I was born 1972 so I’m about 10 years older, just to provide some context.
It’s not that the lack of computers, cell phones, text messaging, IM, Internet, message boards and email is a big revelation, but I think people don’t really realize how different it made life back then.
As a kid, if I wanted to play with my friends, I had to call them on the landline phone. If it was busy (call-waiting was a big deal) or no one answered, I had to peddle my bike or skateboard over there to see if they were outside playing.
There was no “where r u? we r @ movie”. You always had to plan where you were going to meet ahead of time and if someone was late there was no way to get ahold of them. So you were left sitting there like “where the hell is this idiot?!”
I guess the kicker to me is that people act as if all of this stuff sprang forth from the sky in 1985-1986 and no one born in the early 80s has any idea what life is like without it.
But most of it has only really seaped into a mainstream way of life in the last few years. We’ve grown up most of our life doing all of the things that some of the people are listing in this thread as a shocking change (just like you did in your last post).
Call waiting was still pretty rare in the late 80s when we were playing outside with our friends. I thought it was easier to peddle to their houses too. Hell, if I’m meeting someone we still work out the details ahead of time because being one of those idiots that paces back and forth in front of the theater with a cell phone makes you freeze during a New York winter.
That was pkbites’ whole point in the first place. You were the one who brought up the actual current price of gasoline, not him.
As has been stated, the “inflation calculator” (actually, the Consumer Price Index) is computed for a wide range of consumer goods, not just one.
He was simply stating what the 1982 price of gasoline was in 2009 dollars. In constant dollar terms, then, gas is cheaper today than it was in 1982. Of course, the reverse was true six months ago.
Sorry…I"m not sure when unleaded gas first came into use, but 1976 was the first year that cars were required to use unleaded gas (and had the smaller nozzle opening so you couldn’t put leaded gas in them). Leaded gas was still available until the early 90s here in Louisiana and wasn’t banned under federal law until Jan 1 1996 (some environmentally conscious states such as California might’ve stopped the sale of leaded gas earlier though).
Actually, that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed at all. The cover bands today are playing the EXACT same thing they were playing in 1982 (remember, 1982 was almost 30 years ago).
Anybody in their mid 30s to mid 40s want to feel really old? Listen to the song “Heat of the Moment” by Asia…The third verse starts out with “And now you find yourself in 82”. Anyway, there’s a song that was in the top 40 in 1982.
You could smoke in line at the bank, in grocery stores, movie theaters, and in the waiting room at the hospital emergency room. If a smoker visited a non-smoker’s house, the non-smoking resident brought out an ashtray for the smoker without thinking twice.
You could go out in public…to the mall or the grocery store without hearing the F-word, or any other 4-letter words…if you did, it was either a very extreme situation, or someone was going to jail for disturbing the peace.
(Maybe specific to the southern U.S. Everyone at your school spoke English. A classmate who spoke English as a second language was extremely rare, but they still spoke perfect English. Everyone you went to school with probably came from the same racial and religious background. A classmate with a single parent was a rarity, and it was usually the result of a tragic death of the parent, not divorce.
You loaded a film cartridge into your camera then started taking pictures. About a month or two later, you’d finish of the roll (24 or 36 or 48 frames). Then you’d take it to the store for developing. They probably had one-hour photo by then, but it was expensive. It took about a week to get it back the less expensive way.
I was in high school in ‘82. I took a typing class because I knew that some people made money by typing other students’ papers in college, and thought I might need to do that. However, I didn’t get a typewriter until a few years later, so almost all my college work was written by hand. Word processors existed, but I thought a typewriter was just as good. My electronic, daisy-wheel typewriter was really amazing to me. I was blown away by having such an expensive piece of technology to call my own.
In '82 it was still common for people to refuse to “talk to a machine.” They’d hang up on your answering machine and feel affronted.
Stalking wasn’t a crime yet, and didn’t have a name.
There was no call blocking service yet, and telephone harrassers could be really annoying and even frightening.
The point, which Justin_Bailey made as well, is that those of us born in the early to mid 80s went through the same thing. I always called my friends on land lines, and call waiting was a big deal for us too, as were answering machines.
