That one surprises me given how fast people got over Nixon and thought it a good thing he was pardoned, and so forth. I know it didn’t involve the populous the same way, and wasn’t as widespread, but it certainly hit people’s ability to just forget.
If you go further back there there are other incidents, but they were forgotten enough by then that no one could remember them as a point of comparison.
I would tell them about things that have mostly disappeared:
Phonebooks? Gone.
Phonebooths? Gone.
TV repair person? Gone.
Paper newspapers? Not completely gone. But they’re on their way out. Same with paper magazines.
Cars don’t have carburetors anymore. Which means they can start in the winter with no problem.
C.B. radios are not used much anymore. (Though they may have been on their way out by 1985.)
The punk culture of the 1980s used to publish these paper magazines called “zines.” They’re no longer around.
The era of rock music will end around 1992.
Women (and some men) getting “perms.” (Curly hair.)
Malls are dying. Many have shutdown.
This has already been mentioned, but people don’t use voice communication much anymore. And there’s no longer such a thing as a “long distance phone call.” (Back then, calling “long distance” was expensive.)
Participation in amateur sports. Not completely dead. But lots of adults in the 1970s and 1980s would do some kind of sport or physical activity during the evenings or weekends (e.g. softball, golf, tennis). I remember when racquetball courts were being built everywhere. Have they been repurposed?
Cigarette smoking in public.
One thing that I am surprised has not shown up in this thread is Aluminium oxynitride, AKA transparent aluminium.
However many decades prior to 1985 many folks were happily buying all sorts of amazing things from a black and white drawing in a catalog. Entire homes, in fact!
Carburators were well on their way out by 1985. This wouldn’t surprise anyone.
And are computers that are much more powerful than anything you can get today.
Speaking of such early private services…those all charged for connection time.
I think that might be a reverse disbelief, though. If you told somebody in 1985 that hourly charges would go away, they would believe you. If you tell somebody under 40 (or so) now that you used to have to pay by the minute to connect, that would seem ridiculous.
And referencing earlier in my post, tell somebody in 1985 that in the future an ellipses will contain an air of foreboding and bad things left unsaid:
I can’t make it tonight…maybe next week
The way to convey the Boomer meaning to a Millennial would be
I can’t make it tonight
maybe next week
(though I probably picked the wrong emojis)
Landline active and paid for? I have one leading to my house but never called the TPC to get it live when we moved in.
Hell, at the previous house we hat two POTS lines, one for dial-up, for about five years. The lines were rickety and when it rained the hash would interrupt the dial-up’s connectivity. I complained for years but nothing was done. When Cox arrived in the neighborhood I signed up for high-speed and dropped one phone line, then six months later when they offered phone service as well as cable and data, I dropped the last line.
After that, every couple months I’d get a letter from PacBell saying, “We want you back!” and, “We now have DSL!” I never responded.
Well, active, yeah, in that I get the occasional call from the occasional telemarketer; and, as for paid for, as far as I can tell I’m not, y’know, paying for it.
Must be a hiccup in TPC’s billing department. They used to be very good at that.
Thing is, said telemarketers uniformly ask for “Roberto,” and I guess it’s possible that his credit card is still on file, and still getting billed every so often, and maybe he’s just not very good at noticing it?
“You know, we actually used science and cooperation to solve… yes, solve… the ozone hole.”
“No shit? I can’t believe it!”
“Then we used our experiences there and somehow shifted to climate denialism and fascism.”
“Ok, yeah, that I can believe.”
“President Trump picked a fight with a 16yo autistic Swedish girl about climate change.”
“What? That’s English, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“She won the argument.”
“Well, yeah, Donald is an idiot. Anyone who watched him with the USFL knows that.”
… damn, this exercise is hard. 
Must say I’m surprised to read that. Is that really not a thing anymore in the States (assuming that’s where you are writing from), because it seems to me that in Europe plenty of people are involved in amateur sports.
That column you like so much will turn into a real-time, interactive discussion group that people will access through electronic devices in their homes or even on the street, and they’ll spend hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of their lives doing so. Why, just the other day, they got into a long discussion about what you might find surprising in 2022.
“The President of the United States is a reality television star and frequently uses Twitter to communicate with the public.”
That’s not the crazy part, although that’s a good one. The crazy part is that this is the answer I got when I asked an Artificial Intelligence the question.
From 1985: “What’s Twitter?”
From 2022: “It was invented by the same person who invented Square.”
“Square…?”
A post on mastadon made me think of this one. There have been others posts similar, but in search none quite this unbelievable to somebody in 1985 who even knew what it meant.
In the future most people will carry a Unix computer in their pocket.
…but 99% of them don’t know what “cd” does, nor does their pocket computer let them do so, even if they did.
I was using BBS’es in 1985 on my brand new Macintosh. 
What would not have made sense to me back then was the idea of using the Internet as an information search tool-essentially Google. The Internet was well established, at least for a small subset of people, but it was the way we connected one site to another. You had to know about the site and what it did, then go to it yourself. There were lists of sites by the late 80’s, but searching was still your job. The internet simply allowed you to connect to anywhere.
I still remember the day in 1991 when a knowledgable friend answered my question about a document by pointing me to the document on the internet. Which he had found by a search. I was floored. You could find information directly, not just a site containing the information? The internet was born. Obviously I was catching up to the people who had built these early structures, but I was amazed. I didn’t have to go to the site library and request an inter-library loan. I didn’t even have to leave my desk. The world changed forever.
That $50 Peavey practice amp will sell for $1000 in the 2020s. Stock up!
