Modern Marvels: Gadgets of the 1980s (S12, E15) — Full Episode — History

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: It was a totally radical decade that realized the transition from the industrial age to the information age. An era of awesome acronyms. CD, MTV, VCR, IBM, PC. A technological paradise dedicated to entertainment and ergonomics, courtesy of Silicon Valley. Hold on tight, because we're going back to that future. Now, 80s Tech on "Modern Marvels." It was a decade that rocked our world in many ways. A shuttle exploded, shocking America and grounding its space program. A pandemic was identified, stirring social controversy. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. A wall came down, ending the 40-year Cold War. And for the first time, the man of the year was a machine. It was the 1980s, and despite some tumultuous events, it's remembered as a time of optimism and prosperity. [00:01:28] Speaker 2: Money seemed to be pouring out of the sky for a lot of people. And for those who chose not to concentrate on the, quote, unquote, badness that was going on both in the United States and abroad, it was a fun time. [00:01:40] Speaker 1: Yuppies, hackers, and valley girls created a new language and fashion, as well as the consumer culture that naturally followed. [00:01:48] Speaker 2: The 80s really kind of came out of that whole concept from the 70s of let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. It was a decade of attention deficit disorder. It was the amount of product that was out there, and people just kept buying and buying and buying. [00:02:03] Speaker 1: At their core, all these items had one thing in common, one very small thing that was getting smaller all the time, the integrated circuit, or microchip, or simply the chip. [00:02:15] Speaker 3: Anything that human beings interacted with could contain a microprocessor and could become, at least in a tiny way, intelligent. And so in the 80s, that process first became possible and ubiquitous because the chips got so cheap. [00:02:35] Speaker 1: Let's rewind, because we learned how in the 80s. What exactly is a chip? A chip is a sliver of silicon, less than an inch square, onto which engineers etch microscopic transistors and connecting wires. The transistors act as switches that control the flow of currents in the wires. The silicon acts as a semiconductor, which allows the transistors to process the binary code of computers, on for one, off for zero. The number of transistors on the chip determines power and cost. [00:03:11] Speaker 3: This is a microchip. It is a Z80 processor, very common in the 1980s. It had maybe 10,000 transistors on it. And to understand how revolutionary that is, you can look at this board. This is what we used before there were microchips. Each one of these little cans is a transistor. What you've done is you've taken these big transistors and you've etched them on a tiny piece of silicon. And essentially, you've had machines mass produce thousands and thousands of them for pennies each. [00:03:50] Speaker 4: This is a wafer. It's a 300 millimeter, 12 inch wafer. And if you look carefully, you can see there are many squares on this wafer. Each one of these is a fully integrated circuit. And the cost of producing this wafer is constant. In 1965, you could only place 10 or 15, 20 components on a single piece of silicon. [00:04:14] Speaker 1: Today, the number of transistors that can fit in a single chip is in the billions. The rate of innovation was predicted by Moore's law. Coined by one of the founders of Intel, Moore's law basically states that integrated circuit complexity will double with respect to minimum component cost about every 18 months. So as performance doubles, price remains the same. [00:04:40] Speaker 5: The magic of Moore's law was the fact that it happened on a regularly scheduled basis. So anybody who was trying to innovate, they would look and say, when will my product be able to come to the market? Oh, it'll come in two and a half years. What will the capabilities of the silicon chip be in two and a half years? And they would design their innovation to intersect that line rather than only innovating on what was available at the moment. [00:05:05] Speaker 6: We're standing outside the headquarter-- Robert B. Noyce headquarters building of Intel Corporation. Intel was founded in 1968 by around Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andrew Grove. They started out building memory products, and along the way, developed a product called the microprocessor. The microprocessor eventually turned out to be the most important product for Intel. [00:05:30] Speaker 1: Early computer products began hitting stores in the late 1970s. In 1981, Intel's 8088 chip, containing 29,000 transistors, was at the heart of an invention that would forever change the way humans interact with technology and business-- the IBM PC. [00:05:52] Speaker 7: You had the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II. And they