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| S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR
The times they were a-changing. A March 16, 1979 story in
the
Columbia Record
read, “In recent years concern has devel-
oped about the future of the technical education system as its
innovative luster has been tarnished by time and fast-paced tech-
nological change.”
That was true. The latest technology advances influenced the
tech system’s clients—people and industry—like never before.
And it would heavily influence the system, which would need
state-of-the-art technology to keep up with the times.
Approaching change manifests itself in small ways. In 1972,
a video arcade game debuted. The record doesn’t reveal whether
technical college leaders played this game, but if they did they
touched the future. Pong and its black-and-white two-dimen-
sional tennis game heralded the 1980s coming technological rev-
olution. Pong, hooked to a TV, would launch the video arcade
industry. Ten years later a revolutionary video console, Vectrex,
came on the scene. This standalone game didn’t need a TV mon-
itor. No, not at all. It competed with TV. Its desktop monitor and
its array of games represented a bold new advance, but it was
doomed. Space invaders was about to give way to word process-
ing and home accounting.
Two Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—had been working in a ga-
rage in California since the seventies on something they’d call an
Apple computer.
Initially, the idea of people owning their own computer was
absurd, but a shift was underway. We’d seen a similar shift before.
Television nearly forced radio to reinvent itself. On August 1,
1981, MTV played its first music video, “Video Killed the Radio
Star.” Trevor Horne, lyricist, said, “It felt like radio was the past
and video was the future. There was a shift coming.”
A shift was coming all right. The personal computer prom-
ised major change, and the South Carolina technical education
system would not, could not, escape the onslaught.
Did the system want to plow the same old ground or did it
The 1980s
A D E S I G N F O R T E C H N O L O G I C A L C H A N G E
commercial, “1984,” insinuated life was about to change and was it ever. The ad rolls ... A hammer-wield-
ing blonde shatters a mammoth TV screen ending a despot’s hitlerian rant. The message? “In 1984, Apple
will introduce the Macintosh, and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
You couldn’t escape the revolution; you had to embrace it. Apple had a new design for the 1980s and so
did South Carolina’s technical training system. “We are overdue for this thing to begin with,” said Dud-
ley. Technical education wouldn’t be like the 1970s, and certainly not like the 1960s. During the eighties,
the system would reach for new highs: high technology and a higher role in education—worthy goals,
difficult goals.
Let the eighties begin.
