Portal:1980s
Template:/box-header The 1980s, spoken as "the Nineteen Eighties" or abbreviated as "The Eighties" or "the '80s", was the decade that began on January 1, 1980, and ended on December 31, 1989. This was the ninth decade of the 20th century.
The time period saw great social, economic, and general change as wealth and production migrated to newly industrializing economies. As economic liberalization increased in the developed world, multiple multinational corporations associated with the manufacturing industry relocated into Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Japan and West Germany are the most notable developed countries that continued to enjoy rapid economic growth during the decade while other developed nations, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States, re-adopted laissez-faire economic policies. The decade significantly saw the phenomena of Glasnost and Perestroika in the USSR, paving the way for transition from the bipolar world of the Cold War during the early 1990s.
Technically and culturally the 80s also represented a significant transition too as they saw the realm of computing expand from a primarily business and academic phenomenon into the home with the advent of the personal computer, accompanied with the growth of the software industry, ultimately paving the way for the World Wide Web on the Internet. Template:/box-footer
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Box-header/colours' not found.
 The Macintosh was designed to achieve adequate graphics performance, which had previously required hardware costing over US $100,000, a price inaccessible to the middle class. This narrow goal resulted in an efficient design which traded off expandability but met or exceeded the baseline performance of its competitors. |
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Box-header/colours' not found.
|
Nicolae Ceaușescu (26 January 1918 – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader. He was also the country's head of state from 1967 to 1989. A member of the Romanian Communist youth movement, Ceaușescu rose up through the ranks of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's Socialist government and, upon the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965, he succeeded to the leadership of Romania’s Communist Party as General Secretary.
After a brief period of relatively moderate rule, Ceaușescu's regime became increasingly brutal and repressive. By some accounts, his rule was the most rigidly Stalinist in the Soviet bloc. He maintained controls over speech and the media that were very strict even by Soviet-bloc standards, and internal dissent was not tolerated. His secret police, the Securitate, was one of the most ubiquitous and brutal secret police forces in the world. In 1982, with the goal of paying off Romania's large foreign debt, Ceaușescu ordered the export of much of the country’s agricultural and industrial production. The resulting extreme shortages of food, fuel, energy, medicines, and other basic necessities drastically lowered living standards and intensified unrest. Ceaușescu's regime was also marked by an extensive and ubiquitous cult of personality, nationalism, a continuing deterioration in foreign relations even with the Soviet Union, and nepotism. Ceaușescu’s regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on anti-government demonstrators in the city of Timișoara on 17 December 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest and became known as the Romanian Revolution, which was the only violent removal of a Communist government in the course of the revolutions of 1989. Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, fled the capital in a helicopter but were captured by the armed forces. On 25 December the couple were hastily tried and convicted by a special military tribunal on charges of genocide and sabotage of the Romanian economy in an approximately one hour long court session. Ceaușescu and his wife were then shot by a firing squad. |
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Box-header/colours' not found.
 |
The crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-51-L pose for their official portrait on November 15, 1985.
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Box-header/colours' not found.
 |
You are invited to participate in WikiProject History, a group of editors dedicated to developing and improving articles about History. If interested, add your name to our list of members |
- What are portals?
- List of portals
- Featured portals
