Toys of the 70s

Mood Rings The idea behind a mood ring was simple: You wore it on your finger and the color of the stone would reflect the state of your emotions. And in 1975 it only cost $19.95 to figure out how you were feeling... Smiley Faces These were seen everywhere from shirts to bumper stickers.

Pet Rocks were a 1975 fad originated in California by salesman, Gary Dahl. They spread like wildfire to the rest of the country. Here was a pet that took no care and still gave its owner a few moments of pleasure. Lave Lamps were also popular in the 70s.

George Lucas and the merchandizing deal with 20 th Century Fox The Wilhelm Star Wars Thesis on toys?! Groovy!

Pong: The game that started it all. Although it wasn't the first coin-op video game, it was the first video game success story. Pong is essentially a simple game of Tennis or Ping Pong. Each player has a bat that is controlled by a paddle, a ball bounces around the court, and you must strike the ball with your bat, and send the ball off towards the opposing player.

In 1977, Mattel put out Football 1. These were pre-Gameboy hand-held games that basically let the player use direction keys to run his blinking red blip through a maze of defensive blips. A kickoff would result in a chirping version of the "Charge!" melody.

Other Toys

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in In 1945 he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) where he majored in pictorial design. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he found steady work as a commercial artist. He worked as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker and did advertising and window displays for retail stores such as Bonwit Teller and I. Miller. Prophetically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled "Success is a Job in New York." At the start of the 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Maos, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. Warhol also published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again). Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.

M ike Schmidt was born on Tuesday, September 27, 1949, and began his Major League baseball career on September 12, 1972, with the Philadelphia Phillies. The 23 year-old played for 18 seasons on one team and ended his big league playing career in Stats

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's chief executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.