1980s Archives - The Silicon Underground

GE Widescreen 1000: Big time TV for big budgets

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:00:54 +0000

The GE Widescreen 1000 was a big time TV for big time budgets in an era of excess, with the tagline “This is GE Performance Television.” Introduced in June 1978, it cost about 3/4 as much as a family sedan

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Sony Betamax VCR: Born May 10, 1975

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:00:26 +0000

The consumer VCR turns 51 this week. On May 10, 1975, Sony introduced the Betamax. Although Betamax lost the famous format war, it kicked the door open, being the first VCR format that mere mortals could aspire to own and

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How the Vectrex game console sunk a 124-year-old company

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:00:08 +0000

On May 4, 1984, Milton Bradley, a leading producer of board games for 124 years, agreed to sell itself to Hasbro. Changes in the way people played games in the 80s, especially kids, put pressure on the company. In this

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Toshiba’s Soviet nuclear submarine scandal

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:00:56 +0000

On March 19, 1987, the Pentagon announced that it had learned the Soviet Union acquired machine tooling for making submarine propeller blades from Toshiba Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, better known as a major electronics manufacturer. Between the machine

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Blue Monday by New Order released, 1983

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:00:57 +0000

On March 7, 1983, one of the greatest New Wave songs of all time was released. And it shipped in an unusual record sleeve shaped like a floppy disk, complete with cutouts so the record could show through like the

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When the VCR became popular and legal

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:00:20 +0000

When did VCRs get popular? It’s hard to give an exact date. I was alive in the 1980s, and it was a gradual thing. But I will argue that 1984 is as good of a starting point as any, because

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Max Headroom incident of Nov 22, 1987

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:00:10 +0000

It was November 22, 1987, that the most notorious unsolved pirate television broadcast happened in Chicago. It was the Max Headroom incident. The incident It started during the regular newscast on WGN TV, an unaffiliated television station owned at the

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When Nintendo sued Blockbuster

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:00:27 +0000

Here’s a late ’80s memory you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember going to the video rental store to rent a video game and getting the cartridge but not getting the instruction booklet? The reason

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Rax restaurant chain from the 1980s

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:00:49 +0000

Rax was a fast growing fast food restaurant chain in the 1980s. It was based out of Columbus, Ohio, and it was a direct competitor to Arby’s. The chain still exists today. But the total number of stores in Ohio,

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Rough Riders toys 1980s

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 12:03:51 +0000

Rough Riders toy trucks were popular line of motorized toys in the 1980s, introduced in 1981. They competed directly with Stompers, which were made by Schaper. Rough Riders were made by LJN. The first-generation Rough Riders were fairly blatant ripoffs

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