1980, Revolution in Home Entertainment
The year that changed how Americans spend their evenings
The one constant is change. That sentiment has been around for nearly as long as recorded history. As true as that statement is, it’s also true that things don’t change at a constant rate. Society often changes rapidly followed by times of relative stability. Prior to the years surrounding 1980 the standard formula for home entertainment had been pretty constant since the early 1950s. The family would have a television in the living room where they would gather around and watch programming from the few big national networks. That all changed between 1977 and 1983 as the number of options available to Americans grew exponentially. The revolution in home entertainment that took place in these years forever changed how Americans spent their evenings.
Cable TV
I turned eleven in 1980. That makes me just old enough to remember the world before this time, but still young enough to be filled with wonder at those new innovations. When I was little there were basically 3 channels. ABC, NBC and CBS were the only options, well that and PBS which no one actually watched except for Sesame Street. That was about to change. The technology for cable TV had been around for decades but was limited to a few remote areas where broadcast television was impractical. The idea of cable TV as something you would get in addition to broadcast TV began in the early 1970s, but the roll out was slow. It required running thousands of miles of cable, while also needing enough paying subscribers for cable specific networks to be viable. However, by 1980 there were 16 million homes or roughly 50 million people with cable TV. I’m originally from Wichita, Ks, where cable TV first became available in 1979. When a new technology gets to Kansas, it’s pretty much everywhere.
As important as the infrastructure needed to bring cable television to homes, they needed the channels to make the extra expense of cable worthwhile. Many of the channels we associate with cable TV were founded in this era. Three of the most groundbreaking that demonstrated what was possible were ESPN (1979), CNN (1980) and MTV (1981). I distinctly remember people being blown away by the idea of a channel that specializes in a single type of programming. I mean compared to everything else that had come before, the idea seemed ridiculous. People mocked the idea that viewers would watch sports at 8am. The possibility of having hundreds of channels seemed mind boggling.
At least with sports they could replay games, have games that were tape delayed or air shows about sports at different times of the day. So, after getting over the initial thought of it, it didn’t seem that farfetched. MTV was similar. The idea that people would watch music, which was fundamentally an audio activity, seemed kind of weird. Still, it wasn’t all that different from radio that played music all day. The channel that really had people scratching their heads was CNN. The news was a program. You watched thirty minutes of local news, followed by 30 minutes of national news. Who would want to watch more news than that? However, CNN probably transformed the country more than any other channel. It began the era of news as entertainment. The need to have headline grabbing news every hour to keep people tuned in.
24-Hour News
The advent of CNN highlights the reason for focusing on this era rather than a more recent period. We need the passage of time to put events in perspective. At the time CNN didn’t seem any more important than ESPN, MTV or any of the other new channels that were popping up. People sometimes have a sense that they are living through a time of important change. Yet, it’s impossible to understand the significance of those changes until enough time has passed to see their long-term impact.
Ten or even twenty years later the importance of the concept of 24-hour news wasn’t fully understood. It’s only been the last ten or fifteen years with the explosion of 24-hour news services, both on cable and streaming, that the potential negative consequences of this phenomenon became apparent. We now have all flavors of ideological media masquerading as news. Even well meaning and intelligent people can get sucked into a news narrative that’s designed to keep you watching rather than reporting reliable facts. This too often results in people developing a warped view of reality. All this from a news channel that many at the time predicted would fail because the idea was so ludicrous.
Finally, no discussion of television from this period would be complete without mentioning the VCR. By 1980 VCRs had come down enough in price to be a practical addition to the home entertainment system. The idea of being able to watch TV shows when you wanted to watch them, instead of when they aired, seemed almost magical. That’s not to mention the sheer glee of fast forwarding through commercials. It also opened up a new world of watching unedited movies on demand. Our family was one of the early adopters of the VCR. My Mom wanted to go back to work after raising my sister and I to school-age, but insisted on being able to watch her afternoon soap operas. However, in 1980 the heyday of VCRs was still a few years off, in part due to legal battles over the legality of recording television. The real age of the VCR didn’t fully begin until about 1985, after the courts settled the legal issues and the video cassette rental market came into existence.
