1980s Technology Quotes

If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt - at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt - was almost total. They were not part of society; no one thought they were cool.

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

All through the 1980s, Apple kept its prices high. There were many reasons Microsoft's much bigger user base managed to resist moving to the GUI - but price was high among them.

I had e-mail in 1984! I had an e-mail address then, which means that all you could write to was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There were three of us, writing to each other.

Back in the 1980s, you could learn how to add memory cards to your PC in a Radio Shack.

I always loved both 'Breakout' and 'Asteroids' - I thought they were really good games. There was another game called 'Tempest' that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

When the Walkman was the craze in my generation, I was one of the first to have it.

If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that.

I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.