I got married, had kids and worked 60-hour weeks, so I didn’t have much of a 1980’s myself. But here are some of the things I witnessed:
Desktop computers were mysterious things, and proved that executives could not type their own correspondence
The speed of a fax machine was measured in minutes per page
Cocaine was the drug of choice
Everyone knew someone who contracted AIDS
Cell phones came in bags, weighed 5 lbs. and had a battery that lasted maybe an hour. Important people wore a pager on their belt
Naked photos of Miss America ended up in Penthouse magazine. Some of them were pretty hot
MTV, CNN and HBO. There were other cable channels, but none of them mattered
The government broke up the phone company, and for awhile we had to dial 22 numbers to make a long-distance call
If you think air travel is dismal these days, you never flew People Express
Videocassette recorders cost $400, but you could rent porn and watch in your living room
I was born in 1981. It was a hell of a ride. There were almost no cartoons during the week, but then I got to watch cartoons all Saturday morning. Real, playable action figures were a big deal. Today’s collectible action figures are nice, but not meant for dragging through the dirt. It was amazing seeing the fashion change and develop dramatically through the decade. One of the neatest things was watching technology go through a massive revolution before my eyes. We started the decade with records and network television. We ended it with CDs, cable television, and cell phones. Expand that to now and holy cow. I’m writing this message on a tablet, an item that was a piece of science fiction on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1986.
There’s been plenty of bad experiences, too. Don’t get me wrong. But overall, I’d say I was born at an amazing time.
I was 8 through 18 in the 80s:
In a way, I feel like things were quieter - no internet, no smart phones, no giant HDTV blaring reality shows or 24 hour news.
If you wanted to call a friend, they had to be home. If you wanted to talk to more than one, you had to use call waiting.
A lot of music rocked
Terrorism was a thing, but not to the extent it is today
Our vision of the future was a dystopian nightmare of massive income disparity, crumbing infrastructure, dwindling resources, overpopulated expensive megacities, intrusive technology run amok and everything controlled by corporate oligarchs (assuming it wasn’t destroyed by nuclear war with the Soviets). Fortunately that never came to pass.
Got my PhD and a good job in 1980, a kid in '81 and another in '86. I got promoted twice and bought a house. We lived in a great little town in NJ and were part of a games group, for which we hosted frequent murder mystery evenings.
We got an Atari in 1981, and I got a Commodore 64, and then a cheap PC I bought from work.
You may not have had internet but I had email at work with domain addressing. No web, though I believe we might have just started with Usenet towards the end of the decade.
So pretty good times.
If you had a punk hairstyle you got abuse in the streets. This even happened to me in San Francisco.
Nuclear war really was an ever-present concern. My first job (1986) was trying to raise money for an anti-nukes group. The Day After aired on ABC to great controversy, with Republicans calling it Democratic propaganda. Then we learned that the BBC version (Threads) was so much worse. But most of us in the US never saw it. The Day After was horrifying enough. I was 13 then and there are scenes which will stick in my mind forever.
For teenagers not allowed out or with nothing to do, weekend nights meant staying up after your parents had gone to bed watching soft porn on cable with the sound turned all the way down.
Music sometimes skipped when you listened to it, or you had to hit “fast forward - stop - play - stop - fast forward - stop - play - stop - fast forward” a lot to find the song you wanted to hear.
If you were a department manager in the 80’s, you probably had an admin assistant, or secretary as they were more commonly called then. She would spend her days doing things like calling other assistants to coordinate meeting times (all calendars/scheduled were done on paper then of course). Typing up correspondence and filing paperswork. Calling to make travel arrangements and putting together the itinerary packet, which would include maps and directions. These are things that managers are expected to do for themselves now for the most part, using the technology that exists today. Admin assistants are relatively few and far between in comparison to how it was then.
Trying to decide if this is irony or not. In any case, I laughed reading it. +1
The thing that strikes me sometimes when watching old Star Trek episodes is how good we are at massively *underestimating future technology.
The tablets in TNG stored one document. They weren’t network-linked, and as near as I can tell, didn’t run applications, remote control things, or do anything else, other than display one document. There were stacks of them on desks, because, well, you need lots of technical manuals, so of course you’ll need lots of tablets.
And this was a technology that was supposed to be centuries in the future - but the real thing a bit more than a decade later was way, way more advanced.
Flat screens appeared on laptops in the mid-1980s and I thought, surely they will soon grow to wall sized. In fact the technology improved very gradually.
It is now 2017 and I am still waiting for a Holodec as seen on Star Trek.
Virtual reality seems to be a pair of goggles with a TVs in them! That is not what I had in mind.
There were also desktop computers that could do voice recognition in the 1980s. This also has not improved much. It is really just getting going now and is still somewhat flaky.
