In the sixties, the role of Abbey Road as a training ground and the high standards maintained gave the studios an enviable reputation and attracted applications for work and training from engineers all over the world. Hit records were being produced at the studios with alarming regularity. Shirley Bassey arrived from Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, Danny Williams recorded a version of Moon River which shot to No.1 in 1961. Helen Shapiro first visited Abbey Road as a teenage schoolgirl in 1961. Over the next three years she was to record 11 hit records in Abbey Road including two no.1’s, Walking Back To Happiness and You Don’t Know. In 1962 George Martin met four young men from Liverpool who were destined to change his life in the most remarkable fashion. Ken Townsend agreed to stay behind at Abbey Road and work on a commercial test for Martin one evening, June 6 1962. Three months later The Beatles - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were back in Abbey Road and recording for real. They were signed up by George Martin and were about to make their first record. Love Me Do was the group’s first single. Over the next seven years they were to make 90 per cent of their recordings in one or all of the rooms at Abbey Road. They went into the studios and didn’t come out until they’d finished. Ultimately The Beatles changed the recording schedule of Abbey Road. George Martin worked with The Beatles, aiming at releasing a single every three months and an album twice a year. The results justified all the planning that took place. She Loves You, released in August 1963 reached the No.1 spot on two separate occasions, going on to become the biggest selling Beatles single of all time. In fact 1963 was a very good year for Abbey Road with 15 out of the 19 No.1’s of that year all recorded at the studios. In 1964 The Beatles had released six singles and notched up four no.1’s to their credit but in 1965 George Martin decided to leave Abbey Road, although he continued to work as The Beatles producer. The list of artists who also entered Abbey Road during the 1960’s grew almost daily with Manfred Mann, Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Seekers, The Hollies, Cliff Bennett and The Rebel Rousers and Morecambe & Wise among the roll call. Cilla Black had also come from Liverpool with Brian Epstein and 16 chart records including two No. 1’s Anyone Who Had A Heart and You’re My World. The Beatles had achieved many successes by June 1967 but there was one engagement which somewhat overawed them - the prospect of performing in front of an estimated 350 million people. They had been invited to contribute to a worldwide satellite television link-up called ‘Our World’. The Beatles gathered in Studio One at Abbey Road to perform their song All You Need Is Love. 1968 will be remembered as a year of technological progress, pioneered largely due to the creative demands of The Beatles Sergeant Pepper album, done the year before. Acutely aware of the limitations which four track recording imposed, Ken Townsend invented a system whereby two four track machines could be linked together, and multitrack recording entered a new era. The progression from four track to eight track was followed just as quickly by the introduction of 16 track and 24 track, all of which involved the use of EMI consoles which became the backbone of Abbey Road’s multitrack recording, which revolutionised the way records could be made from then on. In April 1969 The Beatles came together to record ‘Abbey Road’, their final album as a group. After seven years they had made records which established them as the most successful pop group in the history of recording. This album became their best-selling work and put the name Abbey Road on the map once and for all. The sixties were a time of immense change in all areas of public and private life, often referred to as a social revolution global in scale. In the United States, for example, social change was wrought by the American civil rights movement, the rise of feminism and gay rights, invention of the microchip and formulation of Moore's Law, and even the rise of neoconservatism. The "Sixties" has become synonymous with all the new, exciting, radical, subversive and/or dangerous (depending on one's viewpoint) events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. In Africa the 60s were a period of radical change as countries gained independence from their European colonial rulers, only for this rule to be replaced in many cases by civil war or corrupt dictatorships. Government Several Western governments turned to the left in the early-1960s. In the United States President John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. Italy formed its first left of center government in March 1962 with a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and moderate Republicans. Socialists joined the ruling bloc in December 1963. The 1960s were marked by several notable assassinations, including Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. First Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, is assassinated by Belgian/Congolese firing squad on January 17, 1961 First South Vietnamese president Ngo Dihn Diem (Ngô Ðìhn Dim) is assassinated in coup d'etat on November 2, 1963. US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22, 1963 in his car during a parade Malcolm X is assassinated on February 21, 1965 The assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. The assassination of presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968. Anti-War Movement A mass movement began rising in opposition to the Vietnam War, ending in the massive Moratorium protests in 1969, and also the movement of resistance to conscription (the Draft) for the war. The antiwar movement was initially based on the older 1950s Peace movement heavily influenced by the American Communist Party, but by the mid-1960s it outgrew this and became a broad-based mass movement centered on the universities and churches: one kind of protest was called a "sit-in." Other terms included the Draft, draft dodger, conscientious objector, and Vietnam vet. Voter age-limits were challenged by the phrase: "If you're old enough to die for your country, you're old enough to vote." Popular music entered an era of "all hits" as numerous singers released recordings, beginning in the 1950s, as 45-rpm "singles" (with another on the flip side), and radio stations tended to play only the most popular of the wide variety of records being made. Also, bands tended to record only the best of their songs as a chance to become a hit record. The developments of the Motown Sound, "folk rock" and the British Invasion of bands from the U.K. (The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, The Rolling Stones ,and so on), are major examples of American listeners expanding from the folksinger, doo-wop and saxophone sounds of the 1950s and evolving to include psychedelia music. The rise of an alternative culture among affluent youth, creating a huge market for rock and blues music produced by drug-culture, influenced bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Doors, and also for radical music in the folk tradition pioneered by Bob Dylan, The Mamas and the Papas, and Joan Baez in the United States, and in England, Donovan was helping to create folk rock. The Jimi Hendrix Experience release two albums in the United Kingdom (U.K.) during 1967 Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love that innovate both guitar, trio and recording techniques. The Beatles release the seminal 'concept' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in June 1967. Bob Dylan releases the Country Rock album John Wesley Harding in December 1967, making the genre acceptable. The Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was the apex of the so-called Summer of Love. The Band releases the roots rock album Music from Big Pink in 1968. The Rolling Stones film the TV special Rock and Roll Circus in December 1968 which was never broadcast during its contemporary time. Considered for decades as a fabled 'lost' performance until released in North America on Laserdisc and VHS in 1995. Features performances from The Who; The Dirty Mac featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell; Jethro Tull and Taj Mahal. The Who release and tour the first rock opera Tommy in 1969. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band release the avant garde album Trout Mask Replica in 1969. The Woodstock Festival, and four months later, the Altamont Free Concert in 1969. Christiaan Neethling Barnard was born in the town of Beaufort West, on the edge of the great Karoo, the dry and arid interior of South Africa, in 1922.His father was a preacher and there were 4 boys in the family. He did well at school , learned music and played sport, and decided on leaving school to study medicine at the University of Cape Town. The Barnard family was not wealthy but managed to secure a 3 year scholarship. He stayed with his older brother and walked to the University. There was little money to spare and even less time for leisure. Another problem was language, as his mother tongue was Afrikaans, and he had to learn to express himself in English. After 6 years he graduated and did internship and residency at Groote Schuur Hospital and Peninsula Maternity. He then joined a colleague and moved to a small town, Ceres, and married Louwtjie. The seeds of his future career were sown when one of his patients delivered a baby boy with a heart defect which could not be remedied. The baby died, causing him to think deeply about this and foresee the need for remedial surgery and the replacement of heart valves. In November Prof Schrire called Chris and told him that there was a suitable patient for a heart transplant. Louis Washkansky was suffering from gross heart failure with a short time to live and was prepared to take the chance. One can say the rest is history. A series of events were set in motion which led to the first human heart transplant, a remarkable feat A young woman, Denise Darvall, had been struck by a car and suffered severe brain damage. Her father did not hesitate when approached for permission to donate her organs. On 3 December 1967 the team emerged from 9 hours of operating and suddenly international attention was focused on Groote Schuur Hospital. The first heart transplant could not have been achieved without the skill and support of a large team - Cardiologists, Radiologists, Anaesthetists, Technicians, Nurses, Immunologists, Pathologists, and in particular, Prof Val Schrire, head of the Cardiac Clinic. The original theatre where this transplant was performed has been turned into a museum in honour of these pioneers of medicine, and to the first donor and recipient. Professor Christiaan Barnard passed away in Cyprus, Greece on 2 September 2001 from an acute asthma attack. 