If anything we saw the transition more acutely than someone like you, born 10 years earlier. For instance, as cell phones gradually became affordable I saw more and more adults using them, but never kids. When that happened from your perspective, you were already old enough to make an adult decision to buy a cell phone if you wanted one.
Or put another way, it’s only been relatively few years since there was a “debate” about whether teenagers had any need for cell phones. Before that they were too expensive for most anyone to give to kids, then they were affordable but people argued they were unnecessary, and finally now people generally feel it’s good to keep kids in contact if they’re doing activities on their own. As a child of the 80s, I went my teenage years without a cell phone and only got one when I was on my own at 18 right around the time other people started buying them for their kids. It’s the 90s kids who really had instant communication as soon as the were old enough to work the buttons.
Likewise with the Internet - I was so fascinated with the concept that I really pushed my parents to get me connected. It wasnt something routine I had my whole life, it was new and exciting and frankly most of my friends didnt know much about it because they weren’t nerdy enough.
I’m having a ball experiencing what the world was like when I was a kid:I’m watching “Mad Men”. Born in 1958, that’s the world of my earliest memories. Very trippy.
To answer the OP question: Almost no one had cable TV. In LA we had the Z channel. Some lucky people had… damn, what was it called? “ONTv”? Anyone remember?
MTV was born in '82, I think…but like I said, hardly anyone had cable.
Lucky! All we had was a really, really long cord. But I could totally stretch that sucker all the way to my bedroom. I didn’t have to talk in the kitchen.
Some stoves and furnaces still had pilot lights, so you had heat and could cook if the power when out.
Yellow pages; instead of the internet, we had the Yellow pages. If you needed a dog-groomer, plumber, or the name of a florist, you flipped through the huge book with the incredibly thin pages. (It was actually easier that the internet for local services) Then you called them up, on your home phone, which was a landline, and about half the time spoke to a person or hung up after twelve rings, because a lot of small businesses had only one line.
By '82, most plumbers had answering machines (remember answering machines?); the florist and the dog groomer might have been able to put one call on hold to answer another call.
Busy signals. Do phones even have busy signals anymore?
I got my Bachelor’s when you were three, and I can barely understand how I functioned without a computer or cell-phone. I have two of each now.
Communication is just so much easier.
Email. I can contact my friends at three in the morning if I have a touch of insomnia without waking them up.
I used to get worried if friends or family were late; now they just text me if traffic is heavy.
I was stuck in a hotel without room internet service recently, and I was professionally crippled. I am that dependent on having constant immediate access to more information and communication than I could possibly need.
My family thought I was crazy in 2000, when I decided to not get a landline for the new house.
I don’t know my spouse’s phone number, but I can get directions from the airport to my hotel in another state before I leave for the trip. My work phone will leave a message on my computer if I miss a call. My boss, who sits ten feet from me, starts every phone conversation with ‘Where are you?’, because I could be anywhere in the world.
I got a phone call from my nephew recently (while I was at the airport), and my first reaction was ‘What’s wrong?’, because he wasn’t emailing or texting me. I send him pictures of plants I want to identify over my cell phone.
No, I do not think any ‘first world’ (remember ‘first world’ & ‘third world’?) person your age can fully grasp the concept of just not being able to contact someone as a normal thing.
(Unless you have an older relative like me, who regularly lets the cell run down and might forget to check one of five email addresses for a week or more. So sue me, I’m a Luddite.)
I didn’t get my first cell phone until 2001 and even then, I never used it. I didn’t have call waiting as a kid, so busy signals were a fact of life. Hell, there wasn’t even a cordless phone in my house until I was 12 or 13. And it was a big deal because that sucker was expensive.
A friend of mine in high school routinely hung up on the answering machine because he didn’t like talking into a machine. For a very long time, I was the only member of my group of friends that had the Internet at home (this was in the late 90s/early 2000s). So if they were home for break and I was home for break we had to coordinate around landline phones because they couldn’t access their email, and our cell phones were prepaid because that was all a bunch of college kids could afford. And texting was still a few years in the future yet.
