The development of the Telstar satellites marked the dawn of the era of worldwide satellite communications. Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, and Telstar 2, which came ten months later, were engineered by a team at Bell Labs headed by John R. Pierce…
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was instituted as a newsletter to circulate among the nuclear science community in the aftermath of World War II and the Manhattan Project as a service and a warning to the world about the weapons they had created and unleashed…
As worries about the possibility of nuclear war spiked in the early 1980s, anxiety and anger began to surface in many of the arts, including British punk music. Punk had been politicized since the movement’s inception and many of those involved were, initially at least, informed by the experience of the British art schools…
For people of a certain age, the synthesized tones of the ident above and the animation of the “P-head” logo of the Public Broadcasting Service is indelibly marked in our memories of childhood. We can recall the educational programming that PBS brought into our homes: stalwart institutions like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood…
By Brother Bill and Mikey Walters
Compute!’s Guide to Adventure Games is one of a series of small, spiral-bound books intended for home computer users and programmers, produced by Compute! magazine, at the time a major reviewer of hardware and software…
In the early days of 1981, a new toy made its way to the West over the Iron Curtain. A few years earlier, a Hungarian architecture professor named Ernő Rubik had developed a “Magic Cube” while tinkering with ways to express rotation in 3D space in a single object…
1982 was the year The Future began to supplant The Past. It began with Time magazine’s claim that “Video Games Are Blitzing the World,” and ended with the home computer being made the publication’s “Machine of the Year” (allegedly bringing Steve Jobs, who coveted the title, to tears)…
In the early 1970s, the Stanford Research Institute received funding and support from a number of sources (including the Central Intelligence Agency, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences, and est leader Werner Erhard) to look into psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance, ESP, and precognition…
Man, Myth & Magic, dubbed “the most unusual magazine ever published,” was the first mass market encyclopedia of the occult, published in the U.K. and Australia in 112 issues beginning in 1970…
By Brother Bill
Anguish (1986) is an obscure and overlooked horror film from Spanish director Bigas Luna, a name perhaps better known for weird and erotic art-house dramas. Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist and Poltergeist II) stars as the overbearing mother of adult son John (Michael Lerner, Barton Fink) who still lives at home and under her thumb. Mother has a psychic connection with her slavish son and can communicate with him over long distances, a power she will use to direct him as her instrument of revenge…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
It ought to be easy to be glib about After the Bomb. A “young adult” book from the mid-’80s about nuclear war is surely bursting with pastel-clad teens exchanging Valley Girl dialogue and adjusting their melting shoulder pads in the white heat of international brinkmanship…
This two-minute television spot from 1985 promoted the Time-Life book series The Vietnam Experience, which was released serially from 1981 to 1988, perfectly bookending the Reagan years. Each of the 25 volumes covered subtopics about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, from military tactics to culture clashes…
In the rapidly changing, highly prosperous world in which they found themselves after the Second World War, American parents began to seek more modern sources of information regarding the best way to rear their offspring…
By K.E. Roberts
Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller and Roman Polanski’s meticulously faithful film adaptation of 1968, seeded the American consciousness with infernal terror at precisely the moment the country was supposed to be suffering its most desperate crisis of faith…
The 1983 film WarGames, directed by John Badham and written by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, was a box office smash and eventually became a generational touchstone, offering mainstream audiences their first glimpse at the computer technology that would ineluctably become part of their lives in the next decade and beyond…