1960 - The first working laser was demonstrated in May by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. 1961 - First human spaceflight to orbit the Earth: Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1. 1962 - First trans-Atlantic satellite broadcast via the Telstar satellite. 1962 - The first computer video game, Spacewar!, is invented. 1963 - The first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2 is launched. 1963 - Touch-Tone telephones introduced. 1964 - The first successful Minicomputer, Digital Equipment Corporation&s 12-bit PDP-8, is marketed. 1965 - Sony markets the CV-2000, the first home video tape recorder. 1966 - The Soviet Union launches Luna 10, which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon. 1967 - First heart transplantation operation. 1967 - PAL and SECAM broadcast color TV systems start publicly transmitting in Europe. 1968 - First humans to leave Earth's gravity influence and orbit another world: Apollo 8. 1968 - The first public demonstration of the computer mouse, the paper paradigm Graphical user interface, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext. 1969 - Arpanet, the research-oriented prototype of the Internet, was introduced. 1969 - First humans to walk on the Moon: Apollo 11. 1969 - CCD invented at AT&T Bell Labs, used as the electronic imager in still and video cameras. Hundreds of full-length films were produced during the 1960s. The decade is known for being prominent in historical drama, psychological horror, and comedy, as well as the sub-genres of spy film, sword and sandal, and spaghetti westerns, all peaking during this decade. Historical drama films continued to include epics, in the style of Ben-Hur from 1959, with Cleopatra (1963), but also evolving with 20th-century settings, such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Psychological horror films extended, beyond the stereotypical monster movies of Dracula/Frankenstein or Wolfman, to include more twisted films, such as Psycho (1960) and Roger Corman's Poe adaptations for American International Pictures as well as British companies Hammer Horror and Amicus Productions. Comedy films became more elaborate, such as the The Pink Panther (1963), The President's Analyst (1967), or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) elevated the concept of a comedy-drama, where the subtle comedy conceals the harsher elements of the drama beneath, and Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1962) set a new standard for satire by turning a story about nuclear holocaust into a sophisticated black comedy. Beyond the trenchcoat and film noir, spy films expanded with worldly settings and hi-tech gadgets, such as the James Bond films Dr. No (1962) or Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965). Similar to spy films, the heist or caper-films included worldly settings and hi-tech gadgets, as in the original Ocean's Eleven (1960), Topkapi (1964) or The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 film). The spaghetti westerns (made in Italy or perhaps Spain), were typified by Clint Eastwood movies, such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) or Hang 'Em High (1968); however, several dashing Italian actors had their own series of such westerns. Science-fiction or fantasy films employed a wider range of special effects, as in the original of The Time Machine (1960) and Mysterious Island (1961), or with animated aliens or mythical creatures, as in the Harryhausen animation for Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Some extensive sets were built to simulate alien worlds or zero-gravity chambers, as in space-station and spaceship sets for the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the psychedelic, space settings for the erotic Barbarella (1968), and with ape-city in the original Planet of the Apes.   In 1945, World War II ended. By 1946, American servicemen began returning home to start up the families they had had to put on hold for 4 years. Thus began the unusually large bubble in the population curve of America known as the Baby Boom, as gazillions of babies were born all of a sudden in the span of five to ten years. Remember that all those babies born in 1946-1947 would be 18 in 1964-1965 (and eventually 22 and out of college, and into the marketplace in the early '70's, to kick off the Me Decade). What that means is that American society would suddenly find itself catering to a generation of young people in a way that had never occurred before. Sixties rock finds its roots in several places, starting as far back as the big swing bands of the pre-war era that the 60's kids' parents listened to as youngsters: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington's bands are some of the most famous. Except for Duke Ellington, all those bands were primarily dance bands, with big swinging backbeats. You can still hear some of their greatest hits today in such unusual places as the Chips Ahoy commercial (1,000 chips in every bag). There were also the smaller, "rhythm combo" groups, usually of only four or five players. Their tunes were popular on the jukeboxes of the day, but were not considered artistically important which is why we have mostly forgotten them today. The recent Broadway show "Five Guys Named Moe," which highlights the career of Louis Jordan, tells about one of the most popular rhythm combos of the day. Nat King Cole also had a small jazz