We had burritos for lunch at a ‘High Tech’ Burrito close to the office. The burritos were tasty enough, but certainly not high tech in and of themselves. I suppose the clientele it hopes to attract are high tech workers .. or it’s simply a reference to Silicon Valley to the south of us. The term Silicon Valley for the high-tech industry in the Santa Clara Valley area was first used in 1971 and already in widespread use by 1986.
And what was state-of-the-art technology back then? No internet, and no cell phones of course – but Intel’s classic 80386 microprocessor appeared in 1986. And that year IBM introduced its first ‘laptop’ computer : a flat, boxy machine that weighed a hefty 12 lbs, cost $1,995 ($4,200 in today’s dollars), and that had all of 256k bytes of random access memory (RAM).