1988
My first serious girlfriend, Katrina, was the bee’s knees. We were both born on the same day, thirty minutes apart. She came from Salina, Kansas. On our shared eighteenth birthday, in 1988, we bought our first lottery tickets. Neither were winners. She used to get worked up about small choices, believing they could cause everything to change from some predetermined fate. If you eat a ham sandwich instead of turkey, maybe you’ll get in a car wreck later that day.
I’d temporarily set aside my digital life in 1988, focused on debate and performance. That year I’d win the State-level competition for Humorous Interpretation and qualify for the Nationals Debate tournament that summer. The shell that had confined me all those preceding years had finally been shucked off.
Perhaps all of the chaos that soon came could have been avoided had either of those tickets been winners. She and I might have married and settled down on some farm in rural Kansas. Alas, the tickets were not winners. Entropy won.
Facts are Binary
Christopher Poole, who would later be known as “moot”, created 4chan in 2003. He was born in 1988.
Rush Limbaugh, the progenitor, propagator and originator of right-wing Talk Radio started his signature show in 1988.
WrestleMania IV, pitting Andre the Giant against Hulk Hogan took place in 1988.
Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time in 1988.
George H.W. Bush would win the Presidential Election in 1988, after serving as Vice President to Ronald Regan for the prior eight years. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and began it’s own dissolution also in 1988, leading to the rise of the Russian Mafia.
Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gunna Give You Up” both debuted in 1988. As did Milli Vanilli’s debut album, All or Nothing. It was soon discovered that the duo only lip-synced their vocals and they were shunned for the chicanery. Truth in talent mattered in 1988.
TAT-8, a trans-Atlantic cable connecting the US’s Norfanet and Europe’s Nordunet was completed, creating Arpanet in 1988, what would soon be known as the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee also began discussing his ideas around what would become the protocols underlying the World Wide Web at CERN the same year.
Arby’s announced their new curly-fries in 1988.
The US suffered one of its worst droughts in history causing tens of billions of dollars in damage and several thousand excess deaths, all starting in 1988.
The very first network-based virus was released in 1988, infecting several thousand computers and causing sections of the then nascent Internet to be partitioned for several days.
Sega released the MegaDrive/Genesis in 1988, introducing Sonic the Hedgehog. Nintendo also released two sequels to Super Mario Bros and the first sequel to Final Fantasy was released the same year.
Rap music exploded in 1988, with Public Enemy, EPMD, NWA, Eric B & Rakim and many more releasing albums in the burgeoning “street” genre. Run D.M.C. would release Tougher Than Leather in 1988. It was the first Run D.M.C. album I did not own.
NWA’s debut album, “Straight Outta Compton”, contained the immediately controversial yet popular track “Fuck Tha Police” as well as a somewhat unnoticed masterpiece, “Express Yourself”. Born from Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s song of the same name, in today’s not-too-distance-future the song soon becomes an important movement’s signature.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was introduced in 1988, laying a foundation from which many small business and home computer networks would emerge.
Microsoft Office and the first version of Photoshop were both released in 1988.
The first patent for a genetically engineered animal was issued in 1988.
The Summer Olympics were held in Seoul, South Korea in 1988. The country’s democracy was only a year old and faced constant threats from their northern counterpart. Despite this, the event went off without a hitch and established the new nation as a soon-to-be major player on the international stage. Within twenty years the nation would be on the forefront of technical innovation and become the most wired nation on the planet.
Creative Labs released it’s initial SoundBlaster in 1988, a product that would dominate computer audio for over a decade.
Linksys, SanDisk and Trend Micro were all founded in 1988.
BlackRock, now the world’s largest asset manager, was founded in 1988.
Prozac and RU-486 (abortion pill) were both invented in 1988.
I graduated high-school in 1988.
Lyndon LaRouche, perennial presidential contender and conspiracy theorist, was convicted of mail-fraud in 1988 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The same year he released an auto-biography claiming Raisa Gorbachev and the Soviet Union had set him up.
Isidor Isaac Rabi discovered Nuclear magnetic resonance which paved the way for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and the machines now used to scan the body for ailments. Magnetic forces exist at the grand, planetary scale as well as the sub-atomic scale. In 1988, Mr. Rabi died.
Die Hard, Big, Beetlejuice, Twins, Coming to America, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Willow and Rain Man were all released in 1988.
Digital cellular phones were invented in 1988.
Near the end of 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland killing all 243 people on board. It would be thirty-two years to the day that the creator of the bomb was charged for the terrorist attack.
Knowledge is a pattern of Binary Facts
19 is the eighth prime number. In Christian numerology, the number 888 represents Jesus, or sometimes more specifically Christ the Redeemer. It is the theoretical opposite to 666, the mark of the beast.
Katrina and I broke up by the end of 1988. Chaos theory validates her concern over small choices sometimes having significant consequences.
By the end of 1988, I would again own a computer, my first in the 286 line.
