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There wasn't internet pornography. Teenage boys spent entire weekends watching scrambled cable channels in hopes of catching a couple seconds of boob. Each junior high clique had at least one member with a pervy uncle who had a mother lode of "pornos" hidden away near his hot tub.
There was this show called "The Cosby Show". It was about an upscale family. There was another called "Roseanne" which was about a family living in a cold little town in Illinois, hurt by the real world economic crisis in the 1980s.
It's true that the Roseanne show premiered in 1988 but the family was "regular working class". There was no "real world economic crisis" in 1988, but the show did feature real-world working class issues like paying the bills, kids doing poorly in school, etc.
I remember life was tough growing up in the 80s.. my family and I were poor. Parents were immigrants who worked in a sweat shop factory.
I remember nights where my mom would pick my dad up from the factory at 3 a.m. I remember watching him steam and iron clothes, and not get paid.
We were struggling.
I remember being a latch-key kid, waking in the mornings home alone, not having anyone there to remind me to go to school. I missed pretty much most of Kindergarten and first grade. We lived in a low-income community mostly for refugees and the elementary school I attended was maxed out with 60 kids per class room.
Life in the 80s was tough, but it was some of my fondest memories, because there was a sense of innocence in life back then when things were slow paced. What little quality time I had to spend with my family, despite not having much, I felt I had everything.. in that small amount of time we were able to spend together it meant the world to me.
I know. I've been in common stocks since about 1981. Black Monday caused a momentary panic, not a "real world economic crisis in the 1980s" that the other poster was referring to.
Nothing in the real world ever stops a TV producer from depicting whatever they want, and real people do suffer hard times even in the best economies. However, if there was an ongoing economic crisis precipitated by Black Monday, Vice President George H.W. Bush would never had been elected President 13 months later.
I disagree. I enjoyed the 1980s both as a minor living at home and as a young adult getting on with life. Nice and all that but today is far better if one prepared properly for the future. Can be said about any era.
No internet. No cell phones. My husband had a "mobile phone" for work which was a phone actually installed on the dash of his truck; it didn't come out. LOL. Computers for the most part were not linked. If you wanted to share information from one computer to another, you had to put it on a floppy disk or a hard disk and physically put the disk in another computer to access it. Most people didn't have home computers yet.
My first internet, if you could call it that, I signed up for in 1992 so I could get on the Court TV forums to discuss OJ Simpson. And it was expensive. You were charged by the minute I think back them. You would buy a block of internet access time and when it ran out you had to buy more. It was frustrating because the chat rooms/forums were SOOO slow and sometimes it took forever just to access something you'd clicked on. And you were paying for that time that you were waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. But that was the 90s, not the 80s.
I kind of think the 80s were good in that there were not personal computers and so many electronic devices yet. People actually communicated with each other in person and I can't speak for anyone else, I know I spent a lot less time sitting at a desk back then.
The fear of the Soviets gripped the nation, that is about it.
I was born in '72.
Maybe it depends upon where you lived in the 1980's.
I was born in 1938. The Fifties were the Red Scare decade, but the VN war certainly showed that Communism was no longer a monolith, but was breaking down into regional variations having little or nothing to do with the Soviet Union and sometimes antagonist toward each other.
And the Soviet Union itself was having more and more difficulty holding itself together, having funnelled money and men in the post-WW II decades into a hopeless contest with a U.S. that was virtually unscathed by that war and booming.
By the 80's the Soviet Union and the fear of world wide communism were a dead issue, except for those on the U.S. ultra-Right. The Soviet Union...and its system were in the last stage of expiring from economic exhaustion and social malaise. The idea that it was brought down by the U.S. in the 1980'a is a phantasm. It died of ill-health and self-inflicted wounds.
"Fear of the Soviets gripped the nation" in the 80's? Not in the United States I lived in.
We drove American made cars
We watched Little House on the Prairie on Monday. The Waltons, The Cosby Show, Dallas, and Sunday night Disney.
I vividly remember when MTV came out!
We saved up our money from mowing lawns and washing cars to buy a "Walk Man". My parents bought Keds sneakers, so I saved my own money to buy Addidas! Blue with white trim. And to buy my Ocean Pacific and Lightening Bolt shirts, painters pants and puka shell necklaces.
The 'hot' girls wore Ditto's jeans or Calvin Kleins.
Every male at my high school lusted after a Camaro, Trans-Am, BMW 320i or VW Scirocco.
We knew the Russians were bad and were going to get us, but The Gipper would protect us.
My parents tried to sell a house in 1981 and interest rates were around 18% - it did not sell.
We still saved our Green Stamps and turned them in a for set of TV Trays
We got our first microwave, an Amana Radar-Range, around 1982.
Cabbage Patch Kids, Pet Rocks, Members Only jackets, Atari, and many more fads.
Avocado green and Harvest Gold appliances still in vogue. We remodeled our home around 1987 with Corian counters!! And new Almond appliances. And an 'appliance garage' on the counter top....we were the bomb! My parents Z-bricked the kitchen walls! Brass accents and hardware.
Z brick lol! I forgot about that crap!
In the late 80s, my mom remodeled the kitchen by sanding down all the cabinets (they were dark) and staining them with some stain that was almost peach color, then a coating of sky blue wash. And the upgrade from green to white appliances.
And the microwave was huge and had dials on it.
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