Looking back: 1984

In 1984 I started my first full-time job, with the ink still wet on my BSc (Hons) degree certificate. That was the year of the Sarajevo and Los Angeles Olympics. Pat Benatar topped the Australian music charts, Stevie Wonder called, Lionel Richie said hello, and people struggled to make sense of this German song:

Several classic movies were released, including Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Australia introduced a dollar coin and Apple introduced the Macintosh (which ran a window-based operating system plus word processing in 128K of memory):

photo by All About Apple museum

Niklaus Wirth won the Turing Award for his work on programming languages like Algol and Pascal. In the field of books, Neuromancer and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were published.

On a more sombre note, thousands of people in Bhopal, India were killed by a toxic gas release (I still remember the shock of reading about this), the Soviets (remember them?) were still fighting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and nobody knew that the Cold War would be over in a few more years. Still, I had my hands full with customers and coding, and wasn’t worrying too much about all that. It seemed like a good year, on the whole.

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