were very popular in middle schools, high schools. They didn't really get into business very much. People had a hard time taking these early computers seriously. It took the IBM PC for people to really look at the computer as something more than a toy. Now it's got those magical three letters, IBM. It must have something to do with business. IBM doesn't do frivolous things. [00:06:19] Speaker 1: Personal computers and the microprocessors needed to power them spawned a giant industry. And this industry already had a home. The area was dubbed Silicon Valley. Silicon for the semiconductor element that made the chip work, and Valley for its location in Northern California's Santa Clara Valley. New tech corporations sprouted up next to established tech organizations, all growing exponentially in the '80s, within an area of about 50 square miles. Hewlett-Packard, 1939. Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957. Intel, 1968. Xerox PARC, 1970. Apple, 1976. Adobe, 1982. Sun Microsystems, 1982. Cisco Systems, 1984. Silicon Valley now boasts more millionaires per capita than any other region in the United States. And almost half of its adult residents hold college degrees. [00:07:25] Speaker 6: Silicon Valley today is thought of as more than just a geographic area. It's also a state of mind, typified by the lifestyle, the work ethic, the interchange of ideas. [00:07:36] Speaker 5: In the '80s, Silicon Valley was just starting into its real boom. Back then, it was this whole robust environment where everybody worked tech, talked tech, and everybody was out to change the world. It was like the gold rush times, but in the '80s instead of in 1849. And everybody from around the world, whether they be from Pakistan or Peoria, they were all coming into Silicon Valley trying to make their mark. [00:08:06] Speaker 1: And many of them did exactly that, especially a local kid named Steve Wozniak. [00:08:11] Speaker 3: Steve Wozniak is one of my heroes because he really worked in a garage and made an object and then turned that object into a company. And at the time, there was nothing like it. It was a complete computer system. Primitive, yes, but a complete system. And then Steve Wozniak also wrote most of the software for us. So he was a hardware designer. He was a problem solver. He was a software developer. Just kind of this incredible genius sort of guy who got the whole Apple corporation started. [00:08:45] Speaker 1: Woz, as he's known, and his partner Steve Jobs worked day and night to make their computing dreams a reality. [00:08:52] Speaker 6: The suburban ranch house behind us is the site of the quintessential Valley success story. This is where Apple Computer was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They started off building Apple One computer boards in Jobs' bedroom, and they moved out to the garage when they received their first production order. [00:09:10] Speaker 1: That first order from a local retailer for 50 computers launched Apple and the Steves into tech geek glory. [00:09:20] Speaker 8: I was thinking, how do I build the absolute finest, best computer of the day? And Steve was thinking, how can we somehow build a product that will reach the masses and reach people that want to pay money to get access to a computer and to use it? And it was his idea to start a company, and I was kind of like, well, I don't know how I want to start a company. I just want to design neat computers and things like that. So we kind of blended our insights, but we did have a goal that we were going to build a product that was so low cost it would improve a lot of people's lives, both at home and at work. [00:09:52] Speaker 1: The Apple One evolved into the Apple Two, which most people remember. Then came the Leesa, which most people don't remember. It was Apple's first attempt at a graphical user interface, [00:10:05] Speaker 8: or GUI. All the computers before had been command line driven. Let's say you wanted to copy a file from one floppy disk to another floppy disk. You would have to type in commands that specify the name of the floppy disk, which might be something so cryptic as C:D: or E: or F: and you'd have to type the name of a file, and you couldn't make one typing mistake. [00:10:31] Speaker 1: The GUI allowed the user to work with representative icons rather than memorized lines of code. [00:10:37] Speaker 7: When you're sitting at your desk thinking, how can I design a better computer? You're staring at your desk, and there's folders, and you've got your desktop, and there's garbage can there. I can open and close windows, and things talk to each other. And I can move folders around and throw them in the garbage and rename them. [00:10:53] Speaker 1: Despite this user-friendly application, the Lisa never took off, because most people couldn't afford to own one. [00:11:01] Speaker 8: It took a megabyte of memory to do that kind of computer, and a megabyte of memory back then just cost $5,000 retail. So our computer sold for