No Internet, no Microsoft Windows, No iPods; this is what tech was like in 1984

1984. It's a year synonymous with George Orwell's novel about a dystopian society ruled by omnipresent government surveillance. The real 1984 was a far cry from that. While today, we do have scary government surveillance, that's largely thanks to email, social media, smartphones, and cloud computing. Those things didn't exist in 1984.

In fact, 1984 was 10 years before the World Wide Web (commonly called the internet) was born. It was the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected as president; the telephone monopoly Bell System was officially dismantled and AT&T launched; and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was born.