What were the 80s like?

[CastletonSnob]

From someone who was born in 1992, what were the 80s like for those who lived during that decade?

[Thunderwing]

It was a time of great innovation. We saw the 'firsts' that make life today. The first cell phone reasonably available, the first video games, home computers... with DOS prompt, no Windows until 1985, it was not widespread until later. 

It was a time of much less... uhm... awareness I think is the word I want. Autism was not as widespread, simply because it was not as widely diagnosed. Kids were given different labels and either learned to cope and fit in, or didn't. I was "Shy". It is more probable that I have Asberger's. Kids with allergies learned to cope, there were no special dispensations made for them. I went to school with peanut butter sandwiches. The kid in class with peanut allergies was responsible for taking responsibility to not touch my sandwich. I went to school with a paring knife to peel my apple, so did other kids. No big deal.

Bullying was a fact of life and accepted. Spanking was acceptable. It had only been a short time since the principle stopped paddling children. (I am pretty sure I heard an older boy getting the paddle when I was in kindergarten, but that might be a false memory.)

Pretty sure there was a recession. I know my family struggled, almost hit rock bottom in early 80's (I look back at childhood pictures, my parents were definitely not overfed, my father was working two jobs and looked like hell). We wore only hand me downs and home made clothes. I don't remember seeing anything relating to the whole LGBTQALKJwhatever, it either didn't exist or we were protected from it. You were a boy or a girl. Gay was a thing, but the whole teenager thing going on now with xie xim sie etc etc labels as a way of being different, didn't exist.

The huger your hair, the better.

AIDS was new, just starting to be properly diagnosed. (It's existed since the 50's, but didn't have a name until 1982 or so.) 




We were just coming out of the 'global cooling' scare of the 70's. "Global Warming" was not a thing yet, certainly not widespread taught. Though there was just as much environmental scaring as there is now. I grew up watching the enviro kids shows of the day, the raccoons, sesame street, captain planet, as well as stuff like david Suzuki's nature of things. As now, they all made horrible dire predictions, though none of those things actually happened.   (So that part hasn't changed, just the 'disaster' being promoted changed.)

[rosierjay]

seems like a really good sum up to me.

i do remember a few big scares as a kid.
jacob wetterling being kidnapped. this was a really big deal, not sure if nationally, but i live pretty close to where he was taken.

baseball was a much bigger deal, more important than football.

razor blades and needles started showing up in halloween candy. at least i think that was the late 80's. was pretty miffed about that.

and lots of great movies came out in the 80's. we weren't rich but we did have a vcr. I still have the vhs of all the stuff i recorded back then. lots of movies and sat morning cartoons.

[Honeycomb]

I remember when Tschernobyl happened. That was extremely scary, and in Germany it triggered this nuclear energy fright in everyone; we kids got novels to read that still cause me nightmares today.

[Peloria]

Ooh! I'll be following this thread! While I only existed for a year in the Eighties, I'm fond of this decade :3 more stories please!
::*popcorn*::

[True]

I was born in 86 so all of my memories are of the 90s xD

[kwhite]

I had 6 whole years in the 80's ha, so I remember the awesome cartoons!! MLP, care bears, Jem, Fraggle Rock, Popples, TMNT, Transformers, etc. I remember getting our cassette tape player, walkman, VCR, the original Nintendo. I feel like technology was really getting a foothold in homes at this time. I had an atrociously massive tape player that I would carry around with me as a little girl. I was only a kid but the 80s fashion still sticks with me and some I hate and some of it is still awesome.  Lot's of bright colours and shoulder pads (still hate these). The music was great with Michael Jackson and so many now classic hits playing all the time. It was a fun time to be a kid

No one really had a cell-phone and no internet so it feels like a different time. In elementary school and going into the 90s I remember knowing all my friends phone numbers off by heart. I can remember a time before the internet. it's changed so fast it's hard to believe we lived without all this technology. I'm happy I new a time before all of it.

[Pokeyonekenobie]

In the early 80s, video rental stores didn't exist.  In fact, the first time someone "rented" a VHS tape was some guy who rented his videos to his friends and neighbors for $10/night.  And people paid it because it was still cheaper than buying a VHS tape from the store.  We used to wait YEARS, not weeks (or days), for movies to be available on VHS so we could watch them a second time.  There was NO Netflix.  There was NO Pay-Per-View.  There was NO TiVo.  There was no rewinding the channel you're watching.  If you missed it, you had to hope there was going to be a rerun sometime before your friends spoiled the whole episode.  If you wanted to know what was going to be on television, you had to read a little magazine called the TV Guide.