something like $10,000, and it wouldn't sell very well. But the price that's affordable has been almost the same since our first Apple II was kind of in this $2,000-ish price range. [00:11:21] Speaker 1: Steve Jobs pushed his engineers to come up with a GUI computer within this desired price range, and they succeeded. [00:11:29] Speaker 7: Here you have, in 1984, the Apple Macintosh. This came out to a lot of fanfare as a different kind of computer, quote, "for the rest of us." So while the IBM PC was pitched at the sort of stayed, kind of boring businessman, the Mac was for people who wanted to have fun, who were creative, and who weren't computer experts but needed to do work with a computer quickly. [00:11:52] Speaker 1: The Mac had a mouse and pulled down menus and picture icons that users could click and drag. Soon, IBM models also had these features. Learning to use computers went from daunting to doable. [00:12:08] Speaker 9: And in the 1980s, if you were using a personal computer, you were a beginner by definition. And people really needed guidance. And the fact that there were magazines like this, and books, and other sources of information, was really a sign that the revolution was here to stay. [00:12:24] Speaker 1: Apple computers made Woz a multimillionaire. He took his money and created one of the biggest musical events of the 1980s-- the US Festival. [00:12:36] Speaker 8: We put $10 million into building an amphitheater and putting in various needed facilities and plumbing and whatever. [00:12:43] Speaker 10: I even tested the porta-potties myself. I think the reason it's gone over so well is that we got more porta-potties per person than any other event of its type ever. [00:12:51] Speaker 8: And we put on the concert, and it would run for three days. We had technology tents. This was in the early '80s. And Apple had kicked off this big thing, and now there were other companies building personal computers, and it was becoming a part of our life. And personal computers were just starting to connect to musical instruments. And technology and music kind of go together, and they always do. So I had a technology fair, and companies basically showed off their products and what they could do, and you walked through and got educated. [00:13:24] Speaker 1: The US Festival foreshadowed the marriage of culture and technology, made possible by the microprocessor. The chip transformed the way people did business, and it also transformed the way people did pleasure. After punching out for the day, we found all kinds of techie new ways to spend our downtime in the '80s. If you were lucky enough to be a kid in the '80s, you might remember spending your allowance at the virtual nirvana called the arcade, bound only by the limits of your imagination and how many quarters you had. Once just a place to play games like skiing, ball and pinball, arcades now boasted the newly popular video combat games, where you could single-handedly save the world from aliens by repeatedly pressing a button. But even more popular were character-driven games, like "Donkey Kong" and "Pac-Man." According to Pac-Man's creator, Toru Iwatani, the inspiration for the character came from a pizza with a slice missing. If you long for the games of days gone by, the Vintage Arcade Superstore in Glendale, California can resurrect your childhood with one of their restored arcade games. [00:14:55] Speaker 7: Came up 500 short. [00:14:57] Speaker 11: Most of our customers are people that played these games when they were kids. Some of our customers are collectors. We have some customers that are celebrities. Our most sought-after products are the early '80s video games, like "Miss Pac-Man," "Galaga," "Defender," "Asteroids," "Donkey Kong." If we don't have something, we can find it for you. We completely go through them. We redo the control panels. We put new monitor glass on them, new marquees, new T-molding, repaint the sides. A lot of times, we put new side art on them. We can put new monitors in them. [00:15:25] Speaker 1: Of course, Gene personally tests each game before it's shipped out to the customer. Inside, arcade games are fairly simple machines, made possible by our old friend, the microprocessor. [00:15:40] Speaker 11: Power comes using it through the cord. It goes in this transformer. There's some fuses. This is the power supply. Here's the computer board. Here's the memory chips right here. This is the microprocessor. Here's the monitor that displays the image. And then the speaker's up here. The control panel's in the front. And that's basically what there is in a video game. [00:16:00] Speaker 1: Arcade game technology helped mesmerize an impressionable new generation. And like many electronics in the '80s, the games became small and cheap enough to come home. Sales of home video consoles like the Atari 2600 boomed. [00:16:20] Speaker 12: There was some interest on the part of many parents in acquiring home games so that their children would be playing at home as opposed to going out into this unknown space of the arcade where the parents would lose control over their children. From the kid's point of view, the games that were conversions of popular arcade games for home consoles tended to be inferior, technically speaking. [00:16:44] Speaker 1: Inferior or not, home video games were a hit. