Leamer, Laurence.Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarz-
enegger.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
Thomas R. Feller
See also Action films; Film in the United States;
Science-fiction films;Terminator, The.
Science and technology
Definition The physical, biological, earth, and
computer sciences and the practical
technological innovations developed from
scientific advances
In the 1980’s, advances in science and technology included
the creation and spread of the Internet, biotechnology, and
the concept of DNA fingerprinting.
During the 1980’s, the implications of advances in
science and technology, along with a series of highly
visible public disasters, caused the public to question
science and technology and led to the growth of the
environmental movement, as well as numerous pub-
lic policy changes designed to protect humans from
toxic and radioactive waste. At the same time, ad-
vances in information technology changed everyday
existence in multiple fields of employment, includ-
ing education and business.
Computers and Information Technology Through-
out the decade, computing and information tech-
nologies rapidly and radically transformed, starting
in 1980, when Seagate Technology produced the
first hard disk drive for computers. The disk could
hold five megabytes of data. In 1981, International
Business Machines (IBM) released its first personal
computer, which ran on a 4.77 megahertz Intel 8088
microprocessor and MS-DOS system software. The
company responsible for designing MS-DOS, Micro-
soft, was only six years old. Simultaneously, Adam
Osborne released the first “portable” computer, the
Osborne I. It weighed twenty-four pounds and cost
$1,795. That same year, Apollo Computer released
the first workstation, the DN100.
In 1982, the popularity of personal computers
rose dramatically with the introduction of the Com-
modore 64, which sold for $695 and came with 64
kilobytes of random-access memory (RAM). The
Commodore 64 would become the best-selling sin-
gle computer model of all time.Timemagazine
named the computer its “Man of the Year,” saying
“Several human candidates might have represented
1982, but none symbolized the past year more richly,
or will be viewed by history as more significant, than
a machine: the computer.”
At the beginning of the 1980’s, the network that
would eventually become the Internet was three
years old. In 1983, that network split into ARPANET
and MILNET, creating a civilian branch as well as a
military one. The innovation had been enabled by
the introduction of the networking standard Trans-
mission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/
IP) in 1980. In 1985, ARPANET was renamed the In-
ternet, and financial responsibility for the network
was assumed by the National Science Foundation.
The Internet would become a dominant force in
both American and global culture, and science-
fiction writer William Gibson coined the term “cyber-
space” as he explored the possible futures created by
advances in information technology. At the same
time, in 1983, Microsoft Windows was released, as
was Microsoft Word. Some 450,000 floppy disks with
demonstration copies of Word were distributed as
inserts inPC Magazine.
The Parallel Computing Initiative, funded by Liv-
ermore Laboratory, redefined high-performance
computing, starting in 1989. Using massive, coordi-
nated clusters of microcomputers, the project was
able to outperform custom-designed supercom-
puters. As technology to link computers coopera-
tively advanced, computer clusters would become
preferred over individual supercomputers for most
processor-intensive high-performance computing
tasks. It followed in the footsteps of research con-
ducted by Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machine Corpo-
ration, whose machine used sixteen thousand pro-
cessors and completed billions of operations per
second.
As the popularity of personal computers in-
creased in the 1980’s, issues regarding the social and
ethical implications of information collection and
management came to light. Such issues included
privacy rights of consumers and citizens, whose per-
sonal information was contained in an ever-increas-
ing number of databases as the decade progressed.
The spread of computers also raised issues dealing
with intellectual property rights, software piracy,
and other forms of computer crime such as “hack-
ing” into private databases and spreading computer
viruses. The first such virus, written by Rich Skrenta,The Eighties in America Science and technology 855