There were daisy-wheel printers available as well, which produced output much like a typewriter — same mechanism, basically, just driven by a computer instead of a human at a keyboard. Their output speed — measured in characters per second, not pages per minute — was atrocious. But, their legibility was much better than the early dot-matrix printers.
Some teachers wouldn’t accept papers rendered by dot-matrix printers, so it was a good idea to ask in advance.
I graduated high school and joined the army in 1982.
Most restaurants had smoking & non-smoking sections. You would tell the hostess how many people were in your party and if you wanted smoking or non-smoking. You could still buy cigarettes from vending machines in bars, restaurants and sometimes laundromats.
MTV played music videos 24-hours a day, 7 days a week. Most of these videos were top 40, with lots of New Wave, R&B and a little Heavy Metal. I think it was 1983 when Kurt Loder started hosting music-related news on MTV. There were no game shows on MTV.
Most people still didn’t have cable TV, which meant they only got the 3 big networks, a couple PBS and one or two UHF stations.
The USSR was involved in Afghanistan, and people were starting to call it “The USSR’s Vietnam”.
China wasn’t a big exporter of manufactured goods. It was “Made in Taiwan” for cheap stuff, and “made in Japan” for average quality electronics. Japan produced good cars, especially the Toyota 4WD pick up. Nissan was called Datsun in America and made a good pick up, but not as durable nor fashionable as Toyota. Subaru made rugged, dependable little cars too. Most of the cars on the road in the USA were American made.
There were very few Latin American migrants in the US compared to now. Most of the people working fast food and cutting lawns were teenage kids. “Foreigner”, when not referring to a power-pop band, usually meant someone from Europe or East Asia. Mixed-race couples were much less common than they are now.
There were fewer check-cashing businesses. Credit cards weren’t used nearly as often, and were run on a little hand-powered machine that imprinted the number using carbon paper. The clerk had to call the credit card company to verify that your card was still good. Nobody used a credit card at the grocery store. More people wrote checks. ATMs were new and many banks didn’t have then yet. All this changed with the advent of the internet.
Originally Posted by pkbites View Post
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.
What in the Blue Blazes are you talking about?
According to the inflation calculator $1.30 in 1982 bought the same amount of goods $2.86 buys today. It has nothing to do with what the price of gas is today. it has to do with the value of the American Dollar.
I graduated from high school in 1981 and went off to university.
In the spring of 1981, I was sitting in my grade-13 calculus class, when the teacher said that he had a surprise for us. He and a student left the room and came back with a computer. It was a Commodore SuperPET, a rather bulky and heavy beast, and the student was carrying it awkwardly. I distinctly remember thinking, “Wow! A computer so small one person can carry it!”
I remember this. Oftentimes the ‘non-smoking areas’ were merely nominal; there was no attempt to physically separate the rooms or air circulation.
We couldn’t get MTV in Southern Ontario due to CRTC regulations. But everyone knew about it anyways. The competing Canadian service, MuchMusic, was considered to be better.
In the Greater Toronto Area, we could get CBC, CTV, Global, CBC French, and stations from Barrie and Hamilton over the air. There were also the stations from Buffalo, NY. If you lived east of the city, you might have been able to pull in Rochester stations.
Lots of people had cable TV; for some reason it really took off in Canada. But there wasn’t a ‘cable box’ attached to your TV; it was called a ‘converter’ and converted all the channels to Channel 3 so that your TV could receive them. One popular model had a row of 12 buttons to choose a channel from a set of 12, and a three-way switch at the side to choose which set of 12.
Fancy TV sets were ‘cable-ready’ and could tune the analogue cable signals directly. Some were ‘stereo-ready’, decoding television signals with stereo sound, and there was an attempt to promote ‘component television’, where the tuner was separate from the monitor and the speakers.
Well-off people had VCRs, which were huge. I remember my stepfather’s VCR had a remote: a pause button on a cord. Even by the late eighties, though, VCRs had become the family entertainment staple.
The USSR was a Monolithic Menace on the far side of the world. There was little idea that it might be as fragile as it ended up being.
I read later that the Soviet menace had always been talked up and inflated to some degree, possibly to justify big US military budgets; at the time I read Heinlein’s essay in Expanded Universe in which he looked at the infrastructure of Moscow from a logistical point of view–railway capacity, roads, water traffic, etc–and came to the conclusion that it was about a quarter smaller than it was popularly portrayed, but that was far from the viewpoint you got on the news.
Well-off people wanted the high-end Japanese brands like Teac and Denon. Rich people bought obscure German brands that cost five times as much.
There was already a budding Japanese tuner culture, though, by 1985 or so; the Honda Civic was already inexpensive, dependable, and modifiable.
In Southern Ontario in Toronto…
Italians and Portuguese, since their migrations in the fifties, made up the bulk of the settled immigrants.
Recent East Europeans were rare; there’s been a big migration just after the Second World War and then little after the Iron Curtain divided Europe. But there were plenty of Ukrainian-descended people from the migrations out west from the 1890s on.
Toronto already had a lot of East Asian people. The Chinese had been here since the 1880s, and the Boat People, the refugees from Vietnam, were in the recent past.
South Asians were less common; their big migration was just starting.
It was rare to see anyone in a head-scarf, and we’d never heard of the burqa.
My first bank account was traditional with a bankbook. By the time I was at university, in September 1981, there was an ATM at the bank branch on campus. But you still had to be a member of that bank to start with.
