Modernizing Text and Data Networks in the Early 1980s

During the decades before the beginning of 1980s, there were just a few ways to transmit messages in electrical format. As personal computers were not available on everyone’s desk and minicomputers were not meant for everyday working tasks, document creation was mostly manual. In early 1980s, people started to realize for the first time that the society around them had changed due to the increasing amount of computers and communication facilities. In this paper, some views have been presented from the perspective of young engineers at that time concerning the fast change in text and data networking that took place in the 1980s. The value of the paper is mostly in writing down these views and memories with some source reference material.