Gilroy, to be specific. I remember traveling by train from Chicago to Philadelphia around 1984 and when I mentioned I lived in San Jose, the guy I was having a conversation with lit up. “Oh! There’s this marvelous station, KFAT! Have you heard it?”
I shook my head sadly. “It’s KWSS (quis) now.”
(Dubious look) “What’s it like?”
“Just what you’d think from the letters.”
Apparently it’s gone too because there’s a KWSS-LP in Scottsdale. I haven’t the heart to listen to it.
Perfectly summarized. And this feeling endured to the mid 1990’s. We believed that we had experienced a golden age as far as crime and civility was concerned, and everything was going to be a slide into a slum world for 90% of the population. Kind of like what happened in NYC in the 1970’s was going to spread to the rest of North America. Now, our views of the future in pop culture are a lot more rosy.
My personal take on the 1980’s is that a lot of things were mechanical that today would be electronic. Your microwave was probably controlled with a mechanical dial instead of LCD displays and computer brains. The HVAC controls in your car were levers that shifted the actual mechanism instead of buttons that controlled electronics, etc, etc.
But we had CompuServe and Quantum-Link and BBS’s, but you had to be a special nerd like me to enjoy it. For adults at the time, they had the equivalent of today’s stupid email forwards via photocopier. My step dad used to bring home 10th generation copies of stupid jokes (usually with an adult bent) that slowly made their way through the companies via Xerox and to other companies via fax.
I was in high school from 1982 to 1986, and then started college in 1986.
Heavy metal music was huge. Lots of bands were touring and playing in large stadiums. A lot of male teens had long hair and wished they played in a heavy metal band; it was almost considered a lifestyle.
Ahh, the music… Cable TV was new, and MTV was a game changer. Most of the music in the 80s was really bad IMO. In addition to heavy metal, synthesizers became a thing. Depeche Mode. Ugh.
Drinking and drug use was rampant among teens.
Christian conservatives were everywhere… on TV, on the radio, and even in our government. Google “Moral Majority” for more info.
It was the era of The Businessman. Getting your MBA and making “big business transactions” was considered the pinnacle of achievement. “Power Lunches” were a thing. Ayn Rand was considered a goddess amongst these folks.
PCs were in their infancy. They were expensive, bulky, and required a high skill level to use.
You read (paper) newspapers and (paper) magazines.
It was a tough, busy decade for me; getting my medical degree, getting married, having kids, finishing my residency and going into private practice, trying and failing to stay off drugs . . .
And with the 36 exposure film, you usually got an extra exposure or two out of it, depending on the camera you’re using and how it winds the film. Same with the other exposure rolls (they came in 12, 24, and 36 for 35mm film.)
I was born in '75, so my main memories of the 80s are 8-bit computing (Vic-20, C64 [though I had a C128], Atari 2600, NES), arcades (where you can get a crowd surrounding you watching you play if you were particularly good at a game. Karate Champ was my jam), synth-based top 40 music, hair metal, Radio Shacks that were actually useful for electronics hobbyists, the Soviet Union/Russia as an enemy, two Olympics every 4 years [complete with a Cold War undercurrent], tons of US vs USSR movies, a general overhanging fear of nuclear annihilation, the AIDS epidemic, satanism scaremongering, stuff like that. I don’t remember it being a particularly great time (I thought the 90s were a much better decade to grow up as a child, with Cold War being over), but it was a perfectly fine time for me to grow up. I have a lot of fond memories, and was very much an optimistic child (much moreso than I am now), but there was always this doom & gloom cloud to the decade.
Music. There was groundbreaking music out there, but you weren’t liable to hear it. It was mere flotsam in a sea of mediocrity. God bless the CD and the ease it offered to an audiophile’s library management.
Cars, the vehicles. The 80s were pretty crappy to American cars. Engine management was in its infancy, and this was reflected in performance. The interiors hadn’t been so crappy since the muscle cars of the late 60s - early 70s.
Cocaine. My god, it was everywhere. And cheap. It’s “one hell of a drug”. <serious>Stay away from it at all costs. </serious>
Education. It was cheap and introspective, as well as challenging and rewarding. It seemed that people actually wanted to be smarter.
Libraries and bookstores. Buildings full of books and people were like temples to some and nightclubs to many others.
Politics. Meh… wasn’t too concerned (see cocaine reference, above).
Entertainment. It was the birth decade of the Fox TV Network. Now you had hours of mindless, sexist, violent dribble to fill the sponge in your head. I’ll grind my axe that Fox is responsible for the demise of all American TV. Also, Morton Downey Jr.
Sports. Go Wolfpack, and godspeed, Jimmy V.
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