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell seemed to have discovered a formula that worked, at least for a while. [00:16:56] Speaker 3: A 2600 contains a very, very simple microprocessor running at maybe 1 megahertz. And that primitive nature allowed it to handle only games that were two-dimensional with just a few colors and a few little objects that were moving on the screen. [00:17:12] Speaker 1: Bushnell allowed an open culture of game development, meaning that other companies could produce cartridges that were compatible with a 2600. Some of the games weren't exactly top notch. [00:17:25] Speaker 12: As a result of that, Atari, in a way, kind of lost control of that platform. That led, in the early 1980s, to kind of a collapse of the industry. [00:17:36] Speaker 1: The game makers that followed, like Nintendo, learned from Atari's mistakes. They patented and coded their consoles and insisted on strict quality control guidelines. Despite some awesome innovations in video games and graphics over the years, we still look back nostalgically on those games from the '80s. [00:17:57] Speaker 12: If you poll, say, university students today, more than 50% of them have played with an Atari 2600 still to this day. And for some reason, it's maintained its popularity. The Atari 2600 nailed a certain kind of interactive play experience that's possible on a very simple platform. They're really timeless games. [00:18:20] Speaker 1: If games weren't your thing, then you may remember other television-related breakthroughs. MTV, CNN, and HBO were a few of the specialty cable channels making a big splash on the tube. But you couldn't possibly watch everything. Or could you? [00:18:37] Speaker 2: Enter the VCR. It allowed people to capture television and not have to schedule their lives around their favorite program anymore, because now they could go and throw a tape in the machine, set the timer, record, and go out and do whatever they needed to do. [00:18:51] Speaker 1: Despite the fact that the clock always seemed to think it was midnight, VCR's enabled us to record a show at its regularly scheduled time and then watch it later. [00:19:01] Speaker 13: And it sounds so simple today, but that was a big deal at that time. The phenomena that resulted was this notion of time shifting. Of course, the other thing that happened, people found the fast forward button, and then they could skip through commercials or parts of a program they weren't interested in. [00:19:17] Speaker 1: Consumer VCRs were introduced in the mid-1970s, but a few households actually had one until the 1980s. In 1990, over 200 million VCRs were sold worldwide. [00:19:31] Speaker 9: When you were buying one in the early days, you had a big decision, which was, did you want beta, which was Sony's tape format, or VHS, which was from JVC? And the two formats were completely incompatible. [00:19:47] Speaker 1: The differences between the two technologies led to a format war, and only one would be left standing. Both machines essentially did the same things-- record and playback video after a cassette was inserted. In record mode, a VCR uses a rotating recording head that makes contact with the tape inside a cassette. As the tape moves past the spinning head, it records an analog signal of each frame as a diagonal stripe on the tape. Another head records sound and tracking information on the edge of the tape. In playback mode, the rotating head lines itself up with the diagonal stripes by using the tape's tracking codes. As the head rotates over the stripe, it reads the information for the image and sends it to the TV. A separate head reads the sound. The similarity between Betamax and VHS ends there. [00:20:44] Speaker 3: Betamax had slightly better quality because it used a larger head to read the tape. And that larger head meant that they could put a little more detail on the tape and get a little better clarity. And that limited the tape's maximum length to 60 minutes when the Betamax decks first came out. VHS was able to fit up to two hours on a tape. And because most movies fit in a two-hour tape, that gave JVC a big advantage in the home rental market. [00:21:16] Speaker 1: Video rental stores popped up on every street corner. And it soon became common to rent a movie on tape and watch it from your couch. Unlike Sony, JVC saw an advantage to licensing their technology to many other electronics manufacturers. The competition lowered VHS prices, attracting more and more buyers. And there were two other reasons that VHS emerged victorious. [00:21:44] Speaker 3: VHS tapes were cheaper, and they were more widely accepted in the marketplace. And then there was a force