What was life like in the 1980's?

Post Reply New Topic

It's been a long time, but there must have been 5-10 in my local area code that I knew of, most being very small, the best one was called Skynet and it could handle maybe 5 people at a time.

I never got to use a puter until the early 90s and MS-DOS/W3.1. I think I missed the golden early days of it.

I was born halfway through the 80s, so I don't remember a lot of it, but I do remember a few years (and of course, all of the leftovers that lingered long into the 90s). Clothing, I remember wearing a lot of solid color polo shirts with alligator badges on them (I always hated them), and short shorts, and those socks with the big stripes on the top.

We had lots of cool toys, but the 4-inch G.I. Joes were always my special interest, so I tended to ignore everything else.

Dad bought a camcorder and was always looking for a good excuse to do some filming. We had a black & white TV for the longest time, I'm not sure when we got a color set, that might've been the 90s.

We had an Atari 2600 and I played it an awful lot: I really liked Adventure and ET, they were the only games I could beat.

Fashion colors were different...kitchens were yellow, and stoves were avacado. Our livingroom had a brown tile floor that had those speckle spots on them, until we took them out and put in brown carpeting. Wood panel was king. It was on the walls, on the TV, on the Atari, even on the station wagon. I think out of everything that has gone away with modern times, I miss wood the most. Everything else just looks like sterile, inorganic nothing to me.

Oh yes, definitely. Sometimes you forget just how common smoking used to be. I was watching Mindhunter, and it's really weird now to see people smoking indoors so much. I can still go to some restaurants today, like Denny's, and say "That over there used to be the smoking section."


YES, yes it does, their prop department really amazes me. If you look hard enough, you can find a few anachronisms, but I try not to think about it

Your movie list needs more Joe Dante, BTW. Explorers and The 'Burbs are two of my all-time favorites, and I feel that modern nostalgia like Stranger Things and Super 8 owe more to Dante than they do Speilberg.


My dad had a pretty decent collection of vinyl (45s and 33 1/3s). My parents had a lot of cassettes too, but I mostly listened to records.

In the 1970s, you learned typing by typing on Olivetti or Royal manual typewriters. I should have aced typing in 7th grade---but I got thrown out too often. I typed about 35 words per minute when I was 11. My mother had a luxury item then: an electric typewriter.

Electric or electronic typewriters stayed pretty viable and common until about the mid 1980s. To me, the electronic typewriter was a poor "transition" item. About 1985 or so, word processors superseded typewriters of all ilks. Personal computers where one could figure out one's finances also started to be common. Many people, however, still did not own a personal computer. Universal computer ownership came with the advent of the Internet/World Wide Web during the mid to late 1990s.

I recently got a electronic typewriter from the 1980's that my dad found somewhere for $3. It is a Smith Corona XD 8000. It even works perfectly and still has ink in it! It is surprising how this thing has survived for over 30 years!



Didn't people use to fear computers back at that time?

Nope. Personal computers were the "thing" in the 1980s. I never noticed any "fear" of computers at that time. 1980s personal computers had very little storage, and a very small amount of RAM. Large "floppy disks" were used. Some people played video games on them; but most of the time, video games were attached to the TV. Many people couldn't afford the Atari games, and went to the arcades to play them---especially early in the 1980s.

I didn't even have a TV in my apartment until 1986---and the one I bought in 1986 was an old Zenith rabbits ears-type TV. And I rented an electric typewriter---yes, I rented it! Electric typewriters were merely electrically-enhanced typewriters. Electronic typewriters had some word-processing capabilities, though they were primitive.

People did fear cell phones in the 1990s---they thought that talking on them could might cancer because of the "radiation" emitted from cell phones.

Ah yes... I remember hearing about that a while ago. I can understand why they probably feared about the "radiation". After all, it was still new at the time.



Did it cost much when you bought it? And how did cable work in the 1980's? I have always had a hard time how cable was obtained in general.

TV's were much more expensive in relation to quality in the 1980s. I spent about $250 on a USED 25" Zenith LOL. The largest TV's back then had about 25" screens. If you had cable, the picture quality was decent; otherwise, forget about it. I had to spend $25 for an antenna in order to get a decent picture on my Zenith.

