What was life like in the 1980's?

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As far as the political climate goes, there was a lot of focus on the cold war and a lot of negotiations with the USSR. That was the primary focus. There were also tensions with Iran which was in the middle of a revolution and was holding Americans hostage, and instability south of the border, particularly in central and south America where communist revolutionaries were using drug money to fund their campaigns. The Iran Contra happened, in which the Reagan administration violated the arms embargo against Iran and sold Iran weapons to fund the Contras (right wing paramilitary groups) in Nicaragua and also negotiate the release of American hostages held in Iran.

News in the 80s was actual news, meaning generally boring serious things and I don't think it was nearly as sensational and biased as it is today. There much higher standards of ethics in journalism.

Most people had news papers delivered every morning or bought one from news paper vending machines....for a time, there were also cigarette vending machines.

Mexico was still very poor and corrupt, and this, combined with the instability in south America, and lax security at the border, helped foster the growth of drug cartels and gangs. Crack proved to be a profitable alternative to cocaine and inner city crime rates began to soar...however this increase in crime was probably more closely correlated with the coming of age of people who had been exposed to high levels of lead in the 50's, 60's, and 70's more than anything. Both New York and Los Angeles were pretty dirty cities until revitalization and cleanup efforts in the late 80s and early 90s.


Illegal immigration was just starting to become a thing and poor Mexicans and refugees from central and south American increasingly tried to escape poor economic conditions and political unrest. I recall a newscast where the reporter said "Illegal aliens spotted at the border," so I imagine it was not particularly common at that point, however there were enough illegal immigrants from Mexico that Reagan granted those who entered before 1982 amnesty.

As for literature, you could always get a hold of the New York Times best seller list for those years. As for youth literature, I think Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were still popular. Judy Bloom was well known, and as far as childrens books, Peggy Parrish was a known author, and The Berenstain Bears series by Stan and Jan Berenstain was still popular. Many of the authors that are famous today were so in the 80s...Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Danielle Steel.

Electronic toys were starting to show up. In the early 80s, Texas Instruments made something akin to a primitive iPad called a "Touch and Tell" where you would place a (nylon?) printed sheet on the tablet and a man's voice would ask you to identify certain things in the image by touching it. The tablet had sensors and the man would tell you if you were right or wrong or what was being touched.



That is not an actual touch screen on it. It's a removable sheet laid over what I can only best describe as a touch board.


Another popular toy they made was the "Speak and Spell" which was made in the late 70s but persisted into the 80s. It would ask you to spell a word and tell you if you were correct or incorrect but it had various word games. It was well reputed for it's "demon voice". The touch and Tell and Speak and Spell both used completely synthesized voices.

Another popular electronic toy was "Simon". Action figures were still popular with boys. G.I. Joe was heavily marketed and a popular cartoon which had a lot of toys associated with it was He-Man. He-Man had a female counterpart who had her own cartoon...She-Ra. She-Ra was He-Man's twin sister. The Transformers cartoon was also very popular, as was The Smurfs, and Rainbow Bright.

Aesthetically, futuristic themes and pastels were in.

Culturally, people were more conservative. Being gay was still fairly taboo, as was race mixing. There was a sit com called "Family Ties" which I previously presented and while it was somewhat of a sit com, it was more of a "dramedy" and touched on serious issues at the time. One episode highlighted the racism still present in society when a black family was planning on moving into the neighborhood and a bunch of the neighbors united in protest because they were concerned it would lower their property values.

At the same time, people had better social etiquette. Ghosting wasn't really a thing because the only ways to socialize with someone was in person, over the phone, or through mail and no one really cared to write letters back and forth unless it was to a pen pal. Most people didn't ignore phone calls because they didn't have a way to know who was calling unless they had an answering machine and were screening the calls, but people didn't often do that either the person might not leave a message on the machine. Those in your social circle were typically people you saw everyday or a few times per week anyway and the best you could do to ghost them would be to actively try to avoid them, which wasn't typically possible, or flat out ignore them in person, which was very rude and something difficult to do over the long term.

1. We had no cell phones, for all intents and purposes They existed, but very few people had them, they were extremely bulky, and maintenance was difficult. Cell phones wouldn't become fairly common until 1999, and smart phones about 2012 or so.

2. But we did have VCR's, especially after about 1982 or so (we had them before, in the late 70s, but they were much more expensive than they were in 1982). 1982, also, was when places like Blockbuster started popping up.

3. A few people had personal computers---but extremely few were able to access whatever Internet existed at that time. Many more people had "word processors," which were really glorified typewriters.

4. In the early 80s, most people who wanted to play video games had to go to "arcades." Video games themselves had only become popular in the late 1970s. There were home games, but they were expensive and usually had inferior graphics to that found in arcade games. In the later 1980s, home video games became more common. The Game Boy was introduced in the early 90s.

5. Landline phones were the norm. There were car phones--but very few people had them. The only way to use a phone outdoors was through a pay phone. Usually, one could not take the phone outside the room where it was installed. More and more people were acquiring answering machines. Most phones were touch-tone by that time; but a few people still had rotary phones (which we called "dial phones).

6. The automatic teller machine started becoming common in the later 80s. Before then, people used to have to withdraw and deposit money through a teller, and had to carry around a "passbook." If you wanted money outside of banking hours, you were out of luck.

