 You don't see them on these old books, but you do on just about every other product on the shelves. Those clusters of skinny and fat lines that sit on everything you buy, they're called universal product codes, UPCs for short, and 45 years ago, they revolutionized retail. In the summer of 1974, the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, became the first grocery store in America to scan an item at the cash register. It was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy for Gum. When retailers got wind of how much faster they could move customers through stores with the UPC system, they began buying scanners in droves. Adweek took note of the frenzy in its January 28, 1980 issue. Scanning a new medium, we asked? You bet it was. Today, businesses ranging from FedEx to Amazon to Walmart couldn't survive without barcodes. What? You mean a packet of Equal? Well, yeah. Bear with me. In 1965, a G.D. Searle chemist named James Schlatter put two amino acids together and came up with Aspartame, a pretty much zero-calorie sweetener that didn't have the nasty aftertaste of saccharin. That's the main ingredient in sweeten low. The FDA approved the dipeptide for dry foods in 1981, soft drinks in 1983, and finally gave it the green light as an all-purpose additive in 1986. A few weeks later, Adweek told its readers to, quote, prepare for the aspartaming of America. And that's exactly what happened. In 1987, Kellogg's, Lipton, and Coca-Cola were just some of the food giants planning to add Aspartame to their products. Today, it's present in over 6,000 brands that we buy. When IBM introduced the 5150 to the market in August of 1981, fewer than 10% of American homes had computers. IBM's PCs weren't cheap. Its $1,565 list price comes to $4,300 in today's value. And it wasn't designed for the office either. But coming on the heels of the Apple II and IIE, the PC touched off the computer revolution. And the surge in new machines, better software, and computer literacy overall went an inevitable spillover into the advertising industry. Not only did the creative process change with the coming of computer graphics, but agency client lists swelled with work creating campaigns for computer makers. By 1983, computer companies were spending $500 million on advertising. Personal computers, Adweek said, just may be the best thing that has happened to advertising since Henry Ford rolled into the industry with the new Model T. In 1977, attendees at the Home Electronic Show in Chicago got an early look at something called VidStar, with cassettes of half-inch magnetic tape in a format called VHS. In other words, the video cassette recorder had arrived in America. Well, sort of. Sony had introduced the Betamax in 1975, but VHS was cheaper and had a longer record time. By the mid-1980s, it would capture most of the market. In 1984, Adweek chose the VCR as the year's hottest product. We reported that the business of renting movies, quote, is among the fastest growing retail phenomena in the U.S., and noted that movie studios, which had initially filed soup to stop the VCR, were now making hundreds of millions from the sale of tapes. Of course, not everyone was happy about the VCR. TV networks realized that millions of viewers were taping shows to watch later, and as one agency executive bemoaned, I'm going to guess that 95% of the VCR audience is going to zap commercials. Today, those bulky old tape players are obsolete, but time-shifted viewing and the zapping of commercials is part of the consumer culture, and the VCR is what taught us how to do it. Technophiles like to debate where and how email began. Some cite MIT's mailbox system from 1965, the first credit Ray Tomlinson, a visionary programmer who, in 1971, pioneered a mail system on the Department of Defense's ARPANET by using the at symbol to indicate message's destination. While most ordinary people wouldn't start using email until the early 1990s, when providers like CompuServe and Prodigy began offering it, Adweek took note of the coming of email in 1981 around the time that companies like Wang, IBM, and GTE began to develop data networks for businesses. Of all the promises of the so-called Office of the Future, we told readers, none holds more fascination than being able to send and receive correspondence electronically. Today, we all send and receive emails. 294 billion of them every day.