Technology Advancements by Greg Gilbert

The 1980’s was a time for great reform for technology. There were great improvements that made lives easier for Americans. One of the first inventions of the 1980’s was the personal computers introduced by IBM in 1981. They are the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It was created by a team of engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. The idea originally came in summer of 1980 by Don Estridge. The scanning tunneling microscope is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Another invention that made exchanging data easier was the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc which contains data. It made it much easier to transfer data, but it wasn’t something would use to listen to music. The name is an acronym which stands for "Compact Disc Read-only memory". Computers can read CD-ROMs, but cannot write on them. CD-ROMs are popularly used to distribute computer software, including video games and multimedia applications, though any data can be stored. Another remarkable invention was the Apple Macintosh became the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface, rather than a command-line interface. Another life changing invention was when Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces. Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984.  The system was called Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1. Taking pictures was very popular during the 1980’s and an easier way to take pictures on the go was using the first disposable camera that was introduced by Fuji. The camera is a simple box camera sold with a roll of film installed, meant to be used once. Some are equipped with an integrated flash unit, and there are even waterproof versions for underwater photography. When people were bored, they would watch TV and sometimes it got frustrating watching TV because the show was not in clear High Definition. Thanks to Panasonic, the first prototype HDTV was invented as a response to the Japan Broadcasting Corporation's. Panasonic's prototype could display up to 1,125 lines of pixels, while a standard-definition TV could show only 480 lines.