combo that had popular success, before he became a Sinatra-style pop ballad singer in the '50's. Then there was Country & Western--especially what was called "Texas Swing," of which Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys was the king. Hank Williams Sr. was another important singer/songwriter of that era and genre. Over in Memphis there was Sam Phillips and his Sun Studios, where rockabilly and Elvis Presley were born. Besides Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison all began their recording careers at Sun Studios. Two other sources of modern rock'n'roll, absolutely essential to the sound we think of as 60's rock, were, first, the Blues. Blues began as the music of black sharecroppers in the poor cotton-farming region of the Mississippi Delta, and traveled north to Chicago with the sharecroppers as thousands of them moved north in search of a better life. It was in Chicago that the blues went from acoustic solo guitar music to electric guitar-electric bass-drums combos. Muddy Waters, Little Milton, B.B. King, and Howlin' Wolf were just a few of these important Chicago blues artists. Late in the evening of September 30, 1919, black sharecroppers were holding a union meeting in a church in Hoop Spur outside of Elaine, Arkansas. Tensions were high and they had posted guards at the door. When two deputized white men and a black trustee pulled into view, shots rang out. Who fired first is still debated, likely unknowable, and perhaps not that important. What is important is what transpired afterwards. One of the white men was killed, the other wounded. The black trustee raced back to Helena, the county seat of Phillips County, and alerted officials. A posse was dispatched and within a few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. In the end, five white men and over a hundred African Americans were killed. Some estimates of the black death toll range in the hundreds. Allegations surfaced that the white posse and even U.S. soldiers who were brought in to put down the so called "rebellion" had massacred defenseless black men, women and children. Nearly a hundred blacks were arrested, and in sham trials that lasted no more than a few minutes each, sixty-something black men were sentenced to prison, and twelve were slated for execution. A massive effort on the part of the NAACP and others, including a prominent black attorney in Little Rock, ensued, and by 1925 all the men were free. But planters had established that blacks had best not organize, even within the law, for racism would bring whites of different classes together to put them down. From 1960 onwards, in the face of increasing hostility from the USA, Castro led Cuba into socialism and then Communism. Officials of the Batista regime were put on trial in ‘people’s courts’ and executed. The promised new elections were not held. The judiciary lost its independence when Castro assumed the right to appoint judges. The free press was closed or taken over. Trade unions lost their independence and became part of government. The University of Havana, a former focus of dissent, and professional associations, all lost their autonomy. The democratic constitution of 1940 was never reinstated. In 1960, the sugar centrales, the oil refineries and the foreign banks were nationalized, all US property was expropriated and the Central Planning Board (Juceplan) was established. The professional and property-owning middle classes began a steady exodus which drained the country of much of its skilled workers. CIA-backed mercenaries and Cuban émigrés kept up a relentless barrage of attacks, but failed to achieve their objective. In March a French ship carrying arms to Cuba was sabotaged. At the burial of the victims, Castro first used the slogan, ‘Patria o Muerte’. Diplomatic relations were re-established with the USSR, North Korea and Vietnam, while China and Cuba signed mutual benefit treaties. Meanwhile, the USA cancelled Cuba’s sugar quota and put an embargo on all imports to Cuba. At the beginning of 1961, the USA severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and encouraged Latin American countries to do likewise. This was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a fiasco which was to harden Castro’s political persuasion. On 14 April 1961, some 1400 Cuban émigrés, trained by the CIA in Miami and Guatemala, set off from Nicaragua to invade Cuba with the US Navy as escort. On 15 April, planes from Nicaragua bombed several Cuban airfields in an attempt to wipe out the air force. Seven Cuban airmen were killed in the raid, and at their funeral the next day, Fidel Castro addressed a mass rally in Havana and declared Cuba to be socialist. On 17 April the invasion flotilla landed at Playa Girón and Playa Larga in the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), but the men were stranded on the beaches when the Cuban air force attacked their supply ships. Two hundred were killed and the rest surrendered within three days. The invaders’ aircraft also took a beating when 11 were shot down, including all the B-26 bombers flown from Nicaragua. A total of 1197 men were captured and eventually returned to the USA in exchange for US$53 million in food and medicine. In his May Day speech, Fidel Castro, who had personally taken control of the defence of Cuba, confirmed that the Cuban Revolution was socialist

