No Internet. No Microsoft Windows. No iPods. This Is What Tech Was Like In 1984

By Julie Bort From Business Insider

Steve Jobs and Mac YouTube

1984. It’s a year synonymous with George Orwell’s novel about a dystopian society ruled by omnipresent government surveillance.

The real 1984 was a far cry from that. While today, we do have scary government surveillance, that’s largely thanks to email, social media, smartphones, and cloud computing. Those things didn’t exist in 1984.

In fact, 1984 was 10 years before the World Wide Web (commonly called the internet) was born. It was the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected as president; the telephone monopoly Bell System was officially dismantled and AT&T launched; and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was born.

Apple’s famous 1984 Macintosh commercial aired during the Super Bowl …

Two days later, Steve Jobs officially launched the Macintosh PC. Mashable

In 1984, Dell Computer launched. This is what Michael Dell looked like. Dell

Michael Dell 1984

In 1984, most people used PCs like this one from IBM. It cost $3,000. www.old

IBM PC AT 1984 PCs didn’t run Windows. Windows arrived in 1985. They used DOS. You typed commands like ‘DIR’ to find files. Wikipedia

By the way, Bill Gates was NOT the world’s richest man in 1984. But he did appear on the cover of Time. He’s touching something called a floppy disk. ClassicPics

A floppy disk was the thumb drive of its day. It installed software, and it let you back up and transfer files.Bartosh

Almost no one had a mobile phone. They were huge and cost $4,000 (like $9,000 today).AP

Instead, some people used pagers. You sent a message and then had to find the nearest phone to call someone back. Motorola

There were no texts or tweets or voicemails. There was the telephone answering machine. Wikipedia

Short of that, people wrote notes. Flickr/Jason Eppink

Prodigy, the first consumer online service (the thing before the internet), was launched in 1984.

You accessed an online service with a modem, which used your telephone line and made a squealing sound.

People bought music, recorded it, and listened to it on cassette tapes Wikimedia Commons

Which gave rise to the Sony Walkman, the precursor to the iPod. One tape equaled about one album’s worth of music. Flickr via lightbox

Video gaming was often done in arcades. Jeremy Bender/Business Insider

But you might have had an Atari at home … Wikipedia/Evan Amos, Locke Cole

… or maybe a Commodore 64. Wikimedia / Evan Amos

You might use your Commodore 64 to play Activision’s “Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.”

Activision

1984 was also the year that Alexey Pajitnov created the legendary puzzle game, Tetris. Wikipedia

Today we can do everything from a watch we wear on our wrists.

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