What was life like in the 1980's?

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I graduated high school in ‘89. I lived in a really small town an hour outside of Philly that was its own universe in many ways. I remember:

We could tune in three FM radio stations - thankfully one was pretty good, because the other two were all Madonna and Duran Duran all the time.

We didn’t have a remote for the TV until I was in high school. Dad would yell out for one of us kids to come stand next to the set and push the twelve channel buttons one at a time until he picked a show.

The local public channel showed Doctor Who late, late Saturday nights. David Tennant is my Doctor, but I have fond memories of watching Tom Baker with my brother.

The only fast food chain restaurants in the area were the downtown Pizza Hut, and the McDs two towns over.

There were multiple bookstores in the mall, and no coffee shops. Only old men drank coffee.

Lord of the Rings was so obscure, you had to be introduced to the series by another fan. Same with Dune.

Fashion trends were regimental for girls, we all had to have the same poufy hair with the claw bangs and a scrungie or banana clip.

Politics... sigh. I still have my Dukakis for pres sign packed away somewhere in my garage. The left side of the spectrum kind of went underground during the Reagan years. It was definitely not widely socially acceptable to be a liberal, or to follow the news in any detail (especially if you’re a girl!)

The atmosphere was weird. Society as a whole seemed so cofident and optimistic and relentlessly happy, while at the same time we were fully aware because of local industry we were a second-strike nuclear target. All of the public buildings including schools contained fallout shelters.

What kind of music was being played on the radio during this time?

Lorna Wing translated Hans Asperger's paperwork into English in 1985. She would then diagnose me in 1987.

Took until 1991 for it to get into American diagnostic manuals...

I’m sure people in the big city were offered a bigger selection than me, but our two pop music stations played only top 40 hits, usually the same ones 7-8 times a day. (Bless WZZO, for they played classic rock!) Lots of Madonna songs, Prince, Michael Jackson, and the hair bands like Poison. There were many one-hit wonders that would get extemely overplayed then disappear forever, like Rock Me Amadeus or Hungry Eyes. I remember I was at an intersection once with my car windows down, and heard all of the cars around me playing the same station.

There was a college music station within range, but reception was iffy and they only played REM and the B52s.

There is a radio station where I live called KONO, and on Sunday mornings it plays Top 40 broadcasts from the 1980's!

This side of the pond, the main kit were 8-bit home computers - the Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro, and others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28 - Hey Hey 16K.

And Micro Men - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

It very much depended on where you lived. I was extreamly lucky, we had WLIR. Its “Dare to Be Different” format played British and Euro New Wave, Synthpop, Post-Punk and wacky novelty records. A documentary about the station has been playing film festivals and will be shown on Showtime starting at the end of March

Way cool

The music in the Billboard lists I provided links to.

The early 1980s were when videos first HAD to accompany hit songs.

They were probably more important then, actually, than they are now.

Well, i know that it holds true on that island. In most parts of Europe Sinclair and the Beeb was a rare oddity, in most parts of Europe Commodore and Atari held big chunks of the marketplace by the throat. I only know of one guy who had a speccy, everyone else had C64, Atari 800, C128, Amiga 500, Atari ST as well as lesser know brands like the MSX compatible and Spectravideo. Some people had Atari 2600, Philips Videopac G7000 and some other consoles, followed by NES and Sega consoles much later on.

Consoles was - and IS weak in Europe. There is much more of a tradition to build your own PC (motherboard + soundcard + videocard etc) here that goes back to the 80's home computer revolution.

The graphics sucked in home video games in the early 80s. They were much better in the arcades.

I couldn't play the home version of PacMan; it was just too fuzzy.

The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man was just terrible. The programmer of the game was given virtually no time to make it. The controls were really bad and the flickering was headache-inducing. The Atari 2600 versions Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man were much better.

I wish I could jump into a time machine and go back to when we actually had malls and arcades.

True, but in comparison to the 70 when there was - nothing - it was good at the time.



There are some people who collect arcade machines and restore them to a working condition. Ask around retro gaming forums to find such a person near you and ask if you can visit and pay.

At retro computing/gaming fairs, they usually put machines on display and you can play till you die from exhaustion. Last exhibit i went to (Retrogathering VCE) there were one of each old computers set up on tables you you could just sit down and play. There were also old computers on display (DEC, ABC 80 home computer, ABC 1600 Unix etc) for non-gaming as well as vendors selling old games and hardware. Dangerous for my wallet.

I don't remember, we usually had cassettes or records playing.

But I do have two songs that I remember hearing over the PA, at two different stores. One was Back in the High Life Again by Steve Winwood, and the other was You've Lost that Loving Feeling, I'm not sure which artist it was, but I want to say it was the Righteous Brothers version.

My dad has a big stack of Top 30 USA records that he bought from some DJ, I used to listen to them a lot when I was younger. Most of them have sheets with the "scripts" on them, and the records have the commercials and everything =) I really should try to find them and put them online somewhere, though they're not in the best of shape anymore.


They also only gave him a 4K chip to do it all in!

Pretty much all the arcade ports to the 2600 were pretty bad. Its a very overrated system, and IMO was inferior to its primary G2 competition, namely the ColecoVision and IntelliVision.