Carnaby-street hippie style of “swinging London,” certain mods began to emphasize the more proletarian aspects of the look, cutting their hair shorter and replacing dandified suits and expensive shoes with jeans and heavy boots. These no-frills “hard mods” prefigured the arrival of the first skinheads.4 Whereas appreciation for black culture – above all American soul music but also Jamaican ska – had stood at the center of the mod way of life, the skinheads took the connection a step further; their reference point was a local symbol of cool, young Jamaican immigrants who modeled themselves on the authority-defying “rude boy” of the Kingston ghettos. The clean, hard look of these transplanted “rude boys” fit nicely with the stripped-down elements of the hard mod style, and their evening wear echoed the earlier mod emphasis on expensive suits and nice shoes. But by far the most critical element in the symbiotic relationship between skinheads and black immigrants was music. Skinheads embraced the reggae music of Jamaican performers like Desmond Dekker as their own. Reggae artists and labels, in turn, actively courted the skinheads, producing songs and albums aimed at this young white audience. The resulting genre – “skinhead reggae” – fueled the rise of the skinhead subculture while jump-starting the careers of many Jamaican performers in Britain. The identity of the original skinhead was thus constructed in dialogue with black immigrants and organized around music created by black performers. The decline of the original skinhead subculture by the early 1970s, and its rebirth later in the decade under the influence of punk rock, opened the way for new influences. Not only did fresh musical genres arise around which skinhead identity could coalesce – above all so-called “street punk,” or “Oi!” music  Stereo had almost completely replaced mono as the recording mode. Studios re-equipped with multi-track tape recorders, first 3-track (initially for film work) or half inch or one inch wide tape, then 4 track on one inch wide tape (later reduced to half inch). 8-track on one inch tape increased to 16-track on two inch tape. The maximum tape width has stayed at two inches but the number of tracks has increased still further to 24, 36 and even to 48 tracks. Pre-recorded Musicassettes were released. Simple to use, the cassette format was to become very popular. However, during its first year on the market only 9000 units were sold. Philips did not protect its cassette as a proprietary technology but encouraged other companies to license its use. The pre-recorded 8 track cartridge appeared on the in-car entertainment market. It was considered a convenient medium for this purpose because it could be inserted into the player with one hand and was a continuous loop. By 1968 around eighty-five different manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million cassette players world wide and in that year alone the cassette business was worth about $150 million. By the end of the decade, the Philips compact cassette had become the standard format for tape recording. Conclusion of a war: A North Vietnamese Army T-54 tank breaking into the grounds of the Presidential Palace, April 30, 1975. The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the American War, occurred from 1959 to April 30, 1975. The term Vietnam Conflict is often used to refer to events which took place between 1959 and April 30, 1975. The war was fought between the Communist-supported Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States supported Republic of Vietnam. It concluded with the defeat and failure of the United States foreign policy in Vietnam. Over 1.4 million military personnel were killed in the war (only 6% were members of the United States armed forces), while estimates of civilian fatalities range from 2 to 5.1 million. On April 30, 1975, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon fell to the communist forces of North Vietnam, effectively ending the Vietnam War. The Soviet Union and the United States were involved in the space race. This led to an increase in spending on science and technology during this period. The space race heated up when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth and President Kennedy announced Project Apollo in 1961. The Soviets and Americans were then involved in a race to put a man on the Moon before the decade was over. America won the race when it placed the first men on the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, in July 1969. Popular American movies of the 1960s include Psycho, Breakfast at Tiffany's, To Kill a Mockingbird, My Fair Lady, The Pink Panther, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; The Sound of Music; Doctor Zhivago, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Bonnie and Clyde; Cool Hand Luke; The Graduate; Rosemary's Baby; Midnight Cowboy; Head; Medium Cool; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Easy Rider. In Europe, Art Cinema gains wider distribution and sees movements like la Nouvelle Vague (The French New Wave); Cinéma Vérité documentary movement in Canada, France and the United States; and the high-point of Italian filmmaking with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Pier Paulo Pasolini making some of their most known films during this period. Notable films from this period include: 8½; L'avventura; La notte; Blowup; Satyricon; Accattone; The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Theorem; Breathless;Vivre sa vie; Contempt; Bande à part; Alphaville; Pierrot le fou; Week End; Shoot the Piano Player; Jules and Jim; Fahrenheit 451;Last Year at Marienbad;Dont Look Back; Chronique d'un été; Titicut Follies; High School; Salesman; La Jetée; Warrendale The sixties were about experimentation. With the explosion of light-weight and affordable cameras, the underground avant-garde film movement thrived. Canada's Michael Snow, Americans Kenneth Anger. Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and Jack Smith. Notable films in this genre are: Dog Star Man; Scorpio Rising; Wavelength; Chelsea Girls;Blow Job; Vinyl; Flaming Creatures. The marriage of music and movies keeps the spirit of the sixties alive today. Movies about the era are incredibly popular. The Vietnam War is the topic most often considered, with movies like Apocalypse Now; Platoon; and Born on the Fourth of July. The influence of the counterculture and Civil Rights is common as well, as seen in movies like Across the Universe; Forrest Gump; and Malcolm X. The subject material of sixties movies is coupled with, and improved by, the music of the era. The integration of the music into a movie makes it seem more realistic and true to the time period. Motown Record Corporation founded in 1960. It's first Top Ten hit was "Shop Around" by the Miracles in 1960. "Shop Around" peaked at number-two on the Billboard Hot 100, and was Motown's first million-selling record. The Marvelettes scored Motown Record Corporation's first US #1 pop hit, "Please Mr. Postman" in 1961. Motown would score 110 Billboard Top-Ten hits between 1961 and 1971. The Beatles went to America in 1964, spearheading the start of the British Invasion. Bob Dylan goes electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The Beach Boys release Pet Sounds in 1966, ushering in the era of album orientated rock. Bob Dylan is called "Judas" by an audience member during the legendary Manchester Free Trade Hall concert, the start of the Bootleg recording industry follows, with recordings of this concert circulating for 30 years wrongly labeled as The Royal Albert Hall Concert before a legitimate release in 1998 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert. The history of computing hardware starting at 1960 is marked by the conversion from vacuum tube to solid state devices such as the transistor and later the integrated circuit. By 1959 discrete transistors were considered sufficiently reliable and economical that they made further vacuum tube computers uncompetitive. Computer main memory slowly moved away from magnetic core memory devices to solid-state static and dynamic semiconductor memory, which greatly reduced the cost, size and power consumption of computer devices. Eventually the cost of integrated circuit devices became low enough that home computers and personal computers became widespread. When the first working laser was reported in 1960, it was described as "a solution looking for a problem." But before long the laser's distinctive qualities—its ability to generate an intense, very narrow beam of light of a single wavelength—were being harnessed for science, technology and medicine. Today, lasers are everywhere: from research laboratories at the cutting edge of quantum physics to medical clinics, supermarket checkouts and the telephone network. Theodore Maiman made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces. He promptly submitted a short report of the work to the journal Physical Review Letters, but the editors turned it down. Some have thought this was because the Physical Review had announced that it was receiving too many papers on masers—the longer-wavelength predecessors of the laser—and had announced that any further papers would be turned down. But Simon Pasternack, who was an editor of Physical Review Letters at the time, has said that he turned down this historic paper because Maiman had just published, in June 1960, an article on the excitation of ruby with light, with an examination of the relaxation times between quantum states, and that the new work seemed to be simply more of the same. Pasternack's reaction perhaps reflects the limited understanding at the time of the nature of lasers and their significance. Eager to get his work quickly into publication, Maiman then turned to Nature, usually even more selective than Physical Review Letters, where the paper was better received and published on 6 August. With official publication of Maiman's first laser under way, the Hughes Research Laboratory made the first public announcement to the news media on 7 July 1960. This created quite a stir, with front-page newspaper discussions of possible death rays, but also some skepticism among scientists, who were not yet able to see the careful and logically complete Nature paper. Another source of doubt came from the fact that Maiman did not report having seen a bright beam of light, which was the expected characteristic of a laser. I myself asked several of the Hughes group whether they had seen a bright beam, which surprisingly they had not. Maiman's experiment was not set up to allow a simple beam to come out of it, but he analyzed the spectrum of light emitted and found a marked narrowing of the range of frequencies that it contained. This was just what had been predicted by the theoretical paper on optical masers (or lasers) by Art Schawlow and myself, and had been seen in the masers that produced the longer-wavelength microwave radiation. This evidence, presented