Cassette tapes were the "in" way to listen to music but records were still widely available during the first part of the decade.  Boom boxes, high top sneakers, leg warmers, crimped hair and off the shoulder shirts were fashionable.  The bigger your bangs the cooler you were.

If the phone rang, you had to answer it to find out who it was.  Answering machines used tapes that had to be erased.  If it was full, nobody could leave you a message. 

There was no such thing as "bored."  If you were "bored" it was because you were boring.  Kids learned to use their imaginations instead of a tablet to entertain themselves.  If you threw a tantrum your parents smacked your butt and sent you to the corner and nobody called the cops because they weren't abusing you, they were being responsible parents and you were being a little *&^% that needed discipline. 

It was also the age of the Music Video.  No YouTube.  You had to wait for hours to see the new Janet Jackson video on MTV (if your parents even let you watch that channel) and if you were lucky enough to tape it, you watched it over and over for hours to learn the new dance moves.  Heavy metal music and big hair bands like Twisted Sister burst onto the scene.  Songs like "We're Not Gonna Take It" battled it out with soft rock hits like "Every Step You Take". 

Kids played OUTSIDE without worrying about being kidnapped.  We played on wooden jungle gyms.  We drank out of the hose.  We scraped our knees and threw mud at each other. 

Saturday mornings were reserved for watching cartoons and eating cereal in front of the TV.  None of that Dora the Explorer garbage.  We watched shows like Fat Albert that dealt with issues like drug use, teen pregnancy, stealing, alcoholism, adoption, and bullying.  There was a special episode that they wanted us to watch with our parents because the Cosby Kids ended up getting in trouble and the cops scared them straight by taking them to the jail to see what it was like in there.  All kids get now is "Swiper, no swiping!"  Punky Brewster was abandoned by her mom at a grocery store and she was adopted by a man old enough to be her grandfather.  She taught us not to play in old refrigerators and how important learning first aid and CPR was.  The Fraggles explored and sang while the Doozers built. 

There were consequences for bad behavior and not everyone got a trophy. 

[Barnacle_lady]

The first years of my youth were the  80s. I had a commodore 64 thats were the pc addiction came from . MTV was very popular and me as a Madonna fan would wait for hours for the new video. But I also liked other 80s artists. We did not have a vcr but a movie box that you could rent. At set time you could watch the latest movies. I have seen Ferris Bueller a lot. Crocodile Dundee was also a favourite. And ofcourse cartoons and toys.
I can also remember the fall of the Berlin wall. It was very hard for me to imagine people had to live that way and now found freedom.
There was also the challenger which exploded in the air.
That wraps it up a bit

[goddessofpeep]

You wanted to look up something, you went to the library and use the card catalog or the encyclopedia.  It was actually pretty complicated to figure out how to read the entries.  We actually had a library class to learn the system.   Later on they put the card catalog on computers, and it became too easy.

VCRs started out slow, but really took off.  I remember a friend of mine rented a VCR for her birthday party one year.  A couple of years later, my family got one, and everyone I knew had one.  And *everybody* got into renting videos.  You had your big name rental stores, and then your smaller local stores, but most convenience and some drug stores had a small rack of movies to rent too.  Libraries also became a great source for movies.  Renting a movie was an event, even if you did it all the time.  Everyone would pack up into the car, and go to the video store.  You'd wonder around until something looked good, and then you'd go home and watch it together.  And you'd actually watch it, not just sit on the couch with a movie playing while you checked your phone or played Candy Crush on your tablet.

Kids were allowed to go outside and play, and even leave the yard and roam the neighborhood.  I got a bike when I was 6, and I was allowed to ride around in the neighborhood on it - no helmet.  You did stupid stuff, you came home injured and didn't make the same mistake twice.  I climbed trees, rode my bike in the street, and did all manner of things that could get me taken away by CPS today.   The freedom was amazing, and I wouldn't have traded it for anything.  I feel terrible that today's kids don't get the same opportunities.  I did have a few times when I got into real trouble(flipped my bike when a branch got stuck in the wheel while I was going downhill, got my shoelaces caught in the wheel and couldn't move).  I just dealt with it  when I got hurt. The one time I really couldn't(my leg was basically welded to my bike, and I couldn't get my shoe off because the lace was so tight), some random kids from the neighborhood saw me and helped me out.  There was always somebody around somewhere, and in general people looked out for each other even if they didn't know each other. 

