1985

again, blogthis ate my post, so I do it yet again....

It happened in 1985:

Nintendo enters home video game market.
Cray-2 supercomputer does 1.2 billion calculations per second.
Hollywood amends ratings; now G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, X.
U.S. household ownership of VCRs rises rapidly to 20%.
Cellphones go into cars.
Images can be broken into digital bits.
Microsoft ships the Windows 1.0 operating system.
Synthetic text-to-speech computer pronounces 20,000 words.
Television broadcasts can be heard in stereo.
U.S. TV networks begin satellite distribution to affiliates.
Typical modem speed now 2400 bits/second.
America Online founded as Quantum Computer Services.
Pay-per-view channels open for business.
Kids can't get enough of Super Mario Brothers computer game.
New videotape formats: 8 mm and VHS-C.

AND it was sometime around 1985 that Teradyne released the Z1860, and ICT [in circuit tester] machine. it was large, expensive, and clunky. It is still Large, clunky, but is now cheep. It seems to cost of maintance is inversely proportional to the lifecycle. (duh) as it gets older we spend more and more to maintain it. this will be the second time in a few years that we have had a catastrophe and i am on the support team so i gotta help fix it. its actually not that bad of a machine except teradyne will stop supporting it soon and we will have to move to a machine that is more reliable, more expensive, much smaller, harder to work on, and incompatible with our multi million dollar fixturing for the old machine. oh well.