I repeat, we witnessed all of this “old stuff” and know about it firsthand. As Fuzzy Dunlop wrote, we’re probably more aware of the change than people in your age group because we have had to live in both worlds for major parts of our lives.
If you really want to find kids that have always been connected, you have to grab the group that’s in college right now. The children born in 1991 or later, they’re the ones that could relate to this “I lived in a world without the Internet!” and have it mean something.
You remember the dark ages better than I do. And your friend is even more of a Luddite that I.
But, a person born in 1982 was probably just developing independent contacts outside of the family by about 1990; they were dating by 1998.
Most of my friends could not use the landline after ten o’clock at that age; my stepson was Chatting with his friends and sweeties 24/7 by that age, and we were not rich or neglectful parents.
I never had a cordless phone. I never had landline voice messaging & call waiting; I went from a land line with an answering machine (picking up the messages erased them) to cell only.
1990 is not 2009 or even 2001. Cell phones existed but not in any great numbers. My uncle had a car phone for his business and the thing was the size of my nine-year-old arm.
When I was a kid, I had to be off the phone by nine. As I got older, that stopped being an issue, but I wasn’t given free reign of the phone more or less until I was an adult. Although this had just as much to do with 9-10 being my mom’s time to chat with friends, family and neighbors on the phone.
This is neither here nor there. These things did not exist in great numbers until the kids born in 81/82/83 were well aware of the world. We remember what it was like to live without them and we saw the change.
Hell, I’m living through another change right now. I’m in grad school and I have never had a great affinity for my cell phone. Some people my age use them religiously, but others just have them to have them.
Yet, every undergrad I see has that phone permantly glued to their head. It freaks me out because I can’t imagine using a cell phone like that and even the people I know who are heavy cell phone users would never dream of being so tethered to it.
Being that connected scares me and a part of me will always pine for those “dark ages.”
We had WHT, which had a similar set up- a normal UHF channel part of the time and a special antenna and box for the movies and porn at night. If you didn’t have the box, you got a scrambled pattern, but could sometimes hear the dialogue. I also knew people who had just HBO- no other cable stations with a similar set up.
I’m also 27. I got my first cell phone in the early 00’s, but it was a Tracphone that was only used for emergencies. And most of the time, I forgot to buy cards for it so it didn’t work anyway. I know damn well what it’s like to break down and have to walk several miles to get to a pay phone.
I got my first real cell phone about 3 years ago. I also got VoIP around that time. My first dealings with the internet was when I was 17. I was dialing up with a 14k modem, soon replaced with a 56k modem. (But our two phone lines were multiplexed so I only got 26k.) I remember getting our first PC when I was 10. It was a 386 which ran Geoworks instead of Windows. Before that, when I was 7 or 8, we got a Tandy Color Computer 3 (similar to a TRS-80) which I learned to program in Basic on.
But anyway, yeah, I think we know pretty well what it’s like not to have internet and cell phones. Computers? Not so much.
Oh yes, I remember that - to be strictly accurate, HIV was walled HTLV-III for a little while. In 10th grade health class, in 1985, we had to write and present a report on a disease and its implications for public health; I got assigned leukemia and in the course of my research came across the HTLVs. From what my fifteen-year-old self could glean from the reports, some researchers thought HTLV-I and -II caused the various leukemias, and -III caused AIDS. Now it appears that HTLV-I is blamed for a relatively rare form of adult leukemia, and the virus that causes AIDS has of course been renamed HIV, and doesn’t seem to be related to the (now) four known HTLVs.
Another sign of the times: shortly before we were assigned this report, my mother had told me about when she, her brother, and their father all had tuberculosis. She and her brother got well, but their father unfortunately did not, and died when the children were still fairly young. So I asked to write about tuberculosis, figuring my mother’s story would make an interesting addition to my report. I wasn’t allowed, because everyone knew TB was almost extinct. :smack:
Everyone at your school spoke English. A classmate who spoke English as a second language was extremely rare, but they still spoke perfect English. Everyone you went to school with probably came from the same racial and religious background. A classmate with a single parent was a rarity, and it was usually the result of a tragic death of the parent, not divorce.