In the '80s, bands in bars used to play covers of fairly new music, unlike today when they mostly play 30 year old music.
The Toyota Camry was introduced in 1982. TWA, Eastern, and Pan Am were all in business.
Personal computers did not have mice or graphical user interfaces. Atari made computers for home use, as did Tandy Radio Shack (the TRS or “Trash” series).
There were no cell phones in the US (AT&T introduced the first cellular telephone system in the US in 1983). AT&T agrees to divest itself of its local telephone service, effectively opening up the long-distance market to competition.
EPA recommended that Times Beach, Missouri be evacuated because of dioxin contamination.
In the NFL, the Raiders and Rams were in LA, the Colts in Baltimore, and the Cardinals in St. Louis. Milwaukee was in the American League in baseball.
Actually, 1982 was the year that AIDS became AIDS.
By September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS, and properly defined the illness.
Some of the other things I remember about 1982 is:
Many places still didn’t have touch tone telephone service.
There were still many phone booths around with doors to keep out noise and whether.
The majority of people (at least around here) didn’t have cable TV.
You could smoke in the library.
There were quite a few theaters that played X-rated movies.
There were lots of drive-in theaters
A gallon of gas was about $1.30 and a postage stamp was 20 cents. Adjusted for inflation that’s about $2.86 and 44 cents respectively.
Ronald Reagan was President and I slept like a baby at night.
And kids don’t actually go trick-or-treating anymore where you live? Please tell me that isn’t true. 
The economy was worse than it was now, I recall many men losing manufacturing jobs. This was going from an industrial to service economy, and it was heartbreaking to see so many men suddenly not being able to afford a house. I would see men cutting grass to make ends meet.
I had started my second year at U of Chicago and the only job that had a future was supposedly accountants and nurses. There were too many physicans, WAY too many therapists, computers were only for rich or businesses so those were already filled up.
The biggest technical change was the Sony Walkman which was going for about $150.00 and that is when I could get a 2 bedroom flat for $200 a month including utilities.
AIDS was horrifying. Not only didn’t we know HOW it was spread, there was no test to tell even if you had it. Imagine that, there was NO WAY to tell if you were even sick, much less no one knew how it was spread.
I recall as a gay man it was horrible. Everywhere I looked people were just dropping dead. I would volunteer at a local gay help center and you’d say “Well who died last week.” And there were no treatments, you’d have these rail thin people, with purple blotches all over.
It wasn’t really a great time to be a young guy. You didn’t see your future as much. Of course no one saw computers coming. That was the real change, well they had computers of course, but few people saw them as an every day thing.
Also remember almost no one had an answer phone, faxes weren’t big yet, VCRs were available but expensive.
Can you imagine people sitting at home WAITING for the phone to ring because “he said he’d call and he might.” 
BTW I did an oral speech on AIDS in November of 1981. AIDS was introduced in July of 82, but since I was involved with Gay Help Centers we used that term, along with Gay Cancer and GRID before, it just wasn’t “official.”
1982 was the year Leonid Brezhnev died. Brezhnev had been sick for years, and his mental state was also not good. Many people suspected his nurse was giving him drugs, and that he was hooked on sleeping pills and possibly other substances. When he died, he was replaced by another sick old man, Yuri Andropov, who had helped to crush the Prague Spring back in 1968. Andropov hung around for a little more than a year (much of it spent running the country from his hospital bed), and was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, who couldn’t even manage that. When Gorbachev finally showed up, many people were relieved - not because they thought he was going to make everything better, but because he seemed reasonably sane and healthy enough to have some good years left in him.
Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko were all hard-liners. Andropov, for instance, may have been involved in the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a civilian passenger jet that strayed into Soviet airspace. (The USSR claimed the flight was on a spy mission for the US.) He was certainly involved in the subsequent cover-up, among other things ordering the black boxes to be hidden.
Brezhnev had ordered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to prop up the Soviet-friendly Communist government there. The US got involved by supporting the mujahideen, a loose coalition of Muslim groups opposed to the government and the invasion. (Sound familiar?)
Elsewhere the US and the USSR were involved in local conflicts in the 1980s, though I don’t think any were as close to being proxy wars as Afghanistan. For instance, in Nicuragua, the US supported the Contras, an umbrella term for rebel groups fighting against the communist Sandanista government. In Ethiopa, the USSR was backing the Soviet-friendly government in a civil war that eventually led to the creation of Eritrea.
I’m not saying everyone was living in terror all the time, but it was certainly a dangerous and politically complicated time.
Some do now but not like it used to be. Mostly kids go to parties with games and prizes and snacks instead of going door to door for candy. Some malls or business districts have a trick or treat event but it might be in the afternoon and it might not even be on Halloween. Some families restrict trick or treating to houses they know.
I had just turned 12 Halloween of '82 so my trick or treating career was pretty much over, but the drop-off that year was obvious. I grew up in a small suburb of Boston that was considered very safe. Previous years houses would buy several big bags of candy and run out early. The streets would be full of kids. In 1982 there was only a handful of trick or treaters. Eventually numbers did start increasing but no where near back to the old levels (I live in the city now so it’s not done as much here anyway but that’s what I hear from my suburban family).