A little later the banks connected their branches and ATMs, calling it some variation of ‘multi-branch banking’. But you could only use an ATM belonging to your bank. A little later still, the banks started Interac, which joined their separate proprietary ATM networks. And in the early nineties, Interac rolled out the point-of-sale terminal for banking cards, which became debit cards and now account for more purchases than cash.
Then the inflation calculator is off quite a bit when it comes to gasoline. In my neighborhood, gas was selling for $1.89/gallon, not $2.86/gallon, on the day you posted that comparison.
I don’t know how the inflation calculator is determining that $1.30(1982) = $2.86(2009), but that ratio doesn’t hold true across all commodities (and for that matter, in all locations; IIRC the price of gas varies widely depending on where in the US you’re located). Since gasoline costs less than the $2.86 figure that the inflation calculator comes up with for whatever sampling of goods that it uses to make that determiniation, there’s probably something which cost $1.30 in 1982 which now costs quite a bit more than $2.86 to buy now.
Cheers,
bcg
There is not a single uniform measure of inflation but generally inflation is tracked against a basket of representative goods to quantify the change in value of money over time. That is, a dollar in 1982 is worth how many dollars in 2009.
You can’t use it to project a specific product like you’re suggesting because you’re right that we would never expect all prices to increase at the same rate. For instance, consumer electronics tend to drop in price in real terms over time. On the other hand, college education prices have increased incredibly fast.
You can compare how prices for specific goods have changed over time by taking into account inflation. Specifically, if the “real” price of gas did not change from 1982 to 2009, you would still expect to pay $2.86 for the same gas because of inflation. If gas is actually nominally cheaper than $2.86 then in real terms gas is less expensive than it was in 1982.
Now that’s just wrong. It took forever to START the ketchup flowing. Then 80% of the bottle would dump on to your plate at once :p.
Apparently we’ve all forgotten the great menace of the eighties. Greater than nuclear weapons, or AIDS, or Soviets.
Satan!
He was HUGE in the eighties, and all the nutters were terrified that their children were being recruited into satanic cults. Dungeons and Dragons? Satanic. Proctor and Gamble? Run by Satanists. Backmasking? Subliminal Satan.
Also, most of us didn’t know Andy Kaufman was a genius yet.
Oh, yeah. Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Motley Crue, and later Metallica, W.A.S.P. and Slayer were the devil music. Just like Little Richard, Chuck Berry & Jerry Lee Lewis were devil music in the 50’s.
Seriously, Satanic Panics were a big deal. I think this says more about the people who believed that crap than anything else.
Tipper Gore led a crusade to clean up music in the mid 80’s.
Dave’s not here, man.
The growth of cable TV households in the U.S. 35% of TV households had cable TV in 1982; 46.2% did in 1985.
Less than 1% of TV households in the U.S. had a VCR in 1980. By 1985, only 14% did.
In 1985, only 13% of U.S. households had telephone answering machines.
So, the odds were that your home in 1985 did not have a computer, a VCR, cable TV, a cell phone, or an answering machine.
That’s what I’m getting at, expressed much more felicitously (sp?) than I could. Thanks!
Cheers,
bcg
Some of you people are nuts! Talking about the lack of cell phones in 1982 and the lack of computers as if that’s some big revelation.
I’m sure it’s all a gag, but come one, give people born in 1982 (or 1981 like me) some respect.
That’s from 1971, not '82.
Does anyone remember SelecTV?
In 1982 very few people around here had cable television because it either wasn’t available yet, or they just hadn’t gotten it hooked up to their house yet.
But there was SelecTV and it was weird. Here in the Milwaukee area it came on channel 24. All day channel 24 was a normal UHF channel, playing syndicated TV show repeats like Bewitched and Get Smart. But at 7:00pm the signal scrambled. If you paid for a decoder box you could watch whatever hit movie they were playing or hard core porno at night. If you didn’t pay for the box all you saw was a crazy scrambled pattern and a voice over telling you why you should pay for the box.
reported the spam
By about 82ish I had a portable cordless phone for my house like this one (second image down)
As far as car seats go, they existed in 1982, my oldest rode in one.
True story, my oldest was born in 1979. At the time the only effective infant seat was the GM Love seat. I went and bought one. When the nurse wheeled my wife and son out of the hospital she was shocked that I was going to put my baby in a car seat and not have my wife hold him in her arms. She actually said “You aren’t going to hold your baby, why not?”
To which I replied “Because if there is a drunk driver out there, I don’t want my son back in your neo-natal intensive care unit.” She sniffed, turned her nose in the air and left.
Five years later (late 1984 or so) we attended a maternity tea at the same hospital. The head nurse got up and said, if you don’t have a car seat for your baby, we will not release the child."
So some where between 1979 and late 1984 car seats for infants went from WTF is that to have one or else.
You didn’t list the odds of having a computer or cell phone, but while you had less than a 50% chance of having each of the other items according to your statistics, you had a 60% chance of having at least one them in 1985.
I was born in 1981 too and while I know much of this stuff, it’s cool having a complete picture painted at once. I mean a lot of the things mentioned gave me an, “Oh yeah!” moment reminding me of things from when I was a little kid.
And as for smoking in restaurants, many restaurants here were divided into smoking and non-smoking sections up to at least the late 90’s. I think Longview passed the non-smoking ordinance while I was in college. As far as I know, there’s still no state law prohibiting smoking in public places.
Yeah, and they sucked. If one walked into another room they’d crackle and fade.
Not only that, but back then cordless phones operated on the 49mhz frequency. Which meant that anyone within a few blocks with a police scanner could listen to your conversations.:eek:
But the odds weren’t random. Higher income households were more likely, and in those cases were more likely to have all three, thus skewing the odds for lower household incomes.
