I’m sure there isn’t a person that hasn’t played the classic game battleship. How can something so simple be so fun and addictive to play?

I particularly loved blowing my brother’s ships ‘out of the water’ – well it was hard to do with only a board game. The imagination took over there, but the feeling of satisfaction was real enough.

In the mid 80′s, Electronic battleship was released. There we had depth charge noises and the sound of a battleship being blown up. This was the real McCoy – or as close as it could get for 1985.

I recall it wasn’t cheap at the time. My parents couldn’t afford one (or just wouldn’t buy it), so I had to play it at friends’ places.

Found this Gem on youtube. It is the commercial that was played on TV for the battleship game. Certainly brings back some memories….

Believe it or not (depending how old you are will bring back memories), but Microsoft Windows started it’s life in the 80′s.

In November of 1983, Bill Gates showed IBM his new operating system, Windows. It went down like a lead balloon, but Bill realised that a proper GUI based operating system would be the way of the future.

Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985. It wasn’t a complete operating system like today as it was an extension of MS-DOS (which was released in 1981), the ‘command line’ or text based operating system.

From 1985, the selling details were as follows:
Price: $99
Hardware Requirements: 80386 CPU, 256KB RAM, 1MB Storage
Media Size: five 360KB 5.25″ floppy disks

Windows 1.0 ran a shell program known as MS-DOS Executive. Other supplied programs are Calculator, Calendar, Cardfile, Clipboard viewer, Clock, Control Panel, Notepad, Paint, Reversi, Terminal, and Write.

Windows 1.0 did not allow overlapping windows, due to Apple Computer owning this feature. Instead all windows were tiled. Only dialog boxes could appear over other windows.

Windows 1.0 executables, while having the same .exe extension and initial file header as MS-DOS programs, did not contain the so-called MS-DOS stub which prints the “This program requires Microsoft Windows” message and exits when the program is run outside of Windows. Instead, the file header was formatted in such a way as to make DOS reject the executable with a “program too large to fit in memory” error message.

From the beginning, Windows was intended to multitask programs (although this originally only applied to native applications and for many versions the multitasking was co-operative, rather than preemptive), so Windows programs always had their own menu bar rather than switching a single menu bar at the top of the screen like Apple Macintoshes did.

For a more detailed view on Windows 1.0, have a read here.

One of most iconic songs from the 80′s was Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love. The girls in the music video were scantily dressed for the 80′s, and caused quite a stir. To say they are iconic of the 80s is an understatement as even to this day they are constantly parodied.

For a reminder of the catchy tune, and the girls, check out this youtube video:

Want some trivia? Read on ….

From what I have read on the net (and it IS difficult to verify), the girls were NOT Robert Palmer’s idea.

So who were the models? The model on the keyboard was Susie Verrico. She was in the reality TV show Big Brother UK in the UK in 2006. The models in the video are (from left to right) Patty Kelly, Julie Pankhurst, Mak Gilchrist and Julia Bolino with Kathy Davies at the back on drums.

Oh, and to finish off, they did not know how to play the instruments which was no great secret but their simple presence worked.