7. Credit cards existed, but there were no debit cards until maybe the very late 80s. It was more difficult for a person to get a credit card then, though store cards weren't too difficult.

Adults back then thought we were all going to grow up with our brains horribly melted from watching TV, and deaf from listening to rock music. Duhh, huh? Wha di' joo say?

Nowadays, adults think their kids are in extreme danger doing everything from playing Animal Jam to using emojis, so nothing's really changed.

Very little was known about autism, and what was known basically sounded like your kid was better off with cancer, and as for Asperger's, what's that?!? As a child my parents and teachers thought my sometimes unusual behavior and low coping skills was just part of me being "very talented". My parents didn't like to use the label "temperamental artist", but back then there wasn't much else to explain anything. At least I was allowed to be who I was up until I started Junior high.

it was YOUNGER back then.

Cell phones & the internet didn't exist. Way more kids played outside into the evening. We did watch a lot more TV after school, though. Video game systems were very simple - we had an Atari, then an NES in the late 80's early 90's. Schools had the most basic computers to teach typing and that's about the extent of what they could do. People wore a lot more bright neon colours. Music came on casette tapes or AM/FM radio. Working class people had a bit more disposable income & housing costs were more affordable. People visited each other more often, and talked on the phone more often, because social media didn't exist for everyone to just keep in touch via Facebook. Even though I knew I was, I wasn't out as gay as a kid in the 80's because it was a very different world then than it is now. Meanwhile, now some younger children feel comfortable coming out in elementary school because society is so much more accepting of everyone.

edit: I was a kid, so this did't apply directly to me.. but back then people dated more than they do now I think. w/o the internet & phone apps, the hookup culture that exists today in many social circles simply did not exist to the same extent at all compared to now.

Something even further off my radar (born in 1982), the AIDS crisis was MASSIVE in the 1980's/1990's & many people died before scientists were able to figure out what it was and how it was being spread.

This is a good one. Dr. Hans Asperger first discovered Asperger's Syndrom in 1940's Austria. Thanks to an annoying world war getting in the way of global scientific research, his writings weren't even translated into English until 1991 - 50 years after his discovery & documentations of these traits in children.

So, in the 1980's I was just a regular weird hyperactive kid that got into a bit of trouble. Some of us were also labeled as "gifted," if we were pretty smart.

Leo Kanner was an important reason also. The doctor figured out early on that being a Jew in Austria was a bad long term proposition and he immigrated to America. When here he helpled 200 Jews escape the Nazi’s including one of Asperger’s clinitions who ended up working for him. But Kanner never mentioned Asperger for decades and then only dismissively. Several theories as to why have been mentioned 1. He wanted to take all the credit for discovering himself 2. It would have been bad public relations to to cite science from “Nazi” Austria in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. 3. As a Jew personal animus towards a person he felt was a Nazi. Whatever the reason as pretty much the Autism authority Kanners failure to mention Asperger meant that his idea of autism as a rare childhood condition caused by cold uncaring parents predominated and not Aspergers idea of a Autism continuum. The lead to non diagnosis, misdiagnoses, and belief that autistic behavoirs were evidence of charactor flaws such as weakness and lazyness.

It was Dr. Lorna Wing who noticed while doing a prevelence study that many people had impairing autistic traits that did not meet the strict diagnostic criteria. She found surviving Asperger papers and her husband translated them which lead her to publish a paper describing Aspergers syndrome in 1981. Her lobbying and the 1988 movie Rain Man as well as the rise of the internet later on has led to the recognition of the Autism Spectrum.

I remember that Family Ties episode when they were showing it in reruns during the 90's. It was basically like All In The Family, except the roles were reversed - the parents were the hippies and the kids were the squares. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A lot of sitcoms in the 70's and 80's were more like dramadies. And thanks to the Moral Guardians most 80's cartoons were incredibly cheesy and needed to have some kind of Aesop because heaven forbids if the kids didn't learn anything from watching it. Not that a kid's cartoon or even an adult one *can't* have a moral and not still be entertaining, but a lot of them were just so terrible. There was The Get-Along Gang, which was a gang of anthropomorphic animal kids, and many parents thought it was great but it really had "The Complainer Is Always Wrong" message that so many other cartoons had. If your friends want vanilla ice cream and you want chocolate, you have to eat the flavor they want, even if it doesn't really matter because you're all buying individual cones anyway, or something like that. And no use of the words "death" or "die", the parents want kids to only have to deal with that when a *real* person they love dies. It was like that to a lesser extent in the 90's and occasionally even now.

the so-called "moral majority" [really a minority of bossy self-righteous dominionist hypocrite scolds] were a thing that wielded power on a national scale. the present version of them supported dotard rump.

This, I had to find local BBS's by word of mouth and from other BBS's.

I remember seeing posted and published adverts for them back in the day.

The 80's were nothing short of amazing. However, I do recall fearing that the end of the world could kick off at any moment. WOLVERINES!! !!

I remember being wowed by beta hifi, then later on vhs-hifi. people didn't believe me when I said I could record 8 hours of high fidelity stereo audio on one VHS tape, using the video sync feature that those decks had.

Perhaps you lived in a much denser populated area? I was a kid that couldn't much call into anything but local BBS's since long distance charges would apply.

Poor beta lost that battle.

grew up in the small big town of Tacoma, WA. even there, 40 miles south of the big civilized metropolis of Seattle, were many BBS at the time.