WUPFV ~ D~a ~flTuan~7 A~TTA U @ i, P A , 7 PAGESEVEN" There were other areas of progress, of course, (and set-backs as well) but they were not as dominant or dramatic as those above. In most cases, change, when it came, was due to ordinary people standing up and speaking out. à I. ro THE 80's IN REVIEW Politically, the 1980's started as a decade of conservatism - Maggie Thatcher had only recently begun her reign as the Irôn lady of Great 'Britain and Ronald Reagan was cam- paigning for President of the United States, but conservatism ran out of steam and it was Gorbachev and his relentless drive for reform that dominated the last half of the decade. The '80's ended with the most dramatic wave of populism since the French Revolution as country after country threw off the yoke of dictatorship. As the 80's began, the American government was under siege Ly a bunch of Iranian students who held the entire American embassy staff in Tehran as hostages. Ironically those students were the leading edge of the populist revolu- tion that spread around the world. From Pakistan to the Philipines to South Korea to Chile to Argentina to Namibia, it finally spread to the dictatorships of Eastern Europe. And, for the most part, the transitions were relatively peaceful. In the end, people prevailed over politicians, and the decade ended with only a few minor conflicts still in progress. **** ** * The 1980's was also the decade that environmental issues took over the political agendas of the world. The ozone layer, greenhouse effects, the destruction of Brazilian rain forest, acid rain, syringes washed up on New York beaches, PCB's, water pollution, and.garbage, garbage, garbage have hogged the headlines for most of the last ten years. Politicians have frantically struggled to keep in step with their constituents. But the major change of the 1980's was technological. The eighties was the decade when computers ceased to be the exclusive toys of governments, scientists and big business. No one could have predicted 10 years ago that desktop computers with hundreds of megabytes of accessible memory would not only be a reality but common and affordable. In 1980, Commodore and Apple had only just produced their first tentative desktop computers. IBM merely scoffed. The decade was already three years old when Commodore set out to create a mass market for the Commodore 64. It had a huge 64K memory and came with a "datasette" record- er. They assumed that people had the patience to wait five minutes for their programs to load. They were wrong. Within a year, the demand for disc drives far outstripped the supply despite the $300 extra cost. Those 5 1/4" discs held about 170 K of memory - huge - enough for weeks of data. And then, finally, IBM entered the fray ...and they cleaned up. What a difference a name makes. People were impressed with each new generation of com- puters ...until the next - more memory, faster, more "user friendly". Then MacIntosh brought us the mouse which made working with computers less a task and more intuitive. As we enter the nineties, I compose this column on a computer with a "friendly" mouse and 4,000K of memory. I use a desktop publishing program which itself uses 250K of memory. The 5 1/4" disc with 170K capacity has been replaced by one only 3 1/2" in diameter but holding 720K of data. But even that is used only occasionally. The real work of storing data is done by the hard drive - 100 megs of memory (or 100,000K). I will print this column out on a laser printer which in itself is a computer with 3,000K of memory. On other fronts the eighties were nowhere near so exciting. Medically the decade will be rembered (if at all) as the decade of AIDS. In 1980 acquired immune deficiency was just an obscure new disease of homosexuals, drug users and Haitians. Only a few were aware of its killer potential and, fortunately, they got the message across. As a result, instead of killing half the population as some pessimists had pre- dicted, it relatively obscure in terms of the numbers affected. Its principal effect has been social rather than medical. AIDS changed the morality of a generation and forced a lot of people to shed their prudish inhibitions. AIDS has dramatically accelerated the visibility of homosexuals. With the deaths of Liberace, Rock Hudson and John Hirsch from AIDS, we became more aware that homo- sexuals are not the tiny minority we assumed. They were, after all, normal creative people who could be and have been admired for their many accomplishments. Abortion was another medical/social issues that hogged its share of headlines. But nothing has changed - the stalemate is even more tightly drawn than ever. Progress was finally made on another medical/social issue. Smoking bas been considered harmful ever since the U.S. Surgeon General's report in 1967, but finally, as we enter the nineties, non-smokers have finally won the right to a smoke-free environmnent almost everywbere they go. Now instead of a non-smoker's rights lobby, it's the smokers who are fighting back. 125 YEARS AGO from the Thursday, December 29, 1864 edition of the WHITBY CHRONICLE • Abraham Farewell and Thomas Nicholson Gibbs are contesting a provincial election in Ontario South Itiding. • St. John's Anglican Church is holding a special service for the volunteer militia prior to their departure to the Canada-United States border. • Annexation of Canada to the United States is a major election issue. • Hugh James Macdonell and Nicholas Wood Brown are contesting the position of Mayor of Whitby for 1865. ý77 WHITBY MAPLE LEAFS MIDGET HOCKEY TEAM, 1939 This boys' hockey team from the Lions Club Midget Hockey League were champions of 1938-39. Posing in front of the old library building at Dundas and Byron Streets are, Back Row: Jack Green, Owen Greenfield, Bryan Burkhart, Harry Donald (Manager), Everett Blight, Bob Beaton and Philip Burkhart. In the front row are Joshua Bruce, Peter Hodgson, Tom Delaney, Jack Vickering and Jack Delaney. The little boy with the cup is Dick Donald, the team's mascot. Whitby Archives photo 10 YEARS AGO from the Wednesda , Janua 2, 1980 edition of the H YFR PR SS • Whitby Chamber of Commerce had a 71 per cent growth in 1979, to a total of 192 members. • Whitby merchants say sales were down in 1979. • The Whitby Psychiatric Hospital has formed a planning and advisory committee. • Durham Region wants Highway 7 recontructed between Brougham and Brooklin. 25 YEARS AGO from the Thursday, December 31, 1964 edition of the WHITBY WEEKLY NEWS No paper was published today. vp.niýW.RnAv IAWFTA. Dv q lam loArm 07 r