Word: 70s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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John Belushi and Gilda Radner are no longer around. The other Not Ready for Prime Time originals have phased into either obscurity or fat-cat Hollywood stardom. The baby boomers who discovered the show in the mid-'70s are now watching alongside their kids and struggling to keep up with the cast changes (which one is Phil Hartman?). Still, an anniversary for Saturday Night Live -- which will mark the start of its 15th season with a prime-time special next Sunday -- is more than just a routine occasion for TV nostalgia. The pressing question: Is Saturday Night still alive...
...assembled a talented group of writers and performers from such cutting-edge venues as the Second City satirical troupe and National Lampoon magazine. Chevy Chase was the show's first star and formative influence, but the group effort soon produced a cornucopia of cultural reference points for the '70s: Roseanne Roseannadanna, the Coneheads, the Nerds, Belushi's Samurai warrior, Dan Aykroyd's Tom Snyder...
...live production, meanwhile, is more polished but lacks the old gleam. The actors now get extensively made up for their impressions (Chevy used to do Gerald Ford without even changing his voice). Yet the skits seem more ragged and underrehearsed than they were during the seat-of-the-pants '70s...
Fuzzy logic began to find applications in industry in the early '70s, when it was teamed with another form of advanced computer science called the expert system. A product of research into artificial intelligence, expert systems solve complex problems somewhat like human experts do -- by applying rules of thumb. (Example: when the oven gets very hot, turn the gas down a bit.) In 1980 F.L. Smidth & Co. of Copenhagen began marketing the first commercial fuzzy expert system: a computer program that controlled the fuel-intake rate and gas flow of a rotating kiln used to make cement...
Nostalgia was the only dirty word in the rock vocabulary. This music had never looked back before. But history could walk away from rock once it had been put snugly into that Woodstock pasture. Rock reacted by turning inward, to the softer personal speculations of the '70s singer-songwriters, then reacted again, first by exploding (punk), then by chilling out into the cerebrations of the New Wave bands like the Talking Heads and the slick, slightly spooky amusement-park soul of Michael Jackson...