Roller rinks were pretty big in the early 80s.  Skating around in circles with Madonna music blaring was a great afternoon.

The whole kid week revolved around Saturday Morning Cartoons.  I'd sometimes get up at 6am because I was so excited for that week's cartoons. They'd usually run from about 7am until noon, the best stuff being in the 8:30-10:30 time slots.

You could record songs off the radio onto tape.  If you were really lucky and had a dual tape deck, you could copy from tape to tape and make mix tapes for yourself or your friends.  I'd spend my evenings trying to catch that one song I wanted from the radio.  The first few seconds were always cut off unless the DJ announced it was going to be the next song:p

It was possible to record tv shows onto tape.  It was even possible to set the VCR to record a certain channel at a certain time, but it was so complicated you probably needed a degree in Electrical Engineering to get it to work.

After school cartoons were pretty awesome too, though they weren't *as* exciting as Saturday morning cartoons.  But they were on every day!  They were basically half hour toy commercials, and they worked a treat!

You played with toys instead of toys being capable of playing on their own.  There were some electronic toys, and some toys with gimmicks, but toys were mostly there to fuel your imagination.  They didn't need to do a lot since you provided all the awesomeness.

All sorts of crazy foods were on the market.  A lot of tv shows and movies had their own cereals and special junk food.  And they could market directly to kids.  There were all sorts of prizes in the boxes, and all those cartoon shows had the craziest commercials targeted right at kids.

Not everybody had cable, and there were a lot of local channels available.  There were all sorts of crazy things to watch on the weekends.  I used to watch the "Thriller Double Feature" - back to back horror movies in the middle of the day.  They also had some beyond bizarre tv shows.  "American family living with something weird" was a constant theme.  The most successful of the bunch was Alf - family living with space alien.  They had family living with bigfoot, family living with android that looked like a little kid, and one really short lived one was family living with dragon.  They also had a very short lived show about Snow White and Prince Charming moving to the suburbs.  And another one where a teenage girl had super powers because her father was an alien but her mother was human.  They tried pretty much everything and hoped something stuck.

Computer class involved learning to type with a boring little program, and learning LOGO so you could get the turtle to draw basic shapes and change the screen color.

There was no PG13 rating until the middle or end of the decade, so kid's movies often contained swearing, violence, and other things that would get them slapped with a PG13 today.  It was only G, PG, and R, so quite a lot got through.  To give you an idea, Jaws has a PG rating.  A bit earlier than the 80s, but shown on tv quite a bit back then.  I saw it when I was 6, and that was a mistake:p  You just rolled with it, occasionally having a few weeks of nightmares or gaining a new phobia if you watched the wrong thing.

There was no social media, and if someone was your friend, you visited their house a lot in person.  Photos cost money to take(film) and money to process, so you only documented important stuff, not what you had for breakfast, or that funny looking tree you saw on the way to school.  You also never knew what you got until you got the film back, so picking up your photos was an event.  And almost nobody had video cameras, so having any sort of home movies or video of yourself was *extremely* rare.

If you failed a grade in school, you got left back a grade while all your friends went on.  It was an excellent motivator to do your homework.  My first school still had the paddle if you really misbehaved.  My friend got paddled.  And you could actually get expelled if you really failed or you were a really big problem in the class.   We also had standardized tests, but that was like one week a year, and nobody studied for it.  It was more a week of no homework than the sole focus of the entire year like it is now.

Not every piece of children's programming had to have multiple awful musical numbers. 

The best playgrounds had dangerously tall metal slides that would burn your butt as you slid down them in the summer.  Summers involved frequent runs through the lawn sprinkler, and riding through the neighborhood looking for other people watering their lawns.  If you were lucky, you had a Slip 'n Slide - a piece of plastic you staked down on your lawn, set up the sprinkler next to, and slid around on it.  They had one at a summer day camp I went to, but they didn't have running water so they used dish soap.  They tried that only once....

[Beldarna]

I was born in 1984 so what I remember is the end of the decade and it was so much easier. People were more chill. Mom could send me to the store to buy her cigarettes. I could roam around town or in the wood being so young and none would bat an eye.

