came operational. Ten beams produced up to 100
trillion watts of infrared power. The same year, the
Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO)
was established to oversee the program and was led
by ex-NASA director James Alan Abrahamson. While
SDI was never fully developed, the program’s re-
search would provide significant advances in anti-
ballistic technology, and its scientists would explore
weapons that included hypervelocity rail guns, space-
based relay mirrors, neutral particle beams, and
chemical and X-ray lasers.
In 1988, Soviet and American scientists worked
together to conduct measurements of nuclear deto-
nations at testing sites in both countries in the Joint
Verification Experiment (JVE). A result of the Rea-
gan mantra, “trust, but verify,” the scientists’ efforts
were intended to develop and improve verification
technologies that would be used to monitor compli-
ance with treaties such as the Threshold Test Ban
Treaty (1974) and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions
Treaty (1976).
Personal Technology The 1980’s saw the advent of
many technological devices that would affect con-
sumers. While the personal computer was one such
advance, others included cell phones, compact discs
(CDs), and car alarms. Cell phones began to be
manufactured by large companies in the 1980’s.
Motorola introduced its DynaTAC phone to the
public in 1983, a year after the Federal Communica-
tions Commission (FCC) authorized commercial
cellular service. The phone weighed sixteen ounces
and cost $3,500.
In 1984, American Telephone and Telegraph
(AT&T) was split into seven “Baby Bells” as a result of
an antitrust suit brought by the Department of Jus-
tice. Each of the seven telephone companies created
by the split had its own cellular business, creating dif-
ficulties in expansion as well as diminishing the mar-
keting power available to each company to promote
cellular phones. The FCC began awarding licenses
for the mobile telephone by lottery, rather than by
comparative hearings. Many lottery winners chose
to sell their licenses to larger companies, which paid
well for the acquisition. In 1987, the FCC declared
that cellular licensees could use additional cellular
services, allowing companies to begin to employ al-
ternative cellular technologies. By the end of the de-
cade, there were over a million cell phone subscrib-
ers in the United States.
Another major change in the technology avail-
able to private consumers came in the form of CDs,
which were introduced commercially in 1982 when
the first music album was released on CD, rock band
Abba’sThe Visitors. CDs, co-invented by Philips Elec-
tronics and the Sony Corporation, would create a
revolution in digital audio technology. The discs
were enthusiastically received, initially by classical
music enthusiasts and audiophiles, and later—as the
price of CD players dropped—by music fans in gen-
eral. CDs were originally marketed specifically to
store sound, but their potential for storing other
types of digitally encoded data soon became appar-
ent. In 1985, Sony and Philips developed the first
compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM). It stored
the entirety ofGrolier’s Electronic Encyclopedia—nine
million words—in only 12 percent of the space avail-
able on the disc.
One technology that received a legal boost in the
late 1980’s was the car alarm: The New York State leg-
islature passed a law requiring insurance companies
to offer a 10 percent discount to vehicle owners
whose car was protected with such an alarm. When
other states followed suit, the number of vehicles
equipped with this technology rose sharply.
In 1989, Silicon Graphics unveiled the technol-
ogy of virtual reality—computer-generated, three-
dimensional environments containing elements with
which users could interact—at a trade show in Bos-
ton. First intended for tasks such as flight simulation,
the technology was quickly seized upon by game de-
signers as well.
Impact While many advances in science and tech-
nology occurred in the course of the 1980’s, the
most significant was arguably the steady stream of
improvements in information technology. The In-
ternet would become a world-spanning entity allow-
ing instantaneous transmission of information and
spurring globalization. At the same time, advances
in DNA and gene identification would affect fields
ranging from agriculture to medicine. Advances in
personal technology would create increasing accep-
tance and use of electronic devices by consumers,
paving the way for the various handheld computing
devices of the next two decades.
Further Reading
Allan, Roy A.A Histor y of the Personal Computer: The
People and the Technology.London, Ont.: Allan,- Sometimes quirky but usually informative
858 Science and technology The Eighties in America