As someone who was born in 1992, what were the 80s were like for those of you who lived through it?
They were great for me: fresh out of college and livin’ large. MTV was new (and actually played music videos), ties and lapels were wide, as where shoulder pads on women. The music was great, and microbrews were just coming into being (well, on my radar anyway). On the other hand, you couldn’t buy a house because interest rates were sky high (if I told you actual numbers, you’d probably not believe me).
ETA: Just go online and watch any episode of *Cheers *and you’ll get the flavor.
Think “Stranger Things” style of nerdiness for me. D&D and DOS games. Infocom text adventures, specifically.
Got my first IBM PC and remember the joys of playing Frogger and Lemmings on a 16-color monitor. I can remember the smell of the magnetic coating rubbing off of the diskettes, and the sound of the dot-matrix printer.
Oh, it’s also the decade I got married; that was good too.
I loved them. I was young, and went to a lot of concerts. I saw:
Prince
The Pretenders
Talking Heads
John Hiatt
Madonna
The Police
Sting
Sheila E
Culture Club
Eurhythmics
And many others I can’t even remember now
Movies were great, too. I saw in the theaters:
The Empire Strikes Back
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Blade Runner
Ghostbusters
The Terminator
Alien
Aliens
etc.
I was dating around, going to clubs and concerts, just discovering good restaurants. It was fun!
Decade long party with debauchery of every stripe. Good times! 
I was a child. I remember rotary phones, card catalogues, and black-and-white televisions with three channels you had to get up to change. I remember PCs with tape drives. I remember lots of corduroy pants and near-fros. Boys played with He-Man, GI Joe, and Micro Machines. Girls played with She-Ra, classic Little Ponies, and Barbie & the Rockers. Popples were a thing, and Rainbow Brite, and Teddy Ruxpin, and Cabbage Patch Kids. We watched Thundercats and Transformers before going to school in the morning.
No one carried water bottles. You got one snack, in the afternoon, when you got home from school–otherwise you only ate at mealtimes. Nothing burns like the metal seatbelt clip of a K-Car that’s been sitting in the sun all day.
Snow White was re-released in theaters, and then Fantasia. There was The Great Mouse Detective. Fievel. Flight of the Navigator. The Last Starfighter. You couldn’t reliably tell the difference between Han Solo and John Fogerty. Once in a great while a mystical commercial would come on featuring the song “Dancing Queen,” and you wanted to hear the whole thing so badly, but your parents didn’t know anything about it and there was no way to either look it up or call the 1-800 number on the screen to order the cassette.
Your parents got a VCR, and that Christmas, your uncle sent you some dodgily recorded movies from The Disney Channel, which he got and you didn’t.
In the summer, you had to walk around the neighborhood looking for kids to play with. You pulled your toys around in a Radio Flyer wagon, just in case. That one girl’s parents had a belt shaker in their basement exercise room, which was always a lot of fun, and so was their waterbed, if they let you play on it. Sometimes the twins had their Slip 'n Slide going, and you’d run home to find your swimsuit. The neighbors had you over to watch Thriller the night it debuted, and it Freaked. You. Right. Out. So badly your parents had to pick you up early.
You didn’t even try to solve Rubiks Cubes. The whole family gathered around the new PC to see the AMAZING graphics in King’s Quest III.
At school, they bussed in kids from the inner city. It was called The Black Bus.
In the evenings your parents watched the network news, and baseball games, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. You watched all that, too, because there was only one screen in the house. You had a plastic cassette player and you listened to The Jungle Book’s soundtrack over and over and over again. You had a Speak 'n Spell, too, but it was pretty hard and kind of boring. You did your mom’s Jane Fonda aerobics tape with her.
There were no more than 24 exposures on a roll of film. It took a few days to get it developed.
The media of music and movies were already mentioned, so I’ll go with another angle.
If you were a comic book fan, it was an amazing decade. Marvel had Chris Claremont writing X-Men, John Byrne writing and drawing Fantastic Four, Walt Simonson writing and drawing Thor, Frank Miller writing and drawing Daredevil and Mark Gruenwald writing Captain America. On the DC side, you had Marv Wolfman and George Perez on New Teen Titans and then Crisis on Infinite Earths, Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen on Legion of Super-Heroes, and in the second half of the decade, Byrne re-defining Superman, Miller re-defining Batman and Perez re-defining Wonder Woman for a new generation of readers, and Giffen, J. M. DeMatties and Kevin Maguire wrote a funny and exciting Justice League.
I was a child of the 60s, so the 80s were kind of a downer for me. I was just starting out In the Real World, working, at the beginning of the decade and by the time it was over, I was 30+ years old and I couldn’t even trust myself. I thought a lot of the music sucked, and I even started listening to Country music for awhile*. And I mercifully never got into the fashions, so there are no pics of me with a mullet anywhere. I mean, I had a good time with my friends and everything, but as background, that decade didn’t do a lot for me.
*But we did have a killer Country station, KFAT, in the Bay Area that was definitely not your father’s C&W station.
I was a young kid. I remember Oliver North was always on the TV.