that isn't talked about so much. And that's the fact that most video stores had the front part of the store where you rented Hollywood movies, and then a back room where you could rent other material of a pornographic nature. This was the first time that people could actually watch these works of art in their own homes. And that caused an explosion in that particular industry. Since that industry pretty much standardized on VHS, it drove a lot of what was happening in the front part of the video store as well. [00:22:21] Speaker 1: It was the final nail in the coffin for the Betamax home VCR market. '80s technology helped us kick back at home. But products like the Walkman and cell phone showed us that we could get tech to go. All the multifunctional items we hold so dear today have their roots in simpler products that became ubiquitous in the '80s, many of which were created by Japanese electronics firms. [00:22:53] Speaker 13: In the '80s, you saw the advancement of a whole bunch of devices from Sony, from the Walkman to the CD player, the VCR, the Handycam camcorder. And these devices were paving new ground in terms of innovation, but also design. And then we saw other Japanese-based electronics companies follow Sony. In fact, there are one or two that have sort of referred to Sony as their R&D department. [00:23:20] Speaker 1: Nowhere was Sony's leadership more pronounced than in the realm of music reproduction technology. [00:23:26] Speaker 3: You started with home stereo systems. Those were shrunk down to a boom box, which you would carry on your shoulder and blast everyone around you. And then came this, the Sony Walkman, which was just a total revolution. You could take your own songs, mix them onto a cassette, load them into a Walkman, stick it in your pocket. And the headphones made it sound incredibly good. It was made possible by magnet technology that allowed them to shrink the headphones down to very small, lightweight package. [00:23:57] Speaker 1: Standard headphones of the time weighed about 14 ounces and covered the entire ear. Sony was able to miniaturize headphones to about 1.5 ounces by replacing ferrite magnets with much stronger and smaller samarium cobalt magnets. The Walkman sends an electrical signal carrying the sound wave that the headset must reproduce. The signal creates a magnetic field in the coil that attracts or repels the samarium cobalt magnet. The coil's movement causes the headset's diaphragm to vibrate, creating the sound waves that you hear. [00:24:34] Speaker 13: It was the first time people could listen to music, any music they wanted to, anywhere, anytime, any place, frankly, without disturbing anybody else. It seems very simple today, but at the time, it was pretty revolutionary. And it really did create a whole movement in terms of lifestyles and behaviors and the way people entertain themselves. [00:24:58] Speaker 1: But you still had to carry around those clunky tapes that degraded over time. Even the Walkman couldn't save the ill-fated cassette because in 1982, Sony, with some help from Philips Electronics, upped the ante yet again with the compact disc. [00:25:16] Speaker 3: For decades, we had wax and then vinyl discs. And then we saw the 8-track tape, which was eventually obliterated by the cassette tape. And as we come into the beginning of the 1980s, we're left with two common formats, the cassette tape and the vinyl LP. These were both replaced in the early 1980s by this, the compact disc. The CD is a total revolution, and it's a revolution for two reasons. First of all, the information stored on the CD is stored digitally, so that each time you play the CD, you're gonna hear exactly the same sound. And the second reason it's revolutionary is because so much information is stored on the CD compared to a vinyl record. [00:25:59] Speaker 13: It was Sony who specified that the CD be able to hold at least 74 minutes of music because one of our top executives at the time, Noria Oga, was also a conductor and also very interested in classical music and wanted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to be able to fit on a CD. [00:26:18] Speaker 1: A CD starts as a disc 1.2 millimeters thick, made of clear polycarbonate plastic. During manufacturing, billions of pits or scratches are pressed into the plastic in a spiral string. The disc is then coated on one side with so-called super purity aluminum to create a mirrored surface. A film of lacquer protects the aluminum and is painted with a label for the CD. A CD is read by focusing a semiconductor laser through the transparent bottom of the polycarbonate layer. [00:26:54] Speaker 3: If you were able to grab a hold of that little string somehow and peel it off, you'd find that it's a string half a micron thick, but three miles long. The laser beam hits the CD, and it's going to find one of two things when it hits that surface. It's either going to find actual mirror, and it's going to reflect back clearly, or it's going to find one of those