There is a lot more attention given to “stranger danger” and child safety in general than there was in 1982. A lot of that is certainly good but sometimes it does seem excessive.
The Chrysler Caravan, the first minivan, was introduced in '83, IIRC.
Rob
Depends on where you are for gas. I just filled up today, and paid $1.89/gallon for it.
Cheers,
bcg
According to Wiki, the phase-out of tetraethyl lead started in 1976 in the U.S., and was complete by 1986. So you probably could have found some leaded gas if you tried.
Yup for all we gained since the eighties in technology , we lost huge in the pursuit of happiness, Im kinda curious about what you would say to someone who is growing up now , and asking that question in about 20 years.
Declan
Oh, much more than that though. Your 1982 choices for a personal computer, at least in North America, would have been:
[ul]
[li]the very first IBM PC — mostly bought by businesses, rarely seen in homes or schools.[/li][li]the popular Apple II Plus. The IIe would be introduced the following year, and would last for the next ten.[/li][li]the Apple III — rarely seen anywhere.[/li][li]the Commodore 64, introduced in August. Big big hit. Also a long-lived machine.[/li][li]the Commodore VIC 20, as seen on TV and in magazines being advertised by William Shatner.[/li][li]In 1982 William Shatner had a new TV series, T.J. Hooker, in which he played a cop. Just thought I’d interject that.[/li][li]the old monochrome Commodore PET was still being sold, though it would be discontinued that year.[/li][li]the Atari 400 and 800.[/li][li]the Tandy Color Computer, or the older monochrome TRS-80, still being sold.[/li][li]the Texas Instruments TI-99/4[/li][li]the Sinclair ZX81, a monochrome machine, or the Sinclair Spectrum with color, introduced that year. Very cheap machines, and it showed.[/li][/ul]
Meanwhile in Great Britain, they had something called the BBC Microcomputer that was quite the rage, but it didn’t cross the Atlantic.
Fellow 82 er here;
http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2004.php
The mindset list for College graduates in the year 2004.
This is the exact thing you didn’t know you needed.
You can backtrack on the site and find different years as well.
I was 7 in 85.
Me and my brother had rear facing baby seats from birth and then booster seats to about 10.
This was the nanny state of sweden tho.
(sorry about the double post)
I checked their list for my graduation year, 2005. Number 7 was, “God has never been a “he” in most churches.” In what church is god not a he? I’m not religious but that seems incredibly incorrect. I’m sure there’s an example but not “most”.
That’s a ridiculous list. It assumes that nobody knows anything that went on before they were born.
Compacts discs came out in October 1982 and at first they were sold like Blu-Ray was a year ago: on a small shelf by itself, with maybe 10-20 titles to choose from, and that was it.
Heck, I’ve seen Mystery Science Theater do riffs on traffic safety films from the 1950s, which included warnings about drunk driving. Wikipedia says (but doesn’t cite how it knows) that DWI laws first began to be strengthened in the late 1970s.
In 1981, if you wanted a printer for your home computer, it would be a noisy dot-matrix printer with tractor-feed hole paper.
In 1981, if you had a home computer, you probably might not have had a dedicated monitor. Instead, you had an RF modulator box which hooked up to the television’s antenna screws, and you used that instead.
In 1981, Pong was already old school. Most everybody had the Atari 2600 (except us, sniff sniff). The 2600 ran at a whopping 1.19 Mhz and had 8 whole KB of memory (though the games were only 4K in size). The cooler kids had the Mattel Intellivision or, starting in 1982, the Colecovision (which ran at a blistering 3.58 Mhz and had 16 colors).
In 1984, the latest all-the-rage supercomputer mainframe was the Cray X-MP. It was capable of running at a theoretical peak operating speed of 200 megaflops. My brother and I were always terribly excited when they had news about the latest Cray computer in Discover magazine. They animated The Last Starfighter special effects with a Cray X-ML! They changed this photograph of the New York skyline to remove the World Trade Center! Wow! By comparison, a quad-core computer today can pull down about 70 gigaflops.
Dangerous toys? Okay: I had a “Battlestar Galactica” original series Colonial Viper, and my brother had a Cylon Raider. Instead of embedded sound samples on microcircuitry and LEDs, they had little spring-loaded red pellets that would shoot out about 3 inches and get lost in the carpet. That is, until some some kid choked on his, and ruined the fun for everybody.
In 1981 you didn’t actually own your own VCR, because they were often very expensive. Instead, you rented the machine for the weekend at the same time you rented the tapes you wanted to watch. If you felt like paying the bigg buxx, you could rent a laser disc player. Oooo, fancy.
The Brick was introduced in 1984 and sold for $4,000.
Typewriters. We all had typewriters. I typed all my high school and college papers.
Not like today, but in 1979 I went to work for Ford writing software to support safety engineering. Air bags were kind of a new thing and seat belts were standard.
Though the mid-70’s and into the '80’s it was popular to have '50s parties with music from that era (you know, poodle skirts, greaser hair, cigarettes rolled up in T-shirt sleeves) but it was a novelty. It was unheard of for teenagers in the 1980’s to listen to the same music their parents had listened to 30 years before. (Now my son loves Guitar Hero and half of those songs were ones I played in bands in the 1970’s.)
For context, I graduated college in 1979.