Home Computing
It’s hard to deny the lasting impact cable television had on American society. Still, it was just TV. In many ways similar to the television people had known and loved for decades, just better. Home computers however, promised to revolutionize the way people lived in altogether new ways. When I was a child in the mid 1970s most people had never even thought of having a computer in their home. Computers were these huge machines that IBM built to handle payroll and perform engineering equations for large corporations.
We did have a template for household computers from science fiction programming like Star Trek and the Jetsons. I think this, at least in part, explains the computer craze from the late 70s and early 80s. There was just a sense that this was going to be important. If you didn’t know how to use a computer, you risked being left behind.
1977 was the year that home computing really started with the Apple II and Radio Shack’s Tandy TRS-80. These both had reasonable success with Tandy selling over a hundred thousand units per year at an inflation adjusted cost of approximately $2,700 and the Apple selling fewer, but at an adjusted cost of nearly $6,000. In 1980 home computer sales surged with the introduction of the Commodore VIC-20. The Commodore sold for about half of the earlier Tandy, and they marketed it through big box stores like K-Mart. Both the Commodore VIC-20 and its 1982 successor the Commodore 64 sold in the millions.
The problem was, what exactly were you supposed to do with one of these computers? Not surprisingly these systems were much less powerful than modern home PCs. Most computers today have one to two million times more RAM. Also, these early computers typically didn’t have a hard drive or a point and click operating system. To save your work you needed to save it to external media like a floppy disk or even a cassette tape.
My Dad bought us a Commodore 64 in 1982, but there really wasn’t much you could do with it. I used it to type a couple papers for school and my Dad bought an Evelyn Wood speed reading computer course. Much to my Dad’s disappointment, it was an utter flop, and I never became a speed reader. It seems many others came to this same conclusion. Computer sales continued to slowly climb, but mainly for business use. After that initial wave, home computers sales slumped and never recovered until the internet became widely available. It just didn’t make a lot of practical sense. Of course, now 40 years later, that initial promise of what home computing could bring has largely come to fruition.
Video Gaming
There is one area those original home PCs did show some promise, gaming. In fact, home video gaming in general traces its roots back to the years around 1980. Before this era, when you referred to home gaming, you were probably talking about board games like Monopoly. The first inkling that this was about to change was with Atari’s release of their Pong home gaming console in 1975. Although it was a success, it only played one game. That changed two years later with the release of the Atari 2600 that used cartridges to play different games.
Initially the Atari 2600 was only a modest success. In today’s money it cost about $900 and only had 8 games available. However, by 1980 the number of available games drastically increased as third-party companies started to make cartridges for the system. That coupled with lower prices caused sales to skyrocket. In 1980 sales matched the combined total from the previous three years at one million. 1981 and 1982 saw sales quadruple to four million per year. Other manufacturers wanted in on this new market and pushed out their own gaming consoles. This led to oversaturation of the market and caused home video game sales and profits to crash in 1983. But unlike the home computer market which didn’t recover until the late 1990s, the rise of Nintendo ensured the home video game era was firmly secured in American culture.
Conclusion
Just to show the impact of this era on the average middle-class American, let’s look at a typical household in 1975 compared to a decade later. In ’75 most Americans spent their evening watching one of the three national networks. Collectively they had a near monopoly on television viewing. The only other options were to sit around and listen to the radio, read a book or to play some sort of card or board game. Most however defaulted to the easiest option which was television. By 1985 television was still the default option for most, but instead of the big 3 networks, most people had 30 or 40 cable channels to choose from. But if none of those options sounded good, they could run to the local video rental store and pick out a movie to watch for a couple bucks. There was also a pretty good chance that the kids were going to be in their rooms playing Pac-Man or Tetris.
Society is still debating whether these changes were entirely for the good. Before this era, when you went to work in the morning pretty much everyone had watched one of the networks the night before. Shows like Columbo or All in the Family were a shared national experience. Having fewer electronic options also made entertainment that didn’t involve staring at a screen more appealing by contrast. Regardless of the social merits of these new forms of home entertainment, the era around 1980 forever changed how Americans chose to spend their leisure time.
______________________________
Additional Reading
Personal Computer History: 1975–1984
A History of Gaming Platforms: Atari 2600
Comments
Post a Comment