Flashback to the ’80s With This Quiz on the Decade’s Iconic Gadgets

The video game arcade is an indelible symbol of the 1980s. Although the first arcade games, including Pong, arrived in the ’70s, the genre’s most influential titles made their debut in the ’80s. These included Rampage, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man. Mortal Kombat II, however, didn’t appear in arcades until the early ’90s.

Manufactured by the music company Roland between 1980 and 1983, the TR-808 — often referred to as simply the “808” — is an iconic drum machine that helped form the signature sound of the early days of hip-hop. Providing a deep, booming bass, the 808 became a cult favorite and has been used on more hit albums than any other drum machine. It continues to be used and referenced in modern music.

First sold in 1978, the Speak & Spell reached the height of its cultural zenith when it appeared in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 movie, “E.T. the Extraterrestrial.” Although a child’s toy, Speak & Spell was the first gadget to use digital signal processing (DSP). Described as an “innovation in audio processing,” the humble Speak & Spell formed the foundation of what is now a $20 billion industry.

Imagine a television from the 1980s, and you likely picture a static-filled rectangular box adorned with bunny ears and prone to hums and hisses — that’s a CRT television. Named after cathode rays, which are electrons observed in a discharged tube, CRT TVs are obsolete today but still find popularity among retro gamers. The technology’s influence also lives on in phrases like “watching the tube” and “YouTube.”

Introduced in 1978, the multi-hued electronic game SIMON is immensely addictive in its simplicity: Press the colors in the order the game says until your memory fails. The four colors of the game were the three primary colors — red, yellow, and blue — along with the addition of green. The game became immensely popular in the ’80s, and several versions of it remain on shelves today.

On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper demoed the first cellphone call. It would be another decade before the phone’s technological descendant, the DynaTac 8000x, became available for purchase. Costing $4,000 with only 35 minutes of battery life, the DynaTac 8000x was inaccessible to most consumers. The phone was discontinued in 1994.

During the early 1980s, IBM ruled the personal computer market thanks to the IBM 5150. The PC used Microsoft software and Intel processors — two of the main components of most computers today — and cost $2,500 (around $7,400 in 2023). To challenge IBM’s computing supremacy, Apple developed the Macintosh and produced a Super Bowl commercial that painted their company as the David to IBM’s Goliath.

For more than 40 years, no computer has been able to surpass the sales number of Amiga’s Commodore 64. Selling 30 million units between 1982 and 1993, the Commodore 64 had only 64 kilobytes of RAM. The C64 was sold almost everywhere, including electronic, department, and toy stores.

In the 1980s, the Japanese gaming company Nintendo went from being a little-known game developer to a household name. During that decade, Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console, the Game Boy, and the Power Glove, a popular-yet-flawed accessory for the NES. The Virtual Boy didn’t make its debut until the ’90s.

Similar to the HD-DVD and Blu-ray rivalry of the early 2000s, VHS and Betamax participated in a format war that culminated in the 1980s. Designed by the Japanese tech company Sony and similar to VHS in concept, Betamax tapes were slightly smaller and provided higher-quality playback (though this quality meant Betamax tapes couldn’t support long running times). By 1980, VHS controlled 60% of the U.S. market.

Throughout the 1970s, the Japanese company Casio earned a name for creating digital watches and calculators, so it was only a matter of time before those two products collided. To kick off the decade, the company introduced the C-80, its first calculator watch. Casio boasted that the all-in-one watch, which cost $75, could “replace everything.” The watch continues to be a fashion statement to this day.

Arguably the most iconic gadget of the entire decade is the Walkman, the first truly portable music player thanks to the arrival of cassette tapes. The first Walkman, the TPS-L2, debuted in the U.S. in 1980 and became a sensation that kick-started decades of mobile music innovation. The gadget is so beloved that Sony continues to sell music players under its name.

Released in 1985, Teddy Ruxpin is regarded as the world’s first animatronic toy. The bulky teddy bear had three servo motors in his head to control his eyes and mouth, and cassette tapes were inserted into his back so he could read bedtime stories to children. The toy was a smash hit during the ’80s and even made a resurgence in 2017 — this time with an accompanying app instead of cassettes.

First appearing in the mid-1970s, boom boxes surged in popularity during the ’80s with the rise of mainstream hip-hop. As their name suggests, boom boxes emphasized a deep bass that played well with hip-hop’s beats. As the ’80s wore on, noise ordinances and the arrival of gadgets like the Walkman spelled the end of the boom box era.

The Video Home System, or VHS, is an analog tape recording format created by the Japan Victor Company in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s, VHS became the dominant format for the burgeoning market of home video tapes and remained at the helm until the arrival of DVDs in the late ’90s.