tiny scratches. And it's going to get diffused when it reflects off. Now, the CD reader is able to tell the difference between actual mirror and scratch. And from that, decide what bits of information have been written onto that CD surface. [00:27:38] Speaker 1: Of course, you needed a CD player. Sony's CDP-101 was also introduced in 1982. Now, the trick was to convince consumers to repurchase all their music on the new format. [00:27:50] Speaker 13: But as people heard it or visited with friends or somehow came in touch with CDs, and the quality of the music, and the amazing fact that it would always have this great quality, it got adopted very quickly. Also, we came out later with the Discman, which was a CD-based version of the Walkman, making CD a medium for portable music enjoyment. [00:28:15] Speaker 1: While many used technology to retreat into their own worlds, some embraced it for more social reasons. The first commercial portable cellular telephone, Motorola's Dynatac 8000X, showed us that we could stay in touch on the go. [00:28:33] Speaker 3: You had the normal telephone, then you had the car phone, and then you had the beginning of the portable cell phone. And we look at this now as totally comical because it's so gigantic. It weighs about two pounds. But this, at the time, was possibly the coolest object that a person could own. It cost about $4,000, maybe $1 or two per minute to use it. [00:28:56] Speaker 1: But it had no cord, and that's what mattered most. Like modern cell phones, the brick was basically a sophisticated radio system. When you dial a call, your phone sends a radio message to a cell phone tower nearby. The tower sets up the call with two frequencies, one frequency for your voice, and the other for the voice of the person you're talking to. This radio system can transmit on hundreds of different radio frequencies. So each tower can handle dozens of calls at once, without one call interfering with another. If a phone is moving, its signal transfers from one tower to the next, spaced about two miles apart. Cell phones eventually went from analog signals to digital. And like everything else, they got smaller, faster, and thankfully cheaper. Prompting that all-important '80s question, who are you going to call? Pocket tech was here to stay. And it proliferated into all forms of entertainment and communication. But was there a downside? [00:29:58] Speaker 7: The more technology we get, the more it becomes embedded in us, the more we're plugged into our iPods, the more we're on the cell phone. Maybe there's less and less reality in our lives and more and more mediation of reality through these electronic devices. [00:30:13] Speaker 1: The '80s got us digitized, downsized, and on the go. When we had so many toys, we needed a cool car to transport them all. And in 1981, a visionary vehicle showed us a portal to the future. The DeLorean DMC-12 is still one of the coolest high-tech looking cars on the road. And it hasn't been manufactured since 1983. [00:30:48] Speaker 14: This is an exceptional car. It's a very sleek, sexy looking automobile. It performs well. When you drive it, you get looks from people that you don't get from any other car. I don't know how many times I've had people with cell phones take pictures of this car. [00:31:09] Speaker 1: The DeLorean was unlike any other car on the market in the '80s. The oil crisis of the '70s prompted many automakers to start building smaller, fuel-efficient econoboxes that some believed left style at the curb. But the DeLorean was first class all the way. The brainchild of noted auto designer John DeLorean, the DMC-12 was developed for the US market. But for financial reasons, it was produced in Northern Ireland. [00:31:40] Speaker 15: The project was funded by a series of small investors, people like Johnny Carson, Sammy Davis Jr., some of John's friends. The big money came from the actual British government to the tune of about $150 million. By building the car in Belfast, Northern Ireland, they had hoped to give people jobs or unemployment was at the rate of about 30%, 40%. And with all the sectarian problems in Northern Ireland about that time, people had jobs, and they're less likely to be causing trouble in the streets. [00:32:08] Speaker 1: When the car hit showrooms in 1981, shoppers were amazed. [00:32:13] Speaker 15: Initial sales were fantastic. Cars were flying off the dealership block because everybody wanted to be the first on their block. And then it wasn't unusual to see them selling for as much as $10,000 over stickers. [00:32:23] Speaker 1: The car's space-age design and virtual celebrity status ensured that it lived up to its slogan. [00:32:29] Speaker 15: One of the tag lines in all the advertising for the DeLorean was, "Live the dream." And to a lot of people, that's what John DeLorean himself was doing. He was a self-made man, married a supermodel, now had his own car company. The whole idea was to live this dream. [00:32:45] Speaker 1: But the dream was