#80s

Whether you played it in the back of your classroom or on your computer at home, if you were a kid in the last 30 years you almost certainly grew up playing The Oregon Trail.

On May 4, 1984, Milton Bradley, a leading producer of board games for 124 years, agreed to sell itself to Hasbro. Changes in the way people played games in the 80s, especially kids, put pressure on the company. In this blog post, I’ll explain how changing times led Milton Bradley to make a transformational bet at the worst possible time that ultimately sunk the maker of the game Battleship, and what happened to what was left of Milton Bradley.

Club Med eventually moved upmarket and away from experiments like this one. Atari eventually became something else entirely. But for thirteen weeks in the summer of 1983, on a beach in the Dominican Republic, you could sit down at an Atari 800 between windsurfing sessions and learn to program in BASIC, compose a piece of music, or weave a headband from a design you made yourself on a computer with 256 colors to choose from. Nobody made you. It was just there if you wanted it, which is very Club Med.

For three summers, Atari gave kids a chance to spend real time with computers right at the moment those machines were starting to move from curiosity to necessity. Then the company collapsed, the camps ended, and what remains is mostly what people held onto, brochures, clippings, a little film, and the memories that still surface online from people who were lucky enough to go.

Howard Jones performs the song Things Can Only Get Better on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Jean-Michel Jarre - ZoolookologieJean-Michel Jarre “Welcome to the Other Side”: https://jmj.lnk.to/WTTOSSubscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/user/jeanmich...

While watching this Back To The Future (1985) Retrospective (exact timestamp) today I noticed what appears to be an XE with an Indus disk drive being used by Bob Gale, co writer for the movie.

While watching this Back To The Future (1985) Retrospective (exact timestamp) today I noticed what appears to be an XE with an Indus disk drive being used by Bob Gale, co writer for the movie.

This is a game about Perfect Strangers and everything is OK forever now.

I took all of the songs listed by Ernest Cline on his blog as being on "The "Official" Ready Player One Soundtrack Mix Tape" and made this playlist.

"The defining element is LOW COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY, as expressed in all aspects of the audiovisual system: the complexity of the platform (i.e. the number of transistors or logic gates in the hardware), the complexity of the software (i.e. the length in bits of the program code and static data), as well as the time complexity (i.e. how many state changes the computational tasks require). A more theoretical approach would eliminate the differentiation of software and hardware and talk about description/program length, memory complexity and time complexity."

"Here's a lovely interview with an alumnus of the Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp, a residential D&D camp for 10-17 year olds held at Shippensburg College (now Shippensburg University) in Pennsylvania. Campers played a series of rotating adventures in aged-grouped parties, with the councillors comparing notes behind the scenes to keep all the groups in synch and to ensure maximum fun and mayhem for all the players."

"Potch ® , Spotbot ® ; put a battery in and make him squirk. The cutest robot dog ever. He wags and chases his tail, shake his head, runs foward, and bumps his nose and changes direction."

"Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?"

At the age of 8, I can clearly remember staring for hours at every page of this wishbook, and I wanted everything in it. "1983 was the year of the video game crash and that year’s Sears Wishbook was chock full of the detritus of a bloated dying industry. You got the handhelds, Vectrex, Gemini, Colecovision, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 in this issue. Along with some great games and accessories. My favorite is the Handsome Hassock storage system on Page 9. I would love one of those now."

"Following in the footsteps of "Real People" (1979), this show took a look at the more unusual sides of nature, medicine and human endeavor. Segments ranged from the uplifting (young people overcoming severe handicaps to lead normal lives) to the unexplainable (a park ranger who had been hit by lightning over 7 times) to the simply stupid (a stunt man jumping a motorcycle over the spinning rotors of 3 helicopters). Popularized the phrase "don't try this at home.""

"It's never been opened. Ever. It hasn't seen the light of day since before it was shipped on May 5th, 1988."

"atariarchives.org makes books, information, and software for Atari and other classic computers available on the Web. Everything here is available with permission of the copyright holders."

""MLX" lets you type in long machine language (ML) listings with almost foolproof results."

"MLX is a series of machine language entry utilities published by COMPUTE! Publications for COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, and various books."

"This Video includes almost all Turbo Boosts of the series!! "

"intro of "Street Hawk" tv-show"

"Detroit rock band The Romantics have filed a federal lawsuit against Guitar Hero publisher Activision, claiming that the game’s cover version of 1980 hit “What I Like About You” infringes on the group’s rights."

"in the '80s there were a series of songs that inspired us to kick ass in every way possible. None inspired more ass kicking than these."

"And I mean fucking LOVE. When these songs come on, White People look at each other and say "Awwww yeah" or "Hell yeah" and are compelled to sing along. Sometimes, there’s also corresponding stupid dance move."

"Take a nostalgic visit down memory lane with this video containing 30 minutes of random 80's cartoon openings. Watch the video and see if you can name them all."

"There is no doubt that the keytar is one of the most ridiculous (yet fantastically awesome) instruments to ever be invented."

"Intro of a classic 80's show."

"one of the first Atari demos to show 128 colors on the screen (the beginning logo) and that was actually good music for a computer back then."

"For those who don't know any better, and think that Boy George was the epitome of eighties rock, please listen to the Pogues, and maybe you won't think us such wankers after all."

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"This Sanford and Son t-shirt features Red Foxx as Fred Sanford giving his heart attack pose. The print is a distressed silk screen."