in figure 2 of Maiman's Nature paper, was definite proof of laser action. Shortly afterward, both in Maiman's laboratory at Hughes and in Schawlow's at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, bright red spots from ruby laser beams hitting the laboratory wall were seen and admired. As the late fifties gave way to the early sixties, the rockabilly stars of the previous decade (the Everlys, Elvis, Roy Orbison) were still having hits, but the older pop-music stars were fading away as they struggled to find material that would click with this new and energetic generation of kids. Pop music gradually became controlled by new young "vocal"-groups, taking their power from a combination of the performer's charisma along with the songwriting talents of the production team, who operated behind the scenes. Eventually rock artists came to be expected to write and even produce their own songs, becoming responsible for everything about how their records sounded--but that would have to wait for Marvin Gaye, Brian Wilson and Lennon & McCartney. In general there were four main pockets of early 60's pop: the East Coast DooWop and girl groups were singers and groups whose origins are in the streetcorner a cappella groups found in many urban centers. With very rare exceptions, these groups did not write their own songs, but relied on their handlers to set up the recording sessions, pick the material, and produce the records. In fact, many of these behind-the-scenes people eventually became stars in their own right in the seventies. The R&B and Soul scene included many talented people who often didn't receive the popularity of less-talented white groups, because of barriers and prejudices against buying "race" records. Later in the decade, after the British groups acknowledged their debt to soul music, and as the civil rights movement inspired black pride, the general American public rediscovered these performers. the California scene was first dominated by instrumental surf groups like the Surfaris, the Crossfires, and Dick Dale & the Del-tones. Dale, the "King of Surf Guitar," in particular helped define how modern rock guitar solos would sound. Then the Beach Boys added vocal harmonies to the surf sound. This surf-&-drag, fun-in-the-sun sound was so popular that the style showed up all over the place, even in tv theme songs such as the Munsters and Hawaii Five-O. But the real important stuff was happening in the recording studios, where young studio wizards like Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and the team of Sloan & Barri began turning the studio itself into their instrument, looking for new sounds in a quest not for records but for productions. There were studio svengalis back east, too, including Bob Crewe and the team of Burt Bacharach & Hal David. Modern artists like Prince, Lindsey Buckingham, and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who use synths and samplings, are rather like the spiritual descendants of those white suburban teenagers, taking their distinctive sound with them regardless of the particular artist they happen to be working with. Troll dolls, originally known as Leprocauns and also known as Dam dolls, Gonks, Wishniks, Treasure Trolls, and Norfins, became one of America's biggest toy fads beginning in the autumn of 1963, and lasting throughout 1965. With their brightly colored hair and cute faces, they were featured in both Life Magazine and Time magazine in articles which commented on the "good luck" they would bring to their owners. The troll doll is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a Kewpie doll. Trolls became fads again in brief periods throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with as many as ten different manufacturers (such as Russ Berrie, Jakks Pacific, Applause, Hasbro, Mattel, Nyform, Trollkins and Ace Novelty) creating them. In 2003, the Toy Industry Association named Troll dolls to its Century of Toys List, a roll call commemorating the 100 most memorable and most creative toys of the 20th century. Television became not only the chronicler of what was going on, but an active player in creating history during the 1960s. The impact of television rose dramatically in the 1960 presidential campaign. A tanned and relaxed looking John F. Kennedy debated a tired, gray appearing Richard Nixon, and the words of the debaters seemed less important than the contrasting images. Dramatic television commercials—including one with an image of a child picking daisies and the atom bomb exploding—distinguished the 1964 campaign between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. The war in Vietnam entered American homes via TV--as did the protests of anti-war youth. When protestors chanted "the whole world is watching" at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, they meant watching through the eyes of television. Riots including the Detroit Riot of 1967 came to the eyes of Michiganians vividly and immediately. Television made its most significant impact in November 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Don Gardiner of ABC Radio in New York went on the air six minutes after the shots; television followed in four minutes. Almost every American who was alive and other than a babe in arms remembers where they were at that time. Television is an inseparable part of that memory and of many other memories of the decade.

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