short-lived. The company hit hard times in 1982. [00:32:51] Speaker 15: You can't have any conversation about the DeLorean without talking about some of the controversy. The car was underpowered. The car was overpriced. Some people didn't like the styling. [00:33:00] Speaker 1: Mirroring its maker, the DeLorean had a flashy exterior, but people questioned what was underneath. [00:33:07] Speaker 15: Cars weren't selling. Interest rates were very high for cars, things like that. And John DeLorean needed money. He was persuaded by one of his neighbors to get involved in a financial deal that he later found out involved the importation and trafficking of cocaine. As most people now know, this was a sting operation. John DeLorean was arrested in October of 1982. Finally went to trial in 1984, where he was acquitted on all charges. [00:33:34] Speaker 1: I never, ever believed I could be brought into a situation like this. [00:33:38] Speaker 15: Of course, when you're arrested, it's on page one. And when you're found not guilty later on, it's on page six. I still have people to this day say, is John DeLorean still in jail? Not realizing that he never did any time. 2,000 pound, a 2,000 bit, 2,50, 2,50, 2,50. [00:33:54] Speaker 1: His company went under in 1983. [00:33:57] Speaker 15: Sold at 6,250. [00:34:00] Speaker 1: But just because they no longer mass-produced DeLoreans doesn't mean you can't get one that's brand new-ish. The DeLorean Motor Company in Houston, Texas, can build you one of these heavy metal babies out of never been used components. [00:34:17] Speaker 15: A completely remanufactured car is one that we'll strip completely to a bare frame, and then we'll rebuild using all brand new parts. So essentially, you're getting a brand new 25-year-old car. [00:34:28] Speaker 1: These unused parts-- engines, transmissions, exterior panels, and all-- were sent here from the factory when production halted in 1983. They also refurbish used DeLoreans to their original luster. [00:34:43] Speaker 15: It's not unusual for a car to come to us in just completely run-down, worn-out condition, and for us to turn it into a car like this one here. We'll refresh the interiors. We'll rebuild drivetrains. We'll do body work. Whatever it takes to make the car look as good as it did back in 1981. And the price tag? A good rule of thumb is it takes $25,000 to have a good, running, reliable, daily driver, nice-looking DeLorean. It doesn't matter if you buy one for $15,000, and you put $10,000 in it, or you buy one for $25,000, that's already finished. A good pre-owned car is, therefore, going to run somewhere in the mid-20s. [00:35:18] Speaker 1: But if you want one made with the new parts, prepare to pay somewhere in the low $40,000. Even stripped down, the DeLorean doesn't look like most other cars. [00:35:28] Speaker 15: Here we have one of the DeLorean chassis in its bare form. In the front, very well protected from a front or from a side impact, we have the fuel cell, which, because it's so well protected, it really plays into the safety theme that John DeLorean was known for. The chassis is kind of unique in that it's a mild steel coated with epoxy, and that's to keep it from rustic. [00:35:47] Speaker 1: Under the hood is a rear-mounted 2.8-liter Peugeot Renault all-aluminum engine. Today, there's also an optional performance package upgrade, which includes a new exhaust system, patterns, dual catalytic converters, and a new muffler. And when you put pedal to the metal? The Bosch KJetronic mechanical fuel injection is what actually [00:36:12] Speaker 15: meters the flow of fuel from the fuel tank into the combustion chamber through the fuel injectors. A lot of the cars from the late '70s, early '80s all had carburetors. This is one of the earliest cars to use a form of fuel injection. [00:36:26] Speaker 1: On top of the chassis sits the fiberglass underbody, onto which the stainless steel panels are attached. [00:36:33] Speaker 15: Unlike most cars where you have body panels welded to the car, on a DeLorean, all the panels bolt on. So it's real simple to do any kind of panel replacements. You can bolt the panels on, and you can bolt the panels off, and you're ready to go. [00:36:45] Speaker 1: It's safe to say you won't see too many other stainless steel cars on the road. Because this metal is about five times more expensive than the more common mild steel used for most cars. Once you're done admiring the unusual exterior, grab a door handle and flip her open. [00:37:04] Speaker 14: One of the unique things about the DeLorean is obviously the gull-wing doors, which open upward. They need 14 inches of clearance, which is less than a regular automobile. They're operated by a torsion bar, which sits inside here. It's made out of stainless steel. It's dipped in 350 degrees below zero liquid nitrogen, and counter-turned 10 times each way. And then it is taken out, which makes it actually become a spring. Then it is put back in the car. This device here is a rod