BACK TO THE FUTURE: The Gadget Show closes at Birmingham's NEC today but geeks have been looking not just into the future but back at the past. GRAHAM YOUNG reports.

T was a decade of strikes, Maggie Thatcher and Loadsamoney.

IBut the 1980s was also on the cusp of a technological revolution.

It was the decade the original Apple Mac was launched.

So, too, the Sinclair C5 and ZX Spectrum.

A TV commercial made by the director of sci-fi hit Bladerunner helped to change the face of the modern world in 1984.

Inspired by George Orwell's novel, it was screened for the first time during the US Super Bowl.

At the end of the Big Brother-style ad, a few words on screen hinted at the shape of things to come.

"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh," it read.

"And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."

The machine had just 128KB of memory and had two applications - MacWrite and MacPaint - which were run on a 400KB floppy disk drive.

But it was a start, an Apple-sized bite of the future.

That year also saw the arrival of the Amstrad CPC464, a home computer complete with bundled CPU/ keyboard, tape recorder and monitor.

And Atari introduced what many see as the first iPad.

The Atari Touch Tablet had a digital pen to let users draw, paint and erase, as well as to drop and drag images.

In 1985, Logitech introduced its first mouse, the C7, and the Sony CCD-V8AF was the first video camera with auto-focus.

Meanwhile, the Sony Betamovie BMC-100P Recorder was effectively the world's first camcorder.

And the Realistic Pocketvision 3 allowed ten hours of viewing from four AAA batteries.

If that seemed remarkable, then the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in 1985, ushering in the console gaming age.

In 1986, it had competition as the Sega Master System was launched...