Word: discs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...space, which translate images into a series of binary numbers that are later reassembled into pictures back on earth. In digital recording a computer takes 44,000 impressions of sound per sec. and assigns each a numerical value. The numbers are then recorded in pits embedded in the disc, read by a laser beam and changed back into sound. The "digital" LPs currently found in record stores are really hybrids, recorded digitally but pressed and played back as analog discs...
Digital CDs have several important advantages over conventional records. For one thing, there is no surface noise, since the laser reads only the numbers, not any dust or grime on the disc's laminated surface. Because nothing touches the disc, there is no wear. Digital records lack the distortion customarily found on LPs in loud passages and near the end of a side, when the sound is unnaturally compressed. The new players are designed to plug into conventional component systems, and the discs will be compatible with any player on the market...
Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist's mother lode. It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays...
Result: the Bank Street Writer, a $69.95 computer program ($95 for the three-disc school package) that will turn an Apple, Atari or, by summer, Commodore computer into an uncomplicated word processor. Designed by Software Consultant Franklin Smith and a team of experts from Bank Street and Intentional Educations Inc., a software development firm in Watertown, Mass., the disc is not only changing the way some children hone their writing skills, it is also proving a commercial success. It is now the fourth fastest-selling word-processing program on the market, competing against such powerful bestsellers as WordStar ($495), Screenwriter...
...B.S.W.'s success is ease of use: the writer slides the floppy disc into a computer and turns the machine on. In a matter of seconds, the computer is programmed and ready for typing. There are no codes to memorize, because all instructions are shown on the top of the screen. Yet for all of its simplicity, it is powerful: characters appear and disappear at a keystroke; blocks of text jump quickly from one place to another...