When you think of it you might realize that most music artists have their chart success when they are between 20 and may be 35 years old. That makes averagely five to ten years. Take Pink Floyd or The Rolling Stones for example. They were all over the charts in the 1960s and 1970s with Pink Floyd's The Wall being the last album in 1979 to score a single as hit.. The Rolling Stones kind of fizzled out in the late 1970s while Mick Jagger had a few singles in the 1980s as solo artist.
My favorite pop stars from the 1980s when I was a teen and twen are Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw. From what I read is that Nik was pressed onto the bubble gum pop track by the music label but had huge hits on his 1984 albums Human Racing and The Riddle, scoring several hits from each. Besides one or two singles from the following album that was it for him. Not bound to the label anymore he continued to produce rock albums but never had any chart success. He and most other "80s stars" are still on tour and play their charts hits from the 1980s for their ageing fans.
There are a few exceptions like Madonna. Starting 1982 she had a string of hits until today. But I doubt that for example Miley Cyrus, Rihanna or Beyoncé can follow Madonna's footsteps to keep being successful.
Why is that? I can only assume that most of the music artists are not able to adapt their music style to please the young generation. Seems only Madonna and a hand full of other music artists.
The pizza restaurant in our small suburb put 1980 the game Asteroids in a corner of the hallway near the entrance and youngsters lined up. He later added Defender and more youngsters showed up, while the restaurant had only few visitors. By 1982 he dedicated the smaller room to arcade games, removed tables and chairs and by the time Donkey Kong by Nintendo or Sega's Astroblaster hit the German market he offered ten or so cabs. Every other week a new game came and each time I was blown away. This room was cramped with teens and twens, while the restaurant was mainly empty.
The 68000 emerged out of the the MACSS project (Motorola Advanced Computer System on Silicon, Motorola Advanced Silicon Computing Systems), which started in 1976 to develop a completely new architecture without maintaining compatibility with any previous processors. It would be the most powerful microprocessor to complement the 6800 8-bit production line instead of designing a compatible line. After all the 68000 provided a bus protocol with a compatibility mode for peripheral devices of the 6800 line. Thus a version with an 8-bit data bus was produced.
The Altair 8800 was the first home computer but lacked a keyboard and monitor. 1977 saw what the BYTE magazine called the 1977 Trinity and encompassed the Commodore PET, Tandy TRS-80 and Apple 2. They came with a built-in keyboard. The Commodore and Tandy also sported a monitor. Shortly after Atari introduced their 8-bit line of micros. In the United Kingdom computers like the Sinclair ZX 81 and Spectrum as well as the Acorn Atom, better known as BBC Micro, became famous. Many teenager began coding, mainly writing games. They became soon known as bedroom coders. All home computers but the Jupiter ACE had the BASIC programming language built in. The best selling machine was the Commodore 64.