that allows the door from opening either too fast, and gives it support when you close it. [00:37:38] Speaker 1: The DeLorean was truly unique for its time. From concept and design, to the controversial circumstances surrounding its creator, John DeLorean died after suffering a stroke in March 2005, reportedly while sketching designs for a new car. But his legacy lives on. This '80s fun mobile is still a timeless hot seller. In the '80s, looking rad was all the rage. But we were also stoked about testing our brains with some way cool puzzles and games. '80s technologies affected almost every part of the way we lived, worked, and played. But products didn't have to be super high tech to grab consumers' attention. Rubik's Cube, the famous six-sided mechanical puzzle, was released in May 1980. By 1982, more than 100 million had been sold worldwide. The object is to rotate the various segment rows until all sides of the cube are a solid color. And no cheating by peeling off the stickers. Invented by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture, the cube has about 43 quintillion different configurations. But it's advertised as having only billions, because the concept of quintillion is too difficult to comprehend. [00:39:09] Speaker 3: What's so interesting about this puzzle is that it's so low tech. And if we can just take a moment to get inside of this, we can see exactly how it was put together. [00:39:19] Speaker 1: The cube uses a central armature with six arms and six affixed squares. 20 carefully shaped cubes interlock with one another in the armature to form the six faces of the cube. This allows the sections to rotate independently. Despite the vast number of possible positions, some algorithms have revealed 22 moves as the fewest necessary to solve a jumbled cube. And if you're a Rubik's Cube competition champion, you can do it in about 15 seconds. Or even blindfolded. To date, retailers have sold 300 million Rubik's Cubes and imitations, reportedly making it the world's top-selling toy. [00:40:12] Speaker 2: My grandmother had a Rubik's Cube in her house, and I didn't ask her to get it for me. Everyone became fascinated by putting these colored patterns back together. Why, I don't know, but there is an attraction that people have with consistently testing themselves. [00:40:30] Speaker 1: Another '80s toy that tested our skills was the Simon. [00:40:38] Speaker 9: The Simon was like a lot of the games in the 1980s in that it was really primitive, but it was also really addictive. It was an electronic memory game, and it would give you a series of flashing lights and tones, and you needed to be able to repeat the pattern. [00:40:54] Speaker 1: Invented by electronic games guru Ralph Baer, it was based on the children's game Simon Says. [00:41:00] Speaker 16: Simon's a computer, Simon has a brain. You either do what Simon says or else go down the drain. [00:41:08] Speaker 2: Not only did you have to test your memory, you had to test your speed and agility. Because the farther along in Simon that you went and the higher levels you got, the faster it went. [00:41:20] Speaker 3: What was revolutionary about it was that it was one of the very first electronic games that had a microprocessor built into it, and that normal people could afford. So that microprocessor had to remember the sequence that had already been displayed and then generate a new random number that would tell it what to display for the next element of the sequence. [00:41:42] Speaker 1: You can still buy a Simon today. Just like so many other devices that originated in the '80s, it's just new and improved and smaller. [00:41:52] Speaker 2: Everything we have in our home, the advances that we've had in our home electronics all began with devices that became standard in the homes of the 1980s. People don't really realize that the '80s really were as long ago as they were, simply because the devices that we had then, we're still using now. We're just making them better. [00:42:14] Speaker 9: In December of 2005, PC World published an article called "The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years." And it's one of the most popular things we ever did, because people are so passionate and nostalgic about the gadgets in their life. And a lot of the ones that they like best are the ones that were really popular in the 1980s, such as the Simon, which was '38 on our list, one of the first popular electronic games, as well as Motorola's original Dynatac cell phone, which was number 35 on the list. And the number one item on the entire list was Sony's original Walkman, just because it's the device that started the personal music revolution. [00:42:54] Speaker 1: Devices popularized in the '80s spawned a lot of revolutions. And as engineering innovation continues its symbiosis with ever-increasing computing capacity, who knows what those devices will morph into next? But it's sure to be totally awesome. [00:43:31] Speaker ?: The end of the year is the end of the year.