew up in. Exactly. It was built in the mid-80s. We were middle-middle class. But, yes. Today, they would push it and look for something with a lot of rooms and land.

[Syme]

This week on the table behind Joe's bare ass we saw the wonderful Radio Shack Model 100. Thirty years later this is still one of my favorite computers. It was the size of a thick notebook

.....

This was a huge leap in usability. For the first time you could turn on a computer and instantly work -- no booting up.

 

 

 

It was a sea change for {outside} journalists. Before then, it was handwriting a story, and dictating it to "rewrite man" over the phone. With the 100, they wrote it at the concert, council meeting, courtroom hallway, etc... and found a phone that the acoustical modem would fit....& send it in at an astonishing 300 baud.

[ketose]

I'm just old enough to remember life without computers in the home. We got one of those fire sale $99 Texas Instruments computers. Then I got a hand-me down Commodore 64. The TI had a cable that connected to a cassette recorder. The Commodore eventually got a 5 1/4" disk drive (from Toys R' Us, which was a major retailer for that stuff in the US) and I learned to write programs and make "graphics" on it. Because of the TV interface, I used it to make credits and title cards for VHS home movies.

[riverheightsnancy]

I was a Freshman in College in '82-'83 and had little to no computer access (NEVER thought of buying one) except in the Theatre office (my major) to help make programs for shows (we STILL typed out some text and then hand cut and paste the layout-hee) and the MOST important thing was to make our resumes for acting jobs with clunky dot-matrix "fancy fonts" woo-who! I still have a copy from that time period.  I never even considered a personal home computer until about 1991 or so when I bought one from a big box electronics store and got royally bent over to the tune of around $3600. I only wanted it for data-processing, graphic layouts,and burgeoning "email". I remember thinking, "What is this internet and how can we find things on it? Where is it?" lol

 

The more interesting thing was my high school got ONE Apple 2 (I think that was the model) in 81'-82. My school was rural and very small. Our only math teacher was quite brilliant and taught ALL of the advanced/college math courses. He decided to teach himself programming (so that we could do something with this bright and shiny Apple in our classroom) and he determined that we would create a children's game on the Apple. Each student's group was responsible for creating the graphic of a Sesame Street character and we had to write the code for each pixel of our picture on the screen. What the game did was each pixel is assigned a numeric value and a random number generator would fill in pixels on the screen, randomly. When a child thought they knew what the picture was, they could press the space bar and type in the name of the character. If they were correct, the picture filled in. If not, individual pixels continued to fill in, until the picture was completed, or the child got the answer correct. I think that we had programmed at least 5 characters. Upon reflection, it actually seems like a cool game for young kids. I remember thinking (when we were doing this project), how it might be a very lucrative job to go into. You know, computers and such. ;)

[DrSpaceman]

I'd say there home and entire neighborhood is extremelty accurate for the time period.  Its exactly the type of home, the type of interior, the size and the look and feel of all the neighborhoods I knew around the suburbs of my youth.  Today it would be consider too small for a family even as a starter home probably.  The standard for a home is much bigger today than it was at the time.  That house I think they have perfectly designed and reproduced.  The whole neighborhood is perfectly done. 

[Kel Varnsen]

The Commodore eventually got a 5 1/4" disk drive (from Toys R' Us, which was a major retailer for that stuff in the US) and I learned to write programs and make "graphics" on it. Because of the TV interface, I used it to make credits and title cards for VHS home movies.

I had a commodore 64 as a kid. I always wondered why it took so long after commodore disappeared, before other computer/electronics manufacturers realized that making your computer monitor and your TV she same thing was actually a smart idea. I mean the fact that you could play games or do whatever on the commodore, and then turn it off and watch TV without changing rooms seems like an awesome selling feature to me. 

[ketose]

I had a commodore 64 as a kid. I always wondered why it took so long after commodore disappeared, before other computer/electronics manufacturers realized that making your computer monitor and your TV she same thing was actually a smart idea. I mean the fact that you could play games or do whatever on the commodore, and then turn it off and watch TV without changing rooms seems like an awesome selling feature to me. 

I had a TI99/4A around the time they were being slashed in price. They native output was a 5-pin DIN connector (similar to a Commodore 64) with composite video and audio. It also came with a huge RF converter so you could connect it to the back of your TV. As long as Channel 3 or 4 was empty on the dial, you could use the TV as normal.

 

For about 5 years I had an old Commodore monitor. It was designed for the 2 video and 1 audio outputs from the back of the computer (luma and chroma). I didn't think the picture was significantly better, but it also had front panel composite jacks. I used a VCR to drive it and that monitor was my TV for years.

[wisteria]

When they showed Donna's license a few weeks ago, the street was fake, but the rest said "Richardson, TX 75081". That's the part of town where Texas Instruments is located, and it also happens to be where I was growing up back in the early '80s. In fact, I probably went to elementary school with their (fictional) daughters, though they would've been a year or two behind me. All the trees in their neighborhood are totally Atlanta (where I now live), but I can attest that even now Richardson is full of houses just like theirs, especially the brick and all those earthtones. If nothing else, the H&CF crew chose locations that really do look like north Dallas in the early '80s -- aside from all those towering pine trees!

 

(Fun fact: a few years later, Mike Judge was living in my neighborhood when he started drawing Beavis & Butt-head. Heh.)

Edited August 7, 2014 by wisteria

[Kel Varnsen]

(Fun fact: a few years later, Mike Judge was living in my neighborhood when he started drawing Beavis & Butt-head. Heh.)

That's awesome. If this show does some how make it to a second season there needs to be a Tom Anderson/Hank Hill type character show up. 

[Hanahope]

Copying from the episode thread:

 

Beta was technically somewhat better quality but you had to be almost the video equivalent of an audiophile to really see it or even care at their high prices.  Probably why your rich Texas relative bought it.  It was kind of a brief status thing by people in the videophile world as they turned up their noses at VHS only to end up with an expensive machine that they couldn't play anything on since all the sellable and rentable tapes eventually became 99.9% VHS format over the next few years.

 

 

My parents bought a Beta, I'm guessing probably because with my dad working for Xerox, he wanted the better quality.  I do remember the VCR wars and that, for a while at least, it was great to walk into a rental place and always finding the movie I wanted on Beta, because it was always ' all rented out' on VHS.

[CherryMalotte]

My husband still has a Beta machine which works, though I haven't had it hooked up in ages.  He and my bother in law used to rent together and they'd record all sorts of MTV videos and later Fridays and Night Flight.  

[ketose]

Speaking of the 80s, I remember Night Flight. That was the insomniac show of choice.