Cable was dispensed through analog "cable boxes" back in the 1980s. Early on (in the 1970s), you had to change the channels manually on the cable box---though by the 1980s, most people had remotes.

I didn't have cable at all in the 1980s; I knew some people who had it, though. by 1990, when I first got cable, the cable box was similar to the one we have today.

Most people had cable installed by "the cable guy" in the 1980s, and well into the 1990s.

Relatively fewer people had cable then, though the percentage was increasing constantly.

So basically in total that would amount to $275 in 1986. Today that would be the equivalent of $618.56. Wow. Amazing how inflation raises the price!

Nowadays, you can get a much better TV than an 80's TV for like $99 or so. At the very least, it's HDTV, 720p.

Another thing that stands out is the weight of 1980s TVs, versus the TVs of today.

My 1986 used Zenith weighed about 40 pounds. And I had to carry it to the TV repair shop in order to get it repaired. Nowadays, a 25-inch TV would weigh maybe a couple of pounds.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 06 Feb 2018, 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How was the economy doing in this decade?

Early in the decade----especially 1982, the economy was in a recession in the US, and around the world. Interest rates were sky high. Inflation was low, like now. Unemployment was actually a little higher than it was circa 2009. Later in the decade, though---especially after 1984 or so, the economy was in relatively decent shape.

It was easier to get a job. Some jobs didn't even require resumes. If you wanted "Temp" work, all you had to do is take a test in person; and, if you did well, you were sent on jobs the next day.

For a permanent job, one, maybe two interviews were performed before a choice was made. It might take a couple of weeks; you might be hired the next day.

If you got a mortgage, the interest would be in the 20% range up to about 1982-1983; whereas it's below 4% right now on average. As the decade proceeded, interest rates went down considerably.

I'm late to this thread and didn't read all of it, so if I repeat someone else's comment, oops! Sorry

What life was like in the '80s depended - as it does now - on who you were.

One thing that I remember vividly was The Great Homelessness. Not because I lost my home, but because two things happened countrywide:

(1) many city, county, and staterun residential mental hospitals closed, and their residents were simply shooed out of the facilities to survive however they could;

(2) this was the first great wave of Condo Conversions; many apartment residents, especially senior citizens on small fixed incomes, found themselves suddenly homeless because they could not afford to buy the places they'd been able to rent when they suddenly "went condo", with or without any significant renovations.

It was the first time since the Great Depression that vast numbers of people were suddenly unhoused.

And now we think this is normal.

It's ok!

Yep....the first "wave" of deinstitutionalization (from mental hospitals) occurred in the 1970s---but it accelerated in the 1980s.

Yep.....the condo conversions, too. This wasn't regulated like it is now, and it put many people in the streets who had previously rented apartments. When an apartment was converted into a condo or co-op, the renter had to buy the apartment; otherwise, the renter was out.

Cell phones and all the other mobile computer stuff simply didn't exist, at least certainly not as everpresent and easy to use and get items. Neither did the internet, at least certainly not in its modern form. So people were much less connected. I would have no way to just chat up people in Canada, the UK, and Australia for example. Comparing the computers of that day with those of today is like comparing a cave mans club with a samuri katana.

People really did think a nuclear war between the USA and its allies and the USSR and its allies was going to happen. You have probably never thought of Russia as the USSR outside of a history class I'll bet. Military recruiting commercials were like all "Be all you can be" and saying things like success in business started for many with a military life.

It was a great decade for toys and music. The toys of the 80s represented the golden age of the action figure era, and nearly all the toy lines had cartoons to market them. However, unlike the comic book kind of cartoons today, these were aimed at children and not adult fans.

With Reagan as President, it was a very hard time for the poor and underclass. And scary to, because he was in fact a senile religious fanatic with his hand on a nuclear button.

The HIV epidemic of the 80s had everyone talking safe sex. I've seen that your generation seems much less afraid of this.

It was loud and colorful.

Last edited by RainbowUnion on 06 Feb 2018, 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.