In the early years of home video gaming, Pong reigned supreme. Released in its arcade cabinet incarnation in 1972, Pong became a sensation and inspired a revolution in computer gaming, headed by Sunnyvale, California’s Atari. As Atari’s programmers created more games for the lucrative arcade market, the race was on to create versions that could be played at home on a television set…
The funny thing is, I don’t remember exactly where I was when the Challenger disaster happened. I don’t think we watched the launch in school or even heard about it there, because the first time I clearly remember seeing the footage was at my friend’s house after school…
Whitley’s Strieber’s Communion is another formative object for me. Well, maybe “formative” is a bad choice of words. After all, I was 12 when the shelves of every bookstore I frequented groaned with the weight of the uncanny Grey staring out at me from the book’s cover. But Communion distilled and reflected a deep-seated childhood fear of UFOs and aliens that I’d had since a very early age…
Two of the most famed alien abduction narratives of the Cold War period were explored through first-person accounts in popular books: John C. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer (1965), about the abduction experience of Betty and Barney Hill, and Raymond E. Fowler’s The Andreasson Affair (1979), about the experiences of Betty Andreasson…
As part of her anti-drug Just Say No campaign, First Lady Nancy Reagan made a guest appearance on the NBC sitcom Diff’rent Strokes (1978-1986) on March 19, 1983. In the episode, titled “The Reporter,” Arnold Drummond (Gary Coleman), a reporter for his school newspaper, breaks a story on drug pushers at his school and submits it to a major city newspaper…
In 1979, Israeli film industry giants (and cousins) Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus purchased tiny independent American film production house Cannon Group, Inc. Cannon had spent the ’70s producing B-movies with occasional surprise hits (like the 1970 “hardhat revenge” tale Joe starring Peter Boyle). Golan and Globus saw in Cannon a way to gain a foothold in an American market that they’d long eyed entering…
In 1972, the World Hockey Association (WHA) was established to compete with the National Hockey League (NHL). The NHL, much like Major League Baseball in the early ’70s, was dealing with its labor market’s rebellion against the unjust reserve clause. The WHA offered players better salaries and an opportunity to sign contracts as free agents…
Spaceships of the Mind was a book tie-in to a BBC series first broadcast in the summer of 1978 and hosted by pop science writer and television host Nigel Calder (1931 – 2014), who was part of the founding masthead of the influential pop science journal New Scientist (founded in 1956). The series consisted of three episodes, each focusing on a different aspect of space colonization, exploration, and survival as the field stood at the time…
Murmurs of Earth was published the year after the 1977 launch of the twin space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. While the Voyager program’s primary mission was to survey, photograph, and analyze the planets of the outer solar system, the book focuses on our attempts to communicate with whatever intelligent entities might encounter the probes as they flew headlong into the interstellar night…
Texas Instruments (TI), which had pioneered both pocket calculators and speech synthesizer technology in the 1970s, released its TI-99/4A home computer in 1981. After the release of its first personal computer, 1979’s TI-99/4—a fairly substantial commercial disaster—TI went back to the drawing board to produce a home computer that was cheaper, easier to use…
We Are the Mutants 