Tv only had two different channels and if what we saw was boring we had to use our own imagination to do something else. We rented movies once a week at the gas station. Music came from the radio and we recorded songs from the radio on to cassette tapes which we listened to in our walkmans.

Phones were not cordless so if I talked to someone I had to sit on a stool in the kitchen or the livingroom depending on which phone I choose. I could never talk about personal and private things because someone would always be able to listen. Not that I had a lot of private things to talk about in that young age but still.

We never called our friends to ask if we could hang, we simply walked over and if they weren't home we walked to the next. The playgrounds were so much fun and not as safe as they are now. I once trapped my foot in a climbing net and hanged upside down for close to 20 minutes until dad came and got me loose. But it was fun and not scary at all. Nowadays they've even manipulated the sand so you can't build sandcastles or make cakes with it because kids might eat and swallow it and original sand might lump in the stomach.. Baking sandcakes where one of the most fun things one could do!

There was not as much materialistic competing between families as it seems to be today. My brother had a commadore 64 and later an amiga so all the kids on the block were at our house when they wanted to play video games. If we wanted to jump a trampoline we went to another house. A third friend had a soccer net in his yard so we went to him when we wanted to play soccer.

Lego was just blocks. Nothing was premade as it is today. f I wanted a lego horse I built one. I built my own helicopters and houses from scratch as well, no instructions needed or included.

Tschernobyl, mom was pregnant during, and when the wind brought the radioactive air over our part of the land she miscarriaged. We were suddenly forbidden to eat fruits and berries from the trees and bushes after that. When I came in munching on a strawberry, mom made me spit it out and washed my mouth with soap.

[Einhornbaby]

I remember when Tschernobyl happened. That was extremely scary, and in Germany it triggered this nuclear energy fright in everyone; we kids got novels to read that still cause me nightmares today.

"Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn"... still shivering by the title only.



Pretty much everything posted what I would have wanted to say otherwise

[LadyMoondancer]

razor blades and needles started showing up in halloween candy. at least i think that was the late 80's. was pretty miffed about that.

Actually this never happened anywhere, but there was definitely a lot of hysteria about it in the 80s.    Parents could take their kids' candy to fire stations to be x-rayed.

It was a time when people were beginning to accept diversity, but at the same time there was a lot of resistance.  When people complained about the world "being too politically correct" they often meant:  they missed being able to tell racist jokes, they were objecting to a company hiring a black person ("they are OBVIOUSLY just the token black of the office"), or they were bothered by a commercial showing any non-white person in a TV commercial or by a TV show showing whites and people of color being friends.

Russia and China were scary.  The Cold War was going strong.

There was a backlash against Japanese made cars (Hondas and so on) because they competed with American made cars and there was a perception that they were "stealing our industry".  I vividly remember an ad by an American car dealer railing against "communist Japan".

The 80s kids were known as "the me generation", the perception being that kids were more self-centered than in previous generations.  But since this gets said about every generation, I doubt it amounted to anything.  That said, I definitely think 80s kids were more, er, "self-focused" than kids today.  In part because kids today are so connected to the internet, and the internet brings outside news to you whether you want it or not.

No internet and no cell phones, so it was easy to be "off the grid."  Both a blessing and a curse, depending if you were trying to avoid your parents curfew or had a flat tire in the middle of nowhere.

These days being geeky is cool;  in the 80s it was likely to get you teased or bullied.

I disagree on the Legos, I vividly remember the space themed Legos and the pirate ship Legos being HUGE.  One of my friends had all the pirate ships and I was extremely jealous.  I had a spaceship set (a small one) and I valued the translucent 1x1 squares and special parts like antennae as though they were gold.

[melodys_angel]

A lot of neon and black.  Lights, scrunchies and pants with elastic on the bottom.

A lot of plastic charms. and geometric shapes.

Music was huge.

I remember bits and pieces but I wasn't quite old enough to appreciate any of it.

[LadyMoondancer]

Great point about music!  MTV was huge and so was music.  I think the popularity of MTV was actually part of the inspiration for Jem.

Oh, also anime was unknown.   I think the first time anime entered into the American consciousness was when Pokemon was dubbed, which was the 90s I think?

(I mean, I'm sure there were a few specialized geeks who got imported anime, but the average joe on the street wouldn't know what it was.)