# Family ends year of living like it's 1986. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 29, 2014, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250 "2014-04-29T03:17:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 9:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/21 "2014-05-01T09:30:51Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > Oh, it was definitely 1986 they were simulating. 🙂 Though, no phones or computers? Maybe they meant _mobile_ phones, and maybe computers weren’t as common or powerful as they are now. But the idea of The Comoputer was there, and it was definitely influential. In 1984, after all, Time had voted the computer ‘Person of the Year’. And, I graduated from electronics school in 1985 and bought my first serious computer in 1986 with money I earned from my first serious job… A Guelph family? Ironic that '86 was when the newly formed Unisys pushed the Bionic Beaver (CEMcorp’s ICON) that had been created to provide a computer for Ontario schools. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/22 "2014-05-01T09:52:13Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > I don’t feel more informed now than I did then. I do. Excessively so. ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 10:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/23 "2014-05-01T10:02:15Z")
_Grok’s Nouns and Adjectives_, _Grok’s Verbs and Adverbs_, _Phonics Three_, and \*Chopper Canada and USA \*were all produced for the ICON in 1986. Canada was never the same again. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Count\_Blucher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Count\_Blucher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Count_Blucher)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/24 "2014-05-01T13:10:49Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > They wore mullets in 1876? I blame unscrupulous whiskey sales to native tribes myself… and occasionally poor aim. No wait, that was 1776. Nm. ---
**Author:** ![DCnDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dcndc/32/2842_2.png) [@DCnDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DCnDC)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/25 "2014-05-01T13:28:25Z")
I lived through 1986. It kinda sucked. I was only 9 at the time, but I still recognized that it sucked. ---
**Author:** ![Ann\_Hedonia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ann_hedonia/32/319_2.png) [@Ann\_Hedonia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ann_Hedonia)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/26 "2014-05-01T15:07:52Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > I had cable TV. The Challenger explosion was the first true event endlessly covered on the news, at least other than the JFK assassination. I don’t know about that. I remember days and days of endless coverage of the John Lennon assassination. Of course, I was living in NYC at the time. ---
**Author:** ![Merneith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/57b2e6/32.png) [@Merneith](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Merneith)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2014, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250/27 "2014-05-01T15:28:13Z")
I graduated high school in 1986. It was neither the best nor the worst of times. Pretty boring really. I did a lot of reading. I wasn’t allowed to watch tv much growing up and really, 80’s tv, I wasn’t missing much. (when I came back after college, though, I caught my parents watching sitcoms.) But on the whole it wasn’t all that much different from the life today. Yeah, yeah, “information superhighway”. The truth is most of us have just transfered tv-wasting-time to internet-wasting-time. Our day-to-day life is largely the same. The biggest difference is having a tv camera in our back pockets. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/family-ends-year-of-living-like-its-1986/687250.md?page=1)