Atari, rotary phones, ALF. I remember a lot of TV shows from the 80s.
Apparently I lived through the golden age of VHS. I always remember being able to rent and watch a VHS movie, but apparently that option started only a few years before I remember doing that for the first time.
The 80s were the decade when the gay community was decimated by AIDS. I was living in New York City, and virtually all of my friends, lovers and acquaintances were dropping like flies. I was a volunteer at GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) and also a Crisis Intervention counselor.
But there was one wonderful thing that happened: In November, 1987 I met the man who would become my husband, many years later.
No internet so news travelled slowly and strangely such that you constantly didn’t know what was going to happen, you just reacted to whatever happened as it unfolded. It was both exciting and scary. Because of decentralized information spread, tribes formed based on proximity rather than anything else.
You could get 36 exposure rolls, too.
But film was really expensive, especially after the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market on Silver. Every exposure counted - not like Digital today.
I graduated high school in 1983, and college in 1987. I guess the 80s define my wild youth. Weed, cocaine, ecstasy, shrooms and acid were the common drugs. Meth didn’t exist or at least was unknown in my area. Nobody used condoms. AIDS wasn’t a fear for straight folks yet. My friends largely voted for Reagan, fucked like rabbits and partied like rock stars. Kind of a disjunctive vibe.
I was a teenager throughout. Literally 10 in 1980 through to 20 in 1990, so my experience is heavily tinged with the nostalgia of no responsibilities, everything I love now being first experienced during that time of my life, and the blind naive feeling of hope for my future.
The pop culture was great (a lot of it still objectively holds up today), it was the rapid growth of video games and home computing, and though there was a lot of bad stuff going on (AIDS, nuclear fear, Cold War, riots and unemployment) most of that didn’t affect me at the time, so I could look at it as purely an observer.
Televangelists and Pro Wrestling made great gains. Grunge and Goth came along. Reagan-ism came along.
The 80s were an amazing time for little kids. **Sattua **pretty much nailed it (except for the Black Bus, didn’t have that out here…)
In the late 70s Star Wars created an incredible toy-tie-in phenomenon and for the entire 80s everything was just toys, toys, toys and cartoons & movies to match them. Or vice-versa, whatever. My family was poor as dirt but I still I managed to have a sprinkling of these amazing tie-in toys. (Except Rainbow Brite. And the Get-Along-Gang. And a proper Mon-ChiChi. Who am I kidding - all of the family money went to Star Wars and GI Joe because I had an older, more charming brother.)
There were a lot more people who were ‘wizards’ at something - there’s a ton of simple step-by-step directions for things like how to force your phone to power off or what kind of cable you’re looking at. Back in the pre-internet time, though, this sort of random information was much harder to come by. You’d have to read a manual or get taught by someone, or do a lot of experimenting to figure stuff out, so you’d end up leaning on people for a lot of info you can get yourself now. For example, Sattua talks about their only being 3 channels. But that wasn’t universally true, sometimes specific markets had extra networks besides the big 3, and sometimes you could pick up another city’s TV channels. But which channels were there and how to mess around with an antenna to find them was not something that you easily found out; generally what ‘special channels’ you could get was passed around from person to person. There might be one guy in the neighborhood who could figure out how to work an antenna to get a particular extra channel, or your weird cousin would tune in to a channel when he’d visit that you couldn’t find yourself.
The 80s were a strange and somewhat atypical experience for me. In 1980 I was 24 and just deciding that I was not going to be happy until I did something with my brain (which meant getting a college education), dropped the druggie friends I was hanging out with, and found something I enjoyed doing more than respiratory therapy. Somehow I missed the whole cocaine thing – I tried it and wasn’t impressed by the effects or the expense, and I was ready for a different lifestyle anyway. I moved back in with my folks for several years and started attending community college. I still worked in RT and saved up all the money I could. Then I moved to Corvallis to attend Oregon State University. I was absolutely dedicated to my studies, and took as many courses as I could from all different schools. The middle of the decade saw me living abroad first in Beijing studying Chinese (where I met the woman who would become my (first) wife), and later in Japan where we taught English. So I lived abroad for a year and a half, and those were very influential times for the development of my adult personality. By the end of the decade we were living in Seattle (a great time to be there, I can assure you), my wife was getting a PhD in economics from the University of Washington, and I was working as a… respiratory therapist. When I left college (with a degree in Biology) there was simply no better paying job to be had. And even if I was doing the same thing, I was smarter and so much better at it. I enjoyed the music of the 80s at the time, but don’t think much of it now. The fashions were awful – wall o’ bangs and shoulder pads… I look back on pictures of women from the 80s and am surprised I found women attractive. But for much of the decade I was sequestered from popular culture, immersed in my studies and living abroad.
By the end of the 80’s (at which time I was 39) I was, like, stop the world I want to get off.
And I more-or-less did. I quit my mediocre-shitty job (at a company that would go belly up just two years later), moved away from Silicon Gulch to a microscopic rural town (and just four months later, out of that town to a guest house on a ranch 10 miles out of town), and